Hitching a Ride on Fast-Rising Sport : Diamond P Brings More Drag Racing to TV and More Fans to Nation’s Raceways

On NBC-TV’s “SportsWorld” show this Sunday two of the nation’s best drag racers, Dick LaHaie and Joe Amato, square off for the “top fuel” title of this year’s Winternationals championship in Pomona. LaHaie will win.

That’s not a prediction. The race was held five weeks ago, when LaHaie screamed down the sport’s quarter-mile distance in 5.1 seconds at a speed of 275 m.p.h.

Why will NBC televise a month-old race? Because millions of fans tune in anyway, much to the delight of Diamond P Sports, a Woodland Hills firm that produced the race for SportsWorld.

Diamond P has a three-year contract to film all 17 of the major drag races of the National Hot Rod Assn., one of the sport’s two main sanctioning bodies, for delayed broadcast on network and cable TV. The other organizer is the International Hot Rod Assn., or IHRA, which uses the Special Events Television Network (SETN) to produce its 12 main events for TV.

Thanks to Diamond P, SETN and other producers, more drag racing is showing up on TV, and the added exposure is credited with a recent boom in drag racing’s gate attendance. Last year drag racing ranked 12th in viewership among all televised sports in the United States, just behind tennis and ahead of horse racing and hockey, according to the Simmons Market Research Bureau.

“At the top of the heap, in terms of generating new interest, is television,” said Brian Tracy, vice president-marketing at the Glendora-based NHRA.

At the top of Diamond P is Harvey M. Palash, its founder and sole owner. Palash has been producing drag racing TV shows since 1976. Four years ago he formed Diamond P Video, which takes Diamond P Sports footage and packages it into home videotapes. Diamond P Video is publicly held, but Diamond P Sports owns 70% of the company and Palash serves as president of both concerns.

Palash isn’t shy about his role in boosting drag racing’s appeal. “I like to think that I had a lot of responsibility for doing that,” he said.

Diamond P this year will produce three drag racing shows for NBC, nine for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN), and six for another cable programmer, the Nashville Network. Four of the Nashville Network shows also will be syndicated to 100 local TV stations nationwide.

Virtually all drag races are broadcast on a delayed basis. Part of the reason, Palash said, is that with all the pauses between races, a drag racing event can last all day. It takes considerable editing to cut it down to an hour’s worth of action. Then, of course, drag racing results aren’t quite as important to most sports fans as how their local football or baseball team fared, so the outcome of drag races, even on a delayed basis, has some suspense for TV viewers.

Because Diamond P Sports is private, Palash neither releases its earnings nor the terms of its contract with the NHRA. But he said the company’s revenue last year was about $5 million and its after-tax profit margin is above 10% of revenue.

Diamond P Video’s 1987 financial results have not yet been announced. In 1986 it earned $43,387 on sales of $675,264, and its 1987 sales should exceed $1 million, Palash said.

Palash’s interest in drag racing goes back to his teen-age years in Los Angeles, when he raced his 1940 Ford coupe against friends’ cars on strips of pavement behind shopping centers. He still owns a souped-up 1972 Chevrolet El Camino and a Nissan 300ZX sports car. But at age 54, he mostly drives his 1983 Mercedes sedan that’s complete with a car phone.

Palash attends most of drag racing’s big events and eschews the earplugs that many fans use to muffle the dragsters’ ear-splitting noise.

He got into the business after earning a law degree from Loyola Marymount University in 1963. He then worked for ABC as an assistant director for labor relations. Part of his job was negotiating contracts for TV and radio personalities, such as sportscaster Keith Jackson.

In 1966, Palash formed a talent agency for producers, technicians and directors. A year later, after being invited to the Winternationals, drag racing’s second-oldest event, he pitched a deal to handle the NHRA’s TV rights and other contractual affairs, and the NHRA agreed.

Five years later, Palash formed Diamond P to package radio programs on racing and other topics, and at the same time granted the rights for a couple of NHRA races to be syndicated.

But in 1976 he decided that Diamond P could do a better job producing NHRA racing for TV, and began syndicating three events a year. Now Palash is vice chairman and, since 1980, one of four directors of the NHRA, a nonprofit organization with a $25 million budget.

Billy Meyer, owner of the rival IHRA, says it is a conflict of interest for Palash to be paid to produce NHRA races for TV. “It doesn’t seem right that the vice chairman of a nonprofit association is able to use his power to get an exclusive contract,” said Meyer, a Texas millionaire and former drag racer.

But Palash and the NHRA dismissed any suggestion of impropriety. There are “no inside closet deals,” said NHRA’s Tracy. Palash said “I step back” when the NHRA decides what it will pay Diamond P, and “I don’t vote on my own fee.” He also said “if anything, the conflict works the other way, because I’m so concerned about the NHRA” that Diamond P Sports occasionally takes a loss on a show simply to promote the sport.

Tracy said the NHRA lost more than $500,000 from televising its races over the past two years, mainly because advertisers are not always willing to pay what the NHRA needs to cover its production costs. But “we look at it as investment spending,” he said. “We have seen what TV has done to our front gate.”

Last year, 1.02 million people attended the NHRA’s 15 major drag races, up 19% from 856,000 the previous year and nearly double the 522,000 people who attended 12 events in 1981, Tracy said. The recent Winternationals alone drew 56,000 on its final day--a record one-day crowd for the sport. Another 500,000 people watched the eight major IHRA races last year.

During 1987, 22 televised drag races were watched by 141 million people, more than double the 66.6 million viewers who saw 17 races the previous year, according to Phil Rosette, vice president of the Sponsors Report, a sports research firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. But Rosette’s calculations include repeat showings on TV as well as viewers of the races on tape cassettes.

Diamond P gets much of the credit for the sport’s growing popularity, said Carla Engelman, coordinating producer for NBC’s SportsWorld. “They take a lot of time to explain drag racing” to a national audience, she said. “I think they are equal to any other packager in that sport.”

To get drag racing on SportsWorld, the NHRA buys air time from NBC; an hour costs more than $300,000. The NHRA will spend another $70,000 or so to produce a TV show of the event, including a fee it pays to Diamond P Sports, Tracy said.

Diamond P’s costs, therefore, are limited mostly to paying its employees’ wages and expenses. The company has 14 full-time workers, but often hires temporary help depending on the race being covered. The NHRA pays all the costs of hiring camera operators, leasing mobile production trucks (mostly from the Nashville Network) and paying for post-production services.

The NHRA tries to defer those costs, of course, by selling several minutes of its allotted hour to advertisers, namely the brewers, tire manufacturers and oil companies that are heavy sponsors of drag racing overall. The local NBC affiliate gets to sell some of the commercial time as well.

However, the arrangement is different on cable’s Nashville Network. The network pays Diamond P a fixed amount to produce the program, and Diamond P expects to complete the job for less than that amount in order to net a profit. If its costs run over budget, it takes a loss.

Thanks to the explosive growth of cable TV in recent years, the NHRA now can find TV time for all 17 of its races. And with drag racing’s popularity rising, Diamond P has no plans to stray far from the nation’s drag strips. “I thoroughly believe in staying in our niche,” Palash said.