Tale of the tires

The final product looked great, but it wasn't always fun or easy, Jack.

Before we turn our attention to Bristol and the upcoming O’Reilly NHRA Thunder Valley Nationals presented by Q, where John Force can begin work on his next 1,000 wins, I wanted to share with you the interesting tale of the tires and all that went into the memorable photo of Force that was sent around the world and splashed on sports pages, ESPN's SportsCenter, and everywhere else that NHRA’s ray of sunshine shone that day.

As you can imagine, and as you have learned from following our semi-regular Five Favorite Fotos feature, getting "the shot" is often the result of good planning and anticipation. Such is the case here as well.

Elon Werner, who works with Force’s publicist, Dave Densmore, to feed the media’s hunger for all things Force, whether they involve John, Ashley, Courtney, Brittany, Robert, "Zippy," Coil, Fedderly, "Guido," Medlen, or any of the other stars in the Force galaxy, provided me with a timeline of the work leading up to The Moment that I thought might make for interesting weekend-worthy reading.

Obviously, with Force sitting on 992 wins entering this year, we all knew that if he was healthy enough to drive (and we all knew he’d be behind the wheel one way or another, right?), eight wins was light lifting for him. One thousand was just around the corner.

Force put in two right out of the gate in Pomona and two more in Houston to put him at 996 and within an event’s win of 1,000.

NHRA tech boss Don Taylor sketched a blueprint ...

wheels and tires were chosen ...

test photographs taken ...

... and NHRA's Graham Light gave the green light for some downtime.

The original concept began earlier in the year when the NHRA Marketing and Communications departments began to discuss ways to salute Force’s milestone achievement. In the past, drivers who reached the 50-event-win plateau were greeted with a custom-made sign; that obviously would not be enough for this momentous occasion.

“We wanted to be sure the text on the trophy or plaque made clear John’s milestone so when photos were taken it would be clear what fans were looking at,” remembered Michael Padian of the NHRA Communications Department. “There was some concern about the trophy/plaque being done in time for the Las Vegas NHRA event, the first race where he had a shot at 1,000, so we went into contingency mode. How could we illustrate this remarkable milestone – and this was important – and do it in a way that would represent the sport of NHRA POWERade Series Drag Racing?

“The idea of the three tires representing the zeros just sort of jumped off the page.”

NHRA consulted with John Force Racing on the idea, and NHRA’s Don Taylor came up with a quick sketch that would become the blueprint that everyone would work toward.

“It was simple and covered all the important elements,” said Werner. “John’s Castrol GTX High Mileage Ford Mustang, four Goodyear tires, and John himself. The key was getting a shot that could be framed to not have a lot of empty space in the background and be easy to set up at a moment’s notice.”

While NHRA’s Corporate Art department designed and ordered the number 1 that would be affixed to one of the tires, the staff at Force’s Yorba Linda, Calif., shop took photos of various tires in their possession to see which types of tires (new or used) and wheels would look best before settling on gold wheels and race-worn tires.

“The next big hurdle was staging a photo to make sure the sketch actually translated to a real photo,” said Werner. “John is relatively superstitious, so getting him to stand in for a 1,000-round photo when he had only won 996 rounds was not even an idea anyone wanted to bring up. The Thursday before the SummitRacing.com NHRA Nationals, I was pressed into duty to stage the photo with Richard Shute of Auto Imagery and Lachelle Seymour from NHRA Communications.

“All the elements were moved around, and shots were taken with me positioned on either side of the Ford Mustang. All the possible options were narrowed down to five candidates that were distributed to representatives from NHRA Marketing and Communications as well as John Force Racing.”

A top-end location at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was scouted and approved, but Force threw a monkey wrench into the plans when he failed to qualify for the event. So it was on to Atlanta, where the same drill was put into place. Locations were selected, roles were assigned, and everyone was at the ready.

“Coming into the race, our secret hope was John getting 1,000 round-wins at the conclusion of an event so there would be more time to coordinate the photo and not hold up racing action,” said Werner, and they almost get their wish.

Not only did Force qualify in Atlanta, but he won his first three rounds to push his total to 999 and set up a final-round date with none other than his daughter Ashley, who also was gunning for a piece of history, the first Funny Car win by a female racer. Ashley made history by defeating her father, who would have to wait at least a week before he could claim his piece of history.

Force qualified for the O’Reilly NHRA Midwest Nationals presented by Castrol on his last qualifying opportunity and was pitted against Ron Capps in the first round.

