Howdy Pete,

You wrote: "Does your service provide straight line events only or do you do "roundy roundy", road courses, sports cars, rallies and others?"

FastNews is dedicated strictly to drag racing. We have at least one reporter at over 100 events a year. At national events we have two or three reporters working. At the US Nationals in Indy, we have four reporters. That event is six days long and a car count of 1100 entries (or more) is common. ...all of this is being done with a crew of ten people, only two of them full time. We also have a photographer at every national event.

You also wrote: "I would have guessed that the NHRA would have a public information director and do that themself?"

I'm assuming you are referring to the AP agate. The NHRA communications people are at all of the national events, and they write and send out the press releases to AP, but that is a relatively short written story of what happened. The lists in the box scores section of the newspapers that include drivers' names, hometowns, class designations, car types and performance numbers are provided by FastNews. It's one of the things that the NHRA pays us to do.

Our funding isn't unlike that of a race team. Summit Racing provides the largest chunk of funds that go to pay the reporters and photographers, and they get everything that we do for dragracecentral.com. The NHRA and IHRA also pay into that pool, the amount determined by what they want from us. They're all kinda like race team sponsors, Summit getting the most info and the other two getting less info for fewer dollars. Castrol on John Force's Funny Car provides the most dough to his team and they have the largest signage on his rolling billboards.

Bob