Re: Raceway Park
Long island was on a downward spiral for a long time,and the penguin ran it into the ground.It was a catch 22.The owner didint invest in the track so the track lost busness,The loss of business left him with a shortness of funds to fight the local complaint department.In the end,he made his money selling it to developers.It became a hate/hate relationship between him and the racers.The slower it got at the track the more he duped them out of payout money and the less effort he put into running the track,and the more PO'ed the racers got and the more of them that left the facilty for good.The last time I was there,he managed to collect entry money from about 200 cars to run test and tune.Despite this fact,he had no tech inspector,so if you arrived to race after the racing started,you had to wait in the tech line for about a half an hour until the guy who was pulling the lanes on the starting line could run over real quick and sign off your tech card.The track had no airhose which isnt the end of the world,but the icing on the cake was when the gas attendant up and left at noon,and his solution was to tell racers they couldnt have any gas.One of my friends towed almost 100 miles to get there and arrived at 1PM only to go home without any runs because the track had no gas.What kind of crap was that??
As for Englishtown,the track is much better managed and much larger,and has more resources to fight the complaints,but my personal take on it is that the racers need to step up to the plate and ALL install effecive mufflers on their cars,even for Sunday brackets.I know racing has always been about being able to be an outlaw and go real fast and make lots of noise that you could never do on the stret,but unless we all want to be racing out in the middle of the forests 200 miles outside of town,we need to be realistic about our sport.A healy car could sound BETTER with good mufflers on it,and is much more enjoyable to drive,and any racer who tells you that they cant make their 800hp engine quieter without killing the power is wrong.The difference between open headers and a well designed set of quiet race mufflers on a 1000 hp car would be less then 25 hp,and for lesser cars the loss would be less.There is no reason to want a loud car then the desire to be loud and obnoxious.I would stand 100% behind a muffler rule if I thought it would do good,but I am beginning to doubt that even quiet muflers on all sportsman cars will pacify the complaint team.
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