NHRA Senior Vice President-Racing Operations Graham Light gave the green light to a short stoppage in the racing schedule should Force win the round, but with just 75 minutes between rounds, everyone wanted to get the job done quickly and efficiently.

At the top end, an actual line was painted on the return road to mark where Force's Castrol Mustang should stop. “X” literally marked the spot. Force reps moved the tires to the top end in anticipation of a win. The tires were rolled into position but quickly began rolling away because the return road is less than level. Small concrete blocks were procured to act as braces to hold the tires in place.

A quick meeting was held in Force’s pit area with crew chief Austin Coil, alerting him that he would have to park his tow vehicle in a different place should John win. Coil nodded and went back to work. Force was finally brought up to speed on what he needed to do should he win. His role is simple: Come out of the car, do his ESPN2 interview, then pose for the photo.

NHRA’s top-end crew was informed of the plan, and a half-dozen photographers were present with ladders to get the perfect shot.

And, of course, Force got a little distracted during the whole thing.

Force beat Capps, and everyone rolled into motion. But as the green Ford was rolled toward the spot, the turn was made too wide, and his Mustang came to rest 30 feet from assigned spot.

Then the transmission locked up.

A mad dash was made to move the tires, signage, and photographers into the new location.

Force does his thing with ESPN, but instead of moving to the setup area, he wants to talk with Capps. As he’s doing that, Force’s newest protégé, Mike Neff, wins his first round of racing, so Force wants to congratulate him, much to the dismay of the assembled group

Force is finally corralled and photos are taken, but Force insists on having photos taken with Coil and the crew.

As Force is loaded onto the back of the POWERade Fan Experience truck and heads to the starting line for more celebration, there is concern that in the hubbub, maybe the photographers missed the shot. The photographers give a thumbs-up, and the organizers collectively sigh in relief.

In seconds, the top end goes from chaos to stillness as NHRA Marketing and Communications reps and JFR representatives shake hands and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Concluded Werner, “As Col. John ‘Hannibal’ Smith of The A-Team used to say, ‘I love it when a plan comes together.’ "

Show and tell

It’s been a busy week here at NHRA Publications Central, what with back-to-back national events, the production of the souvenir program for the National Hot Rod Reunion, and intense work on a super-secret Publications project that I hope to be able to share with you all soon, so, as we toil to get Issue 18 of National DRAGSTER 2008 out the door and on its way to the printing presses in beautiful Beaver Dam, Wis., I figured I’d make this one easy on the eyes with a little show and tell.

We all know that NHRA has been in some pretty highfalutin places lately, such as Sports Illustrated, Men’s Fitness, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, etc., but did you know that an NHRA dragster once made the pages of super-fab Vogue magazine? 'Tis true.

Now, I’m not a Vogue reader — my tastes run more to Maxim and Stuff — but I understand that it’s one of the leading fashion and lifestyle magazines out there. It was founded in 1892, which means they’ve put out around 1,400 monthly issues (Ha! DRAGSTER is on number 2,271!), but the only one I care about is the August 1970 issue.

It was the Look Young issue, and the cover featured scintillating blurbs such as “Terrific New Clothes Starting at $15” (this was 1970, remember), “The Beautiful Throat: Unique Exercise Routine” and “Good Skin: How To Have It … How To Fake It,” along with a fair-haired maiden who was the subject of the issue’s fashion shoot, which was done at then-new Ontario Motor Speedway, home to be of the inaugural NHRA Supernationals later that year.

The front-engine Top Fueler – a California Chassis Engineering-built machine with a Tom Hanna body, paint by Bill Carter, and 392 Chrysler power courtesy of Ed Pink – was owned by former ND Editor (and regular column tidbit contributor) Bill Holland and partner and driver John Guedel. The car, Art Linkletter's All-American, was a prop for the shoot, which also incorporated Guedel (“a proponent of the one-piece ‘silverized’ driving suits,” noted Holland) posed in his driving gear. Guedel’s father was the producer of Linkletter’s popular television show and others, including Groucho Marx's, hence the "sponsorship."

A male model also was used in the shoot: a then unknown Michael Douglas, who two years later would burst onto the small screen as Inspector Steve Keller opposite Karl Malden on the TV show The Streets of San Francisco.

“Back then, we were actively trying to promote the sport of drag racing to the mainstream media and had reasonable success,” remembered Holland. “They were looking for a nice car that was L.A.-based. As John and I were always trying to get extra exposure for our car and drag racing, we volunteered for the gig. Me working for NHRA may have given us an inside track. We also did a national TV spot for Certs breath mints with the car, which was shot at OCIR.”

