IHRA: An interview with Mike Dunn, Part 2

Talk about the push to a younger demographic – that's something the NHRA is really concerned about.
Well, I'm about to turn 60, so I might not be the best authority, but I can certainly remember back in the 1960s and '70s the excitement in just watching the cars go down the track. But this newer generation – they are not necessarily as dedicated to their own cars as we might have been. They have their computers and their tablets and their phones, and everything revolves around that. They still like cars, but in a different way. We have to figure out how to engage them in our events, and I think we have some ideas that will help. Engagement is the whole key. Obviously we'll do Twitter and Facebook and other forms of social media, but our ideas go behind that.

We'll have to present racing to them in a whole different way. Be more interactive. Give them the numbers, show them the action.

The NHRA has gone from quarter-mile to 1,000 feet for some of their classes. Is the plan for the IHRA to still be quarter-mile completely?
Yes, at the tracks where we can safely run a quarter-mile. Some of the tracks we're are looking might work best in the eighth-mile format, and that's what we'd run there. We will be a primarily quarter-mile series, but we're looking at everything now. There's a lot on the table and I don't want to rule anything out at this point.

Every IHRA race this year has had a jet car component, but jet cars are no longer formally part of the IHRA. Any thoughts on that?
That's one of the things that are still on the table. For 2016, this has been a rebuilding year. We kept some of our strongest races and tracks, and strongest classes, on the schedule, while we re-evaluate everything. Like I said, we have everything on the table right now, and then we'll start taking the things off we believe probably won't work, and keeping what we think will work. But there will be, and already is, a lot of discussion over what we take off the table. We want to have solid reasons for every more we make.

Doing television helped me a lot on that. When I was just racing, I had a pretty narrow focus, but when I started working for ESPN I was able to see more of the big picture – why certain things worked, other things didn't. How do you explain things to new fans? How do you use the feedback you get? How do you entertain fans during the downtime?

Closing thoughts?
If you had told me six months ago I was going to be president of the IHRA, I would have wondered what you'd been drinking. But I'm having a great time. All of the best accomplishments in my life weren't easy to come by, and I know this won't be easy, but I love a challenge.