What Do You Want To Bet NHRA OKs Gambling To Gain Attention?

By Susan Wade

Will NHRA drag racing be coming to an online sports-betting app near you?

Sanctioning-body president Glen Cromwell told Autoweek Motorsports Editor Mike Pryson in an article published Feb. 19 that the NHRA is exploring the idea of opening the world’s quickest and fastest motorsport to bettors.

Cromwell indicated executives are in the exploratory stages: “It is a discussion we are having here. We are working and talking to various companies as we speak. Nothing has been finalized yet, but we are going down that road. We hope to have something here in the near future. We’re perfectly aligned for something like that. It’s two cars going down [the racetrack], and you’ve got one winner and one loser. It’s a perfect setup.”

It is, with many classes and a winner every minute or two all day long during race day.

And the sports-betting industry – according to the website Athletic Panda – is in the middle of a growth period (between 2020 and 2024) in which it is expected to grow by $144.44 billion. The site estimates the global value of online sports betting $46 billion and overall sports betting $250 billion.

So the prospect of lucrative winnings for bettors and an exponential increase in the number of engaged fans for sport series/leagues understandably makes the legalization of sports gambling an attractive consideration. But do the obvious advantages – greater awareness, more fans, better TV ratings, more media platforms, top-of-mind placement in a crowded pool of sports fans – outweigh the concerns of going down that road?

That’s something the NHRA will have to come to grips with.

Current landscape has mixed implications

The move could toss drag racing into the trendy mix of online sports betting and expose it to millions more viewers. This readily could be the blockbuster marketing break the sanctioning body has been seeking. It could hook an audience besides those eager for quick profits – it could develop genuine fans fascinated by the sensory spectacle and sheer engineering triumph of it all.

On the other side of the coin, the sanctioning body would have to address its sketchy behavior and the officials’ tolerance for that. It would need to craft some kind of policy regarding team orders/taking dives/manipulating outcomes – practices that racers and fans have argued about for years but that largely have gone unpunished. And it would have to commit to strict enforcement of rules against manipulation and to transparency. That means research, education, and a vow – a guarantee – to have zero tolerance for round-win-fixing. And what about team owners, drivers, and crew members placing bets, even if on their own respective drivers?

The current case in the NFL of Atlanta Falcons receiver Calvin Ridley comes readily to mind. Ridley, on a hiatus since October 2021 reportedly to focus on his mental health, placed bets on his team and consequently is suspended indefinitely and forced to forfeit at least this season’s $11.1-million salary. Baseball’s Pete Rose is a glaring example. And even baseball and American heroes Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, for a while, were punished by the commissioner for taking post-retirement jobs as greeters/ambassadors at casinos. But drag racing has had no particular interest in whether anyone involved with its teams has any involvement or transactions with any sportsbook enterprise.

In this country’s gambling mecca, Las Vegas, the NHRA races twice a year. And, team owner Don Schumacher said, “for years . . . [casinos have] had a line on the Las Vegas race. I have never bet on it, but I do know that at some of the casinos, there has been a line on the Las Vegas race. I can’t say anybody in our sport does bet.”

Call that naïve or outright protective or something in between, maybe him just wanting to speak only for himself. What would matter more is how the NHRA could rein in a behavior that might have become a habit or a profitable hobby today for some who don’t want to give it up. Drag racing is full of humans, and humans are full of human behavior. In short, policing any rules the sanctioning body might make also might prove problematic.

So many elements are in play as the NHRA considers jumping into the sports betting business. It’s a tug-o-war between lucrative benefits for the sanctioning body (in both exposure and revenue) (and for fans, for obvious reasons) and the weighty guarantee of integrity.

Racers already are wagering

It was just a one-time, fun deviation from the normal order of a race, but then again, the race itself was a divergence from normal.

During the last qualifying Saturday afternoon at the NHRA’s most recent event, the Four-wide Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the final foursome in the Top Alcohol Funny Car class decided to have a little fun – with a lot of money at stake.