Speaking of promotions, former Top Fuel racer Don Roberts, another regular reader of this thrice-weekly compendium of nonsense, passed along this crazy photo of the two-car King & Marshall team doing a bit of a sticky shtick for Loctite and its then-new Super Bonder glue in April 1972.

“We glued an aluminum bar and a steel bar together with Super Bonder, hooked them to the cars, and tried to pull the bars apart not once but twice,” he recalled. “The bars stayed together. We did this promotion in the infield at Seekonk Speedway in Seekonk, Mass. Don Marshall is seen to the right giving the signal to a crew guy standing in front of me at the wheel of the dragster and to another crew guy standing in front of [Jimmy] King, who was at the wheel of the Duster Funny Car.”

King, of course, was more famous for another photo, the one at right. At the 1970 Nationals in Indy, he backflipped his slingshot just off the line, and the next week, the surprisingly lightly damaged car was back in action with a wheel attached to the top of the roll cage. I asked Roberts what he knew about that whole deal.

“The motor bogged on the leave, the clutch hooked, and a pair of Marvin Rifchin's newest sticky-compound tires put the car up in the air, and from there it stood straight up on the push bar,” he recalled. “The car and King fell over backwards to the right and landed upside down. In 1970, the term ‘wheelie bar’ didn't exist for Top Fuel dragsters, but I am sure if the car had them, it would have helped in this situation.

“King wasn't hurt, and the car had little damage and was back racing the following weekend. The guys in the shop screwed the caster on the cage when King wasn't looking as a goof. All the caster ever got was strange looks and caught on my firesuit pants getting in the car.”

There’s a nice photo bio of Roberts on Bill Pratt’s DragList.com site.

After my recent column about the Vallco Drag Racing Game – creator Greg Zyla has been delightedly overwhelmed by the renewed interest in his 30-year-old baby – I was reminded by reader David Moore of another of the options that young drag racing fans had to get behind the wheel: Hasbro’s handheld Red Line Pro Drag Racing game. He had recently come across one on eBay.

With its butterfly-wheel design, the game allowed fans to compete in Top Fuel, Funny Car, Pro Stock, or Stock with a full or Pro Tree. You’d mash the gas thumb button on the right and shift with the thumb button on the left (three speeds each for Top Fuel and Funny Car, five for Pro Stock, and four for Stock) while an LCD representation of the track, your tachometer, and the scoreboard let you know where you stood. You had to beat preset opponent performances for each class on each type of Tree (for example, you needed to run consectutive rounds of 4.97, 4.82, and 4.67 to reach the Top Fuel final, where you needed to run 4.52 to win -- or 4.32, for some reason, if you raced on a full Tree).

Being the computer nerd/research junkie that I am, I actually found a PDF set of instructions for the game online (“Racing tips: Peel-out sound and ‘smoke’ on your screen mean your RPMs were too high …”), where you can read more about it, including the required e.t.s.

Update! No sooner had I published this entry than I got an e-mail from reader Frankie LoCascio, who pointed out that the Hasbro game, introduced in 1999, is actually an updated version of the game that Kenner (famous for those cool zip-cord SSP cars!) made in the 1980s. Kenner was bought by in 1985 General Mills, which sold it to Tonka in 1987, which sold it to Hasbro in mid-1991. Hence, the different brand names on essentially the same product.

So, thanks to the instant and always correctable and appendable nature of the Web, here’s an update! Here’s a pic of the older version, which is a lot more square and dated looking and does not have the cool LCD screen of its successor. This version had four classes, with Modified substituted for Pro Stock, and the Tree is at the top instead of at the side.

In what was a pretty cool idea, Hasbro teamed with Travelodge hotels in June 1998 to make Pro Drag Racing and its other handheld game, Trivial Pursuit, available to sample at the check-in desks of 300 of Travelodge's most popular locations with the plan to expand to the entire chain in the fall when four other new titles, including Monopoly and Totally Twister, hit the shelves. The products also would also get a trial on cruise lines such as Carnival and Royal Caribbean as well as in Discovery Zone play centers.

And finally comes this really cool video, the link to which was sent to me by another former National DRAGSTER editor and current NHRA board member, Dick Wells, and it's probably one of the wilder drag-race-type competitions you’ll see. It pits a Bugatti Veyron, a wild, mid-engine sports car that is the quickest accelerating and decelerating road-legal production car in the world, against a Eurofighter Typhoon airplane. The stunt was set up by BBC television’s popular automobile show Top Gear.

