It was a fall evening when a handful of people gathered around a computer screen to watch a new website launch. Nobody in the room could have imagined where this little experiment was headed, provided it was headed anywhere at all.
The date was Sept. 15, 1999, and CompetitionPlus.com was officially online. We stared at what would be considered an archaic hit tracker today and watched the numbers come in.
Eight people showed up. Then five more, followed by 10, and every time that counter moved somebody noticed.
By the end of the night, 100 people had visited CompetitionPlus.com, and we thought that was pretty darn impressive. Today, 100 can show up in a second.
The term “internet magazine” hadn’t really caught on yet. We were called an e-zine, one of those words from the early internet that thankfully didn’t survive nearly as long as we did.
CompetitionPlus.com started with a basic premise. We loved drag racing, understood journalism and believed there was an audience willing to read legitimate reporting about the sport on the internet.
There wasn’t a grand plan to make it through 27 years and begin a 28th. That first night, we were too busy watching the counter to worry about Year 2.
Today, CompetitionPlus.com celebrates its 27th birthday and begins Year 28. The internet we launched into would be almost unrecognizable today.
There was no Facebook driving readers toward our stories, no X, Instagram or YouTube. The idea of watching television-quality video on a telephone would have sounded about as realistic as a Top Fuel dragster running 3.60.
When social media became where people gathered, CompetitionPlus.com went there, too. The days of waiting for everyone to come through the front door of a website were disappearing, and we weren’t interested in waiting around to see if they came back.
Social media gave us another way to put our work in front of people. It never gave us a reason to change the work.
From the first day, the intention was to bring true journalism to the internet. In 1999, some in traditional media weren’t convinced the internet belonged in the same conversation with newspapers and magazines.
We intended to prove otherwise, and that meant CompetitionPlus.com couldn’t become an electronic bulletin board for press releases. If we called ourselves a publication, we had better act like one.
That meant going to the races, interviewing people, developing sources, checking facts and occasionally asking a question somebody didn’t particularly want to answer. Loving drag racing never meant we had to tell only the good stories.
Sometimes the story wasn’t pretty, and sometimes the answer we got wasn’t the one somebody hoped we’d print. We’ve made people happy with our reporting and we’ve made people mad with it, occasionally accomplishing both before lunch.
When internet video finally became something people could watch without spending half the afternoon waiting for it to load, we jumped in. CompetitionPlusTV followed, and before long we were producing original shows, interviews, documentaries and historical pieces such as Storytellers and Legends: The Series.
Podcasting and streaming eventually brought programs such as the CompetitionPlus POWER HOUR and the Alan Reinhart Show. Nobody sitting around that computer in 1999 saw any of that coming because we were still pretty impressed that 100 people had found the website.
Over the years, we’ve covered some of drag racing’s greatest moments and some we’d rather never have had to write about. There have been championships, controversies, deaths, comebacks, rules disputes and enough behind-the-scenes stories to know what happens on the racetrack is sometimes only half the story.
We’ve watched racers nobody knew become household names in this sport. Some of the kids we remember running around the pits are now strapped into the same kinds of race cars their parents drove.
There are racers competing today who weren’t born when CompetitionPlus.com went online, and there are readers who weren’t, either. That’s when starting Year 28 really makes you wonder where the years have gone. Every few years, the internet came along with a new toy everybody supposedly had to have. We tried plenty of them, kept what worked and moved on from what didn’t.
We’ve redesigned the website more times than I care to remember and embraced other avenues that gave us another way to do what we’d already been doing. The responsibility was the same whether we were putting a story online in 1999 or pushing it across multiple platforms in 2026. Get the facts right, talk to the people involved and don’t duck a story because somebody might not like seeing it published.
We’ve also learned the value of preserving history because today’s race becomes yesterday’s pretty quickly. Ten or 20 years later, somebody inevitably wishes more of it had been documented.
Nobody keeps something like this going for 27 years by himself, and I certainly didn’t. As CompetitionPlus.com begins Year 28, there are a lot of people responsible for us still being here.
Writers, photographers, videographers, editors and contributors have given a piece of themselves to this publication. Racers have trusted us with their stories, and advertisers believed enough in what we were doing to help keep an independent publication alive. My dearest friends Roger Richards and Brian Wood stood beside me when i wasn’t worth standing beside.Â
Then there are the readers, some of whom have been here almost from the beginning. Others arrived through Facebook, Google, YouTube, CompetitionPlusTV, the POWER HOUR or one of the thousands of stories we’ve published along the way. Without those readers, none of the rest works.
It always comes back to that hit tracker on Sept. 15, 1999. Eight people showed up. Then five more, followed by 10, until we finished the night with 100 readers and thought we’d done something. Nobody around that computer was thinking about social media, streaming video, podcasts or beginning a 28th year. We wanted to tell drag racing stories and hoped somebody out there wanted to read them.
Turns out, they did, and today those 100 readers who took an entire evening to find us can show up in a second. That’s a lot of change since 1999, and there will be plenty more coming.
We’ll deal with it when it gets here because we’ve been doing that for 27 years. Until then, we will tell the story and do it like journalists.
That’s what we signed up for on Sept. 15, 1999, and that’s what we’re carrying into Year 28.
Happy birthday to us, and to everyone who helped us get this far, thank you.