Sean Bellemeur, Doug Gordon, Chris Marshall, and Shane Westerfield each ponied up $1,000 for the winner-take-all wager: whoever turned on the win light in their quad would get the whole pot.

(It was straight “Whoever gets to the finish line first wins” deal. Drag racers can go quicker than an opponent and lose. With their reaction times factored into the results, that sometimes happens. It’s called winning on a holeshot. But all those technicalities were off the table for this one run.)

Bellemeur won the loot and said at the top end of the racetrack, “That was awesome. We need to do more of this.” He said he felt the pressure to go for the win light and the money because his car hadn’t been performing the best so far in qualifying. With his three colleagues standing beside him – and smiling, despite being out a grand apiece – he said, “I hope the NHRA takes a look at this and maybe does some more of this.”

Public-address announcer Joe Castello said his cell phone “was blowing up” with messages from fans saying they wanted to see more of that, that it was fun.

Bellemeur and the fans might get their wish – but that’s not a safe bet yet.

Some like the idea, others don’t

Don Schumacher “I would love to see sports betting get involved in NHRA. I think it would be great for the sport. It would get the sport in front of additional eyes. And that would be a positive for the sport.”

John Force, the 16-time Funny Car champion and 154-time race winner (and declared non-gambler), said, “If it’s a way to generate revenue, why not?”

But is joining forces with a sportsbook or online betting platform simply a cheap and easy substitute for working harder at marketing?

Not everyone is keen on the idea.

One Autoweek reader who identifies himself as “rmp4109” reacted with the opposite opinion as Schumacher and Force: “Betting on racing is a great way to get the races fixed with one racer doing something to guarantee a loss.” That fan likely spoke for many. Other readers gave the notion a thumbs-down:

NHRA officials are no stranger to manipulative practices. The most obvious example is the Countdown to the Championship. That represents blatant manipulation: Only the top 10 drivers – at first just eight in 2007, then 10, now (after Billy Torrence qualified without attending every race) any driver who enters every “regular-season” event are eligible to compete for the title. Points are reset after the U.S. Nationals. Any points advantage a driver has earned throughout the year are dissolved as the Countdown racers are separated in increments of 10 points. It smacks of socialism, and it definitely has manipulated the outcome of championships.

Moreover, the sanctioning body has surprised racers with a points-and-a-half payout at the U.S. Nationals and the Finals at Pomona, Calif. The first time it was a mid-year announcement; drivers see it coming now. But that is a manipulative monkey wrench that’s not necessarily indicative of a driver’s overall performance (which a championship is supposed to reward).

It’s unclear if or when NHRA might enter into an agreement with a betting establishment. But to take that step, surely it would have to address its recent past and institute some new policies to ensure integrity.

NHRA’s track record sketchy on manipulation

Schumacher said, “It certainly does raise numerous questions.”

And he said he doesn’t condone “throwing” or manipulating the outcome of a race.

Schumacher said, “As far as one racer helping another racer out, I have been against that forever. My teams did not operate that way. It just isn’t something you should do to the fans and to your team members.”

Back when Ron Capps and Tommy Johnson Jr. were Funny Car teammates and title contenders out of the Don Prudhomme Racing organization, Prudhomme said he would not issue team orders. “I don’t think I need a championship that bad,” he said.

Former team owner Morgan Lucas found out in 2007 just how controversial a match-up between teammates in pivotal situations can be. Melanie Troxel was his teammate, and she had a chance to take the final Top Fuel spot in the inaugural Countdown to the Championship. They drew each other in the first round at Reading, Pa., the cutoff event to qualify for the playoff, and they decided to race heads-up. If she lost, she would not qualify for the Countdown. Lucas beat Troxel – and was criticized openly for not allowing her to win. Had he done that, he said, he knew he would be criticized for taking a dive. He was in a no-win situation.

