All professional sports are about creating heroes. Not real heroes like fire-fighters who run into burning buildings or soldiers who fight to save their units even when they're wounded and near death, but "heroes" fans can appreciate for how well they throw a ball through a hoop, slap a puck or drive a racecar. Heroes that are marketable, attract fans and sponsors, and, hopefully, heroes who live otherwise admirable and interesting lives. It's what the business is built on and I don't have any problem with it.
Kids will accept almost any flash-in-the-pan success as a hero. When you're 10, if someone gets lucky and, say, sets a national low e.t. record, you think it's the greatest accomplishment in the history of racing. But by the time you're an adult, you should know the difference between someone who lucks into the correct setup one weekend and someone who's been a consistent performer for years.
Some people want to be heroes without working too hard at it. There are racers who are praised in magazines, sell posters of themselves, and always have pens ready for autographs; meanwhile, they've done nothing. They only show up to a couple of races a year, their cars never run right, and they haven't won squat (and we all want a little squat in our lives). But everyone on their team wears matching uniforms and their smiling mugs show up in ads as if they've got a couple of decades worth of championships behind them.
To be a racing hero, you need a long track record. You need to be Don Garlits, who's won 144 National wins in Top Fuel in more than four decades. You need to be Richard Petty, who has 200 NASCAR wins and seven Winston Cups. You need to be Warren Johnson, who's earned six NHRA Pro Stock championships, 90 Nationals wins, developed the GM DRCE V8 and basically invented (for better or worse) the modern Pro Stock car. Guys like Michael Schumacher, John Force, Ayrton Senna, Mark Donohue, A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Jeff Gordon, Steve Kinser, Juan Manuel Fangio, Al Unser, Bobby Unser, Tazio Nuvolari, Dale Earnhardt, Don Prudhomme... have earned their hero status. All of us in sport compact racing are a long way from being heroes... yet.
While I'm sure someone will come out of our type of racing as a genuine hero, it's an open question as to who that will be. That ought to keep all of us modest and open to dealing with the fans as peers instead of as a horde to be kept at a distance, subdued in our own proclamations of greatness and remembering that each victory is a small step in a long hike. We're not Formula One, NASCAR, CART, or even the regular NHRA. We're competitors on the track, but we're all in it together in building this thing of ours into something that will generate legends. Right now my only hero in Sport Compact racing is Keith Goslin, the ROCK that enables the wheels at WORLD Racing to keep turning.
He, along with my crew and everyone at WORLD Electronics, comprise my group of heroes for never quitting and having the pride to take things to the next level, no matter how much adversity we face together. Right now is when we determine what sorts of heroes and legends we want to create. We can be remembered for constant petty bickering and silly infighting or for running the cleanest, most consistent racing on Earth. We can build great, creatively engineered racecars using parts anyone can buy and people recall for decades, or we can start building machines out of exotic components only available to people with $2 million CNC mills in their garage and a squadron of MIT graduates on their payroll. We can be the heroes who always played on a level playing field or the prima donnas who were always looking to skew the rules one way or another through back-door politicking and whispering campaigns of rumors and innuendos.
If we're going to be heroes, let's be good ones.