ROLLIE MILLER
AS THE general manager and
national event director for
the NMCA and NMRA, Rollie
Miller is accustomed to making a fair
deal of difficult decisions. But nothing
came close to the unique challenges
Miller has faced as a result of the
COVID-19 pandemic, which started to
tighten its grip on the U.S. shortly after
the two organizations started their
2020 seasons in Bradenton, Florida.
In the three months that followed, Miller and
the NMCA/NMRA teams have completely restructured
their 2020 schedules. The Atlanta race
was moved back to late June. The Super Bowl
of Street Legal Drag Racing, originally set for
Route 66 Raceway near Chicago, has
been moved to World Wide Technology
Raceway outside St. Louis, completely
replacing another NMCA/NMRA
race at St. Louis. The third blow came
when Summit Motorsports Park announced
the cancellation of its 2020
season, causing NMCA/NMRA to
move its All-American Nationals to
U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin,
Michigan. So far, the season-ending
races haven’t been affected.
“This is a challenging year. Everybody
knows that,” Miller says. “As we get
into August, September and October,
so many organizations and individual
promoters are going to be trying to
reschedule events and it’s going to get
kind of crazy. It’s going to be one of
those years where people are stepping
on top of each other. You just need to
communicate with your fellow promoters
and sanctioning bodies, which a lot of us are
already doing. But it is going to be a challenging
year, one that’s going to be pretty weird, for lack
of a better term.”
At what point did you realize this season
wouldn’t go off as originally scheduled?
I would say I first thought there might be an
issue during our NMCA Florida event in Bradenton.
That Friday, some news stations in Tampa
announced that there were some cases in Tampa.
We didn’t feel the effects on our Saturday crowd,
but we definitely felt some effects on our Sunday
crowd. We were down about 50-60 percent. I sat
there thinking, wow, this could be something
weird here moving forward. We’d had cases in
Washington and New York at that time, then
Tampa announced a couple cases that Friday.
There are a lot of people involved in the
schedule decisions and a lot of people affected
“I THINK [THE
RACERS] RECOGNIZE
THE EFFORT THAT’S
BEING PUT INTO
NOT JUST OUR
SCHEDULE, BUT
ALSO THE EFFORTS
THAT OTHER
ORGANIZATIONS
ARE PUTTING
INTO GETTING AS
MANY RACES ON AS
POSSIBLE TO FINISH
OUT THE YEAR.”
by them. What was the biggest priority when
you were thinking about revising the schedule?
The big challenge was we didn’t want to
make lots of changes. We wanted to analyze it,
get good data and make accurate changes just
once or twice. Unfortunately, we’ve had to do
that three times now as things have progressed.
That was important to us. Let’s not overreact
and make sudden, rash decisions. Let’s analyze
everything properly and make educated, good
decisions slowly.
The NMRA/NMCA Super Bowl of Street Legal
Drag Racing moved from Chicago to St.
Louis, which was already set to hold the inaugural
Midwest Muscle Car Nationals. What
went into the decision to replace that event
rather than try to find an additional date or
track to hold the Super Bowl race?
That decision was two-fold. One, we had
already postponed an individual NMRA and
NMCA event in St. Louis. We were looking
for an opportunity to fulfill those contractual
obligations with Chris Blair over there. At the
same time, everybody could see that Chicago
was probably in the worst situation when it came
to a reopening opportunity for large spectator
events. Even within the state of Illinois, Chicago
was the worst. The state had just implemented
a six-region plan within the state and Chicago
was going to be reopened differently than
southwestern Illinois. With that realization, we
decided we’ve got contractual obligations down
at St. Louis. It doesn’t look like this is going to
happen up at Chicago. Let’s move it down and at
least take care of St. Louis, knowing that we’re
probably not going to have an opportunity at
Chicago at all this year.
What kind of feedback have you received
from racers regarding the new schedule?
It’s weird, it’s like 99 percent positive in that
all our racers just want to go race.
They’re to the point where they just
want to get out of the house, get in
a race car and make some laps down
the racetrack. I think they recognize
the effort that’s being put into not just
our schedule, but also the efforts that
other organizations are putting into
getting as many races on as possible to
finish out the year. The overwhelming
majority of racers are just excited to
get a place to race.
Recently it felt like things were
starting to go back to normal. Then,
it came out June 1 that Summit Motorsports
Park won’t open at all this
season. How did you react to that
news? How’d you try to adjust the
schedule again?
First off, that decision by Bill Bader
was one that I totally support for him.
He’s trying to make the right decisions for his
facility for the long term, for the viability of his
business. It makes sense for him and his individual
situation to do what he’s doing in setting
himself up for 2021. There are some other smaller
tracks doing the same thing.
We had some other options that I had already
been talking to. As soon as that happened, we
jumped on the phones and revisited those options
and made those decisions in the matter of
a couple days. We were prepared for it, but we’re
prepared at all of [the tracks]. I’ve got contingency
plans for just about every track and every race
this year. Back in March and April, we started
working on that really hot and heavy, making
sure we had options for each race depending on
what happened.
We had to find another option to support our
sponsors and our racers in getting the event done
for this year. We look forward to returning back
to Summit next year. DI
June 2020
DragIllustrated.com | Drag Illustrated | 81