Other team owners have not been that hesitant. Fans saw that, perhaps aptly, at Las Vegas, in the penultimate race of the season last fall.

At that time, Pro Stock veterans Greg Anderson and Erica Enders were battling for a fifth title. Anderson lost in the first round. Elite Performance Motorsports teammates Enders and Troy Coughlin Jr. met in the semifinals and were neck-and-neck with each other for most of the quarter-mile course. Then Coughlin’s car went silent at about the 1,000-foot mark. That allowed Enders to breeze into the final round with a chance to make up valuable ground on Anderson.

The move was roundly criticized, and Coughlin said he regrets doing it.

Anderson was vocal about it: “Going out there purposely and throwing out the white flag halfway down the track, that’s not acceptable in my book. Maybe in some people’s minds it is. Not on anybody with KB Racing. I do have a problem with people going out there and purposely laying down or whatever you want to call it and giving the race up.

“It’s a tough decision to make when you have multiple team cars, like we both do,” Anderson said. “It’s a hard decision to make to not do that. But you just can’t do it. I’ve raced 20 years, and I’ve had sponsorship for 20 years. And there’s been 100 times in those 20 years that you’ve thought to yourself, ‘Man, it would be nice I could get a break from one of my own teammates.’ And never once have we made it happen. You can’t do that. The sponsor won’t accept it. The fans won’t accept it.”

He said, “It looked terrible. It made our class look bad. And I don’t care who’s standing here right now – I’ll tell ’em that same thing: It’s wrong. It’s bad for the class. It’s bad for the sport. And whether you’re team cars or not, you have to go out there and race. All these team sponsors have different sponsors on the doors. You can’t do that.”

Enders had a different spin on the situation.

She said, “I have one job, and that’s to win races and world championships for Melling Performance . . . and all the people that make this possible. But for my boys at Elite Performance and Elite Motorsports, a true teammate is defined by what they do for you, what you do for each other. We’re one family. I’m sick of people and what they got to say. If they want to get a couple million dollars together and come out here and try this, they get to do it how they want to. This is how we do it, and we do it with grace and class.”

Fellow Pro Stock Countdown driver Matt Hartford expressed his disgust with the race-day ploy: To intentionally shut off against a teammate, I got nothing for ya.”

At the time, Coughlin justified the result, saying, “This team is a family, and we all know how it works at this point in the season. It happened the other way around in the past with the same teams involved, so now we’ll take these results and head to Pomona to see how it ends.”

It ended with Anderson getting his fifth championship – and with Coughlin regretting his judgment.

Coughlin said, “It’s part of competition. It’s part of the heat of the battle. I made a split-second decision. It was not how it should have gone down.

“It’s definitely a strange spot. The way I did that was completely wrong. I would probably not do that again. That was 100-percent my personal error. That was something on my shoulders I will always take 100-percent credit for. It’s part of the competition piece that you live with your whole life. You move on and learn from your mistakes. We’re human. We’re going to [make mistakes]. You learn from them.”

Neither he nor the team was fined.

Arguably the most memorable such incident came in 2009 at Indianapolis, when Tony Pedregon and John Force got into a shouting and shoving match as Force raced Robert Hight and Hight needed to make the Countdown field at No. 10. Force’s car drove out of the groove, Hight won, and ESPN announcer Mike Dunn declared, “The fix is in!” And accusations flew. The only penalty meted out was a hefty $10,000 to Force – for making contact with an official during the commotion.

So fans and bettors (not necessarily the same) would need some assurance that the races are not decided back in the pits. Caleb Cox, team manager for Cruz Pedregon Racing’s Funny Car team, said, “That’s something NHRA would have to take a tough stand on.”

A decision to become involved with one or more betting platforms could trigger a shift in the structure of the sport: it could diminish the appeal of multiple-car teams or, conceivably, prohibit them.

In a Facebook Live program last week with The Capital Sports Report, Force said, “If we can’t help each other, why have them?”

