It seems that the strange and bumpy road the American Hot Rod Association revival has been on may have led off a cliff. The first race of the season, held at Desert Thunder Raceway in Midland, Texas, was a total calamity with funnel clouds, flooding, and a dearth of spectators. Circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that the Midland race’s failure may spell doom for the AHRA.

The whole AHRA resurrection has been a long, strange trip fraught with alternating bouts of hope and hubris. Shockingly, the hubris has all but snuffed out the hope.

When word got out that there was going to be an AHRA again, many racers rejoiced and the good ju-ju was flowing from all directions. A humble, grassroots approach to reviving the legendary AHRA name seemed to make sense in both economic terms and managerial terms.

Then the weirdness started and a bold announcement was made that probably cast the die of the new AHRA. Not content to start life as a traveling series, racing on NHRA/IHRA sanctioned tracks, AHRA management announced that they would be sanctioning their own race tracks. This gave the NHRA a perfect reason to stop its sanctioned tracks from hosting AHRA events because now they were direct competition. This meant that the AHRA was relegated to small tracks, which meant small crowds, which means little margin for error in promotion and a very strong need to make every race a profitable enterprise. Their two most impressive facilities, San Antonio Raceway and Toronto Motorsports Park, are nice facilities that were formerly sanctioned by the IHRA.

Back in December of 2009, the AHRA took over the operations of “Thunder Road Raceway Park” formerly known as Red River Raceway, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Troy Moe, the CEO of the AHRA, stated at the time that the facility would be, “the mothership of re-establishing the AHRA in the South.” On March 2, 2010, the AHRA announced that it was walking away from the track, as the agreement had been terminated. No reason was ever given for terminating the contract but we’re going to go out on a limb and guess it was a monetary problem. 

Now comes the announcement that this weekend’s planned event at San Antonio Raceway has been cancelled. The reason why has not been shared at this point but a short statement on the San Antonio Raceway sit seems to indicate that it was not the track’s decision to walk away. It’s one sentence, “AHRA has CANCELLED the race scheduled for this weekend.”

Is it because there may be rain on the way? Is it because they were depending on the cash from the first race to pay for the second? Time will tell, but it certainly doesn’t look good for the AHRA.

Source — DragRacingOnline.com — AHRA Cancels San Antonio Race