Every year that the Nationals has been held at Calder since 1992, the NHRA's Carl Olson has been in town to check it out, and through his position (until recently) as their Vice President International Relations, a subscription to DRAGSTER and regular contact with a range of people here he has kept in close touch with drag racing in Australia.

His knowledge of the broad picture of Australian drag racing, and its relative position in the sport around the world are probably unmatched. Carl Olson has seen it all and, for those constant whingers who see nothing but problems all the time, is happy to tell you that in spite of the perceived failings we do a lot better than anywhere else except North America.

Each year when Carl has come to Oz for the Nationals he has stayed at the Melbourne Airport Travelodge, which is where the DRAGSTER crew always stays, and so I get to run into him on a number of occasions away from the race track, and each year make a point of at least having breakfast with him.

This year, on the Sunday morning before eliminations, we got the opportunity again, and over bacon, eggs and coffee we covered a lot ot ground. However, there was one point which Carl raised early, and on which we spent a lot of time. I don't suppose I'm breaching too much of a confidence when I state that about the third statement Carl made to me that morning was, "I've got the impression this year that things in the drag racing scene aren't as smooth or as happy here as I've seen in past years."

That statement led on to plenty of discussion, amongst which I found myself returning to a theme that seems to have constantly haunted drag racing in Australia: Promoter parochialism. For a start, let's forget any semantics about a definition ot the word "promoter"; we all know what we mean.

I can recall writing editorials as far back as 1974 about this, and there have been others since. In 1974 my editorial was provoked by a rash of date changing within the New South Wales Division between the managements of the drag racing strips at Castlereagh and Oran Park, each trying to chop the other off at the knees. Nobody was winning and only drag racing was losing.

We all came to the belief that such things were behind us from the late 1980's, when the tracks began to act in concert to import overseas racers, sharing the expense, and thus the benefit of the lower costs and greater profits. The sport benefited. There are many good reasons why we need our race tracks to act in unison, not as purely local affairs.

Sure, all race tracks really survive on their local racing and fan community, and for at least seventy percent of the racers who compete at any track, their interest is only in racing at that venue. They don't want to race at any tracks interstate, and for many they don't even want to race at other tracks in their own division. All they want to do is take their car or bike out to their local track once a month, have a bit of fun and go home again.

But we do need a unified national approach. In the early 1990's that view blossomed. It seemed suddenly obvious to all that if we got together we could build a bigger and better sport. The unified booking of imports, as mentioned, was just one aspect of this. There was also a common policy on promotions, a central pursuit of media exposure and image, a unified approach to date setting and bracket structures.

We were lucky then, more so than we were aware. Through the backing of the Rothmans tobacco company, via its Winfield brand, there was funding to supply bonus payouts to series winners in Group One brackets at least, and a single concerted image on television, going for the highest rating network. All sorts of things seemed possible. Everyone was so excited about what was happening that we all pitched in and started rowing in the one direction.

Now, on the swing of some sort of pendulum, we are reverting to the localized, parochial view.

Television coverage is broken up over the 10 Network (Nationals coverage, nationally, and possibly other Calder features), the Nine Network (Ravenswood's event coverage in Perth), the Seven Network (Willowbank's monthly event coverage in Queensland), as well as SBS's Speed Machine weekly program. There is no common bond, theme or thread through any of it, though I suppose we can consider ourselves lucky that this lack of unison can be considered a problem, because five years ago the problem was that there was no television.

We're seeing ever greater localization of racer formats. Perth created its Top Comp bracket, which we wrote about, and suddenly there's a Super Competition bracket in Calder, which is similar but different, and Super Comp at Willowbank (which is different again), and Eastern Creek is still occasionally running its version of Super Comp, which is different from all the rest. Wild Bunch runs here and there, but a lot less than it did a few years back, and in North Queensland there's the Supercharged Outlaws and a budding bike circuit built on local rules.

And when you look at Calder and Adelaide continuing to run their heads-up Super Modified, Super Gas and Super Eliminator indexed brackets, of which only Super Gas gets the occasional run at other venues because it's become part of the national Championship bracket scene, and all this on top of the ANDRA Championship eliminator schedule, you start to realize why there are so few racers in any given class or bracket. We've subdivided and localized the cake so many times that it's starting to look as if all that will be left to eat will be crumbs.

Now I hear reports that the much vaunted Drag Race Australia, which was created not even two years ago to act as a central body for the promotion and packaging of Australian drag racing is "dead in the water" according to my source, and going down by the bows. More on that next issue.

One wonders how we ever hope to build a national motorsport with such a disparate and divided approach to its presentation.