Teams still might want to have data-sharing about performance or track conditions for their tune-ups, but manipulating the outcome when teammates were to race each other would, or should, be off the table. So it might affect drivers of new independent Top Fuel and Funny Car teams who might have had visions of expanding in the future, as well as existing multi-car team owners.

“I understand team racing and team concepts,” Cox said. “It’s up to the owner of that team what he wants to do. No different than Formula 1 – if Max Verstappen’s in second and Sergio Perez is in first and Max is racing for the championship, they’re going to tell Sergio to move over and let Max go. If you’re a driver, you’ve got to do what your team owner says. I don’t like that part of racing. Your team should race heads-up. But I’m not part of a multi-car team, so I don’t feel that facet. I would think that the competitor inside of me would be like, ‘I want to win. I don’t want to dive.’ There would have to be something in the rules about that, because that’s one way to manipulate the system.”

Cox considered the scenarios and offered one suggestion. “Just randomly thinking: It would be cool if your multi-car rule was you’re forced to have [only] one Top Fuel dragster and one Funny Car. [It] keeps your interest in both classes, but [with] no opportunities to manipulate.”

That’s a solution to the problem, certainly. But what career-changing upheaval would that cause for a tandem such as Doug Kalitta and Shawn Langdon . . . or the father-son combo of Steve and Billy Torrence, who race together as a family? For Force and Hight, such a rule would have serious business/funding fallout. In addition, John Force Racing would have to decide the futures of Brittany Force and Austin Prock in Top Fuel, again with seismic implications. And it’s unclear what impact new rules might have on technical and data-sharing and marketing alliances such as the one between the Top Fuel operations of Antron Brown and Justin Ashley. They’re separate teams that pool resources in particular areas of operation.

The sport has some history with betting

Tod Mack, the maverick promoter at Maryland International Raceway from 1971-1990, built the first four-wide dragstrip – and established pari-mutuel betting for the fans at his Super Pro and mid-level E.T. Bracket races, for booked-in eight-car Funny Car and Pro Stock shows, and for even a wheel-stander exhibition. One-hundred o the proceeds went to charity.

“I don’t want to see a nickel, and I want to stay perfectly clean in this,” he told the local Jaycees when they helped him set it up. “I don’t need money from this thing. I need the publicity.” For an article Competition Plus published in 2014, he said, “My motive in it was for publicity and promotion and entertainment value, not actually to make money on the handle from the pari-mutuel wagering itself.”

Mack received plenty of pushback from NHRA founder Wally Parks, who was concerned that the state would step in to control auto racing, and from the then-Governor and Attorney General of Maryland. He blew them all off. He was planning to do it for just one occasion, but after the resistance, he said, “I got pissed. I said, ‘Screw this. I’m going to keep on doing it.’

“This was when the sport was really at a downtime. In the early ’70s, the sport was in trouble. We were losing car counts,” Mack said.

Incidentally, promoter Tod Mack’s pari-mutuel betting experiment several decades ago begat the four-wide format at Maryland International Raceway.

“In order to make it work,” Mack said, “you have to have a number of quick events, like the horse-racing program. People can cash in their tickets and buy tickets for another event. In traditional drag racing, one event takes all day to run. You’ve got to wait for three whole rounds before you come up with a winner and a runner-up. I said, ‘Well, in that case, let’s run ’em four at a time. I had a track that easily could accommodate four lanes.”

This new format (which promoter Clark Marshall tried earlier at Shelton, Wash.) required a new timing system which flashed the order of finish.

“That way I could have events with eight cars. I only have two rounds and we have a winner, a runner-up, and a third place – win, place, and show. So it was crazy, and we built it and it worked,” Mack said.

Four-wide racing caught on with multi-facility owner Bruton Smith, who instituted it at Charlotte and later at Las Vegas. But gambling on NHRA drag races is up in the air. And no one really knows he odds on it actually happening.

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