A number of years ago drag race fans sweated on seeing their favourite sport on television. When it did occasionally -- and I mean occasionally, like maybe once a year if you were lucky -- happen it was the point of discussion for days or weeks. In the earliest days there was no such invention as a VCR, so you couldn't keep a record of these scarce incidents, and if you didn't see it you'd missed it forever. But when video recorders became a reality tape sales rocketed whenever drag racing hit the small screen, and we all accumulated cassettes made up of all sorts of odds and ends of drag racing on television.

In our collective minds we linked television and success: If you were making the small screen you were making the big time.

It seemed a natural enough connection. Big companies strutted their wares and images on television, and whenever they backed some venture, whether it was sporting or cultural or anything in between, their images sprawled across the screen at us, in the background of shots and in the ad breaks between. Obviously, big companies liked television.

Drag racing wanted to be recognised as a big sport, so went after television, as well as the big corporate players.

But television was a more prickly customer than we could ever have imagined. The cost of packaging this stuff was expensive. When RPS Promotions was putting together its television coverage of their Top Fuel and RPS Pro Series major events the budget was pushing $60,000 per event. These became major projects in themselves, involving, at times, complete outside broadcast units from the Nine Network. They involved several weeks of post-production work in editing suites that don't come cheap.

As most of the tracks have got into some form of local television exposure they have had to face value judgements concerning the nature of what they wanted versus what they could afford. Every camera out there costs money, every extra bit of tape involves extra editing time. Most have had to cut their television budgets very close to the bone.

Television hasn't been the magic key to corporate acceptability for drag racing, but the sport is now largely hooked to it. To abandon it or lose it is to admit you can't make the grade, and to probably alienate all or many of your existing sponsors and signage customers. But it's now taking as much as $20,000 off the top from each event. That's a sizeable chunk of income from most paying crowds (don't be fooled by the "attendance" figures handed out for race meetings -- these include everyone at the race, including competitors, staff, officials, photographers, guests and so on; the Winternationals had an "attendance" of 35,801, and a paying spectator total of 16,585), and represents a major slice off the top.

It's fairly typical of what occurred at drag strips across the nation in the past decade. Once one track installs ET readout boards other tracks are expected to do the same. Once one has intermediate timers all others are expected to do the same. Once we get into what is now seen as "proper track preparation", with drums of traction compound, traction tractors, and all the rest, it's something which is expected at every race meeting. None of this really attracts any extra spectators, nor should it be seen as unnecessary, it's part of the growth and development of the sport, but it also adds to the cost, both during installation and then in maintenance.

This closely parallels what's happened with race cars. I can recall a lengthy argument between then Top Fuel racer Warren Armour and then ANDRA National Director Dennis Syrmis at the 1976 ADR Grand Finals, at Surfers Paradise. Up to this time you could build a competitive A/Dragster for around $2500, and it would run around 9.0 second times, with, say, a direct drive injected big block set-up. Then along came the Chapman family from South Australia with a similar car, except that it included a Lenco gearbox, which improved the performances to around 8.8 seconds.

Armour argued that the Lencos should be banned, because suddenly to be competitive every A/Dragster racer had to install a Lenco gearbox, at a cost of (then) around $2000, as well as change his diff ratio to suit, and fit bigger tyres, and stronger axles, and it was something else to maintain in the car each year. "Now it's going to cost twice as much to build one of these cars, and they will still be as relatively competitive as they were before, but to the fan on the hill they won't look one bit different and nobody up there can pick the difference between an 8.8 and a 9.0," was Armour's argument.

ANDRA conducted a survey, and almost universally the racers voted to retain the Lencos, so we went on, but at a cost.

You can't really argue against this sort of thing, because it equates with progress, and if you just stand still and don't appear to be progressing people will soon become bored and move on. But all track managers will tell you that the margins between profitability and loss have narrowed greatly, and the days of being able to run quiet little meetings with small crowds and still showing a profit, or even breaking even, are almost gone.

I guess we put it down to progress, but while this is not an apology for track management, every racer out there who now spends two or three times, or more, on his racing as he did a decade ago, because of the increasingly competitive nature of the sport, needs to accept that similar influences apply to the race tracks, and the costs have risen on all fronts, and out of proportion to the income.