Guys,
A little history lesson. When David Freiburger first devised Drag Week in 2005, he wrote, in quotation marks, "The only rules are, there are no rules!" He had grown tired of what fastest street car racing had evolved into, which was a rulebook loaded down with innuendo and minutia to try and keep as many cars as possible competitive. So he was planning an event tough enough to sort out the pretenders without a fifty page rulebook.

2nd: Hot Rod Magazine is a group of journalists who want content, internet hits, and good drama from Drag Week, nothing more, nothing less. The Drag Week staff is a separate entity tasked with a huge responsibility to pull off all the administrative and logistical nightmares that arise with trying to put together an event of this magnitude. Then you have the race and tech directors who are using volunteers and track staff to keep the nuts and bolt together and the train moving forward. These three heads do not always work in concert, so to assume any outcome is the result of a consensus would be folly.

As the fields have grown, there is a clear precedent, year after year, of adjustments made on the fly. For a veteran, the tone was set during the Driver's Meeting when Keith explained, "You guys pick what class you're supposed to be in, you know the rules, I'll only make adjustments if I need to". This was clearly code for: I don't have the desire or the manpower to beat people up with rules, so police yourselves, and I'll act if there are protests! I saw cars who moved up in class to Ultimate Iron and Unlimited, ETC that wouldn't have been allowed to do so in previous years.
Last year, in my story, I complained about abuse of the impound lane. In the drivers meeting Lonnie Grimm clearly stated that it wouldn't be used in 2016 unless he felt it was necessary. I know most of the week, the impound guys didn't get an express trip to the front of the line.

The one thing I would stress, to help everyone enjoy Drag Week as much as possible...Never assume "The rules are the rules", The rules are a moving target!

Dealing specifically with Friday, they made a move to run SME in the first session, so they could build the ladder, then they ran the class cars in the 2nd session, and never went to an all-run deal. It worked GREAT!! Unless you were a SME car who wanted to run later in the day...a little heavy handed. Next time have me distract Sean, and pull him over to the side, and then sneak in!!