The man voted as the greatest drag racer in the National Hot Rod Association’s first 50 years has plenty of ideas on how to fix the sport he dominated for nearly four decades.

At 77, ‘Big Daddy’ Don Garlits still spends most of his days tinkering with race cars and antiques in his garage outside the Drag Racing Hall of Fame in Ocala, Fla. If given the opportunity, he’s more than ready to tinker with the NHRA’s current rules.

The NHRA, he says, is in trouble, and he’s right. Quality entries are down, attendance is down at tracks, and there isn’t a whole lot of money being made.

Garlits blames the rising expenses, which have priced many teams and drivers out of the sport.

“A lot of us got into drag racing because it was affordable,” he said Wednesday. “Now you have teams that have a $3 million or $5 million budget, where they can just outspend everyone else.

“They’re the teams that are holding change up. We could easily make the tires smaller and lower the wing and run a lot slower, but they don’t want any part of that.”

Garlits’ biggest problem is that the races themselves have gotten too short. Races were shortened for safety concerns last year from a quarter-mile to 1,000 feet. That shortened the races from about five seconds — still too fast by Garlits’ account — to about 3.5 seconds.

“The racese are too short; three-and-a-half seconds is just not long enough to keep the fans interested,” he said. “Then you have the cars blow engines every race, and then you have to wait another 10 minutes between races to get the oil cleaned up. It’s a bad show.”

Garlits’ ideas are simple and harsh. Make the rear wing smaller and lower it to take away downforce. Have Goodyear build smaller racing tires to take away grip. Disqualify any team that blows an engine and drops oil on the track.

“The engines right now, if they’d cut them back to about 1,000 or 1,500 horsepower, they would run forever,” he said. “And the problem about slowing the cars down would be solved.

“It would also bridge the gap between the have’s and the have-not’s. The competition would be a lot closer, and that’s what’s going to bring the fans back.”