The Bugatti’s W-16 engine has 16 cylinders in four banks of four cylinders, each of which has four valves (for a total of 64). The 488-cid engine sports four turbochargers and makes an advertised 1,001 horsepower and requires radiators to keep the engine and turbos cool. It goes zero to 60 in 2.46 seconds and turns the quarter-mile in 9.8 seconds at 150 mph. Despite its hefty 4,160-pound curb weight, Bugatti claims it can brake from 400 kph (249 mph) to a standstill in less than 10 seconds thanks to unique cross-drilled and turbine-vented carbon rotors, front calipers with eight titanium pistons, and rear calipers with six pistons. At speeds of more than 124 mph, a hydraulic rear spoiler also lifts to act as an air brake, snapping to a 55-degree angle in 0.4-second once the brakes are applied. Bugatti claims maximum deceleration of 1.3 Gs on road tires.

The plane, a twin-engine multi-role canard-delta wing strike fighter aircraft, can hit 910 mph and climb at 62,007 feet per minute.

The reason that all of these stats are so important is because the two-mile race requires Top Gear's Richard Hammond to accelerate the Veyron from a standstill down a one-mile course, brake at the other end, and race back to the starting line before the plane, piloted by Royal Air Force squadron leader Jim Walls, can take off, climb one mile into the sky, then plummet back toward Earth and pull out of the dive before pancaking itself on the tarmac and cross the finish line ahead of the car.

Who won? You’ll have to watch the video.

An irrepressible Force

I was never all that good at math in school, but you don’t have to be a quantum physicist to calculate that John Force had to average about two round-wins in each of his 501 starts to reach the 1,000-win plateau he crested with his first-round victory at the O’Reilly NHRA Midwest Nationals presented by Castrol. That’s an average of a semifinal appearance each time out, which is pretty damned impressive in my books.

Doing 1,000 of anything successfully – whether it’s 1,000 trips to the grocery store without bashing into a shopping cart or changing 1,000 diapers – is quite an accomplishment, but when it means muscling a short-wheelbased, 7,000-horsepower, rolling time bomb to the end of a 40-foot-wide, quarter-mile-long ribbon of concrete and asphalt ahead of the racer in the other lane trying to do exactly the same thing, it’s REALLY something. Most drivers don’t have 1,000 runs under their belt – including in qualifying – let alone 1,000 winning passes.

Considering that he started from nothing and won just 14 rounds in his first 22 events in his first five abbreviated campaigns, ending up with 1,000 in 501 is astonishing. Consider this as well: In 125 of those 501 starts, he won all four rounds available, so one should easily be able to deduce that he had a lot of first-round losses to balance it out. But, as we know, he gutted it out and eventually became the sport’s biggest winner, and the rest is history, right?

Lately, though, things have been a little tougher for him, which is why I really liked his quote from the press release after he recorded that 1,000th win: “Winning a thousand rounds, that means that at a point in time, we were pretty good!”

It was a humble Force, a true-to-himself-and-his-fans Force because he knows he hasn’t won as he used to. He knows he hasn’t been in the winner’s circle to hold the trophy since Brainerd last year. He knows that a year from now he’s going to be 60 – still young for a drag racer, but feeling old in the bones, especially the sore ones he has now.

But even if he somehow thinks his glory days are behind him, I’d invite him to put a little Toby Keith in the CD player and sing along: “I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.”  That's how John Force is, and there's not a Funny Car racer in the pits who doesn't fear him as much now as ever.

As we all know, he didn't reach 1,000 wins by accident or by luck.

To have any modicum of success while you’re trying to come up through the ranks -- barnstorming the country, living on burgers and beans five to a room, trying to build a name, find a sponsor, and keep the rods from coming out of not just your engine but your personal life -- takes dedication.

But he made it through to the other side. We all know the stories: polio in youth; sharing an impossibly small trailer with his parents and four siblings; quarterback of a high school football team that never won a game; truck driver; how he used a tax-refund check and the sale of a prize that his mother-in-law had won on a game show (an organ) to buy his first race car; cars that usually had more oil underneath them than in them; doing anything for a buck, even dressing up as little red-haired, pigtailed Wendy to satisfy his sponsor; nine straight runner-ups without a win.

And sometimes it's not much easier today, mentally at least. To continue to stay after it 30 years later while not only running a multimillion-dollar business and nurturing protégés – three of which are your daughters, all of whom will be winners – but also while keeping the world safe for democracy and nurturing an ever-growing fan and sponsor base and dealing with a gazillion people who all want “just five minutes” of your time and attention AND dealing with your own demons … well, not many people could be John Force.

A lot of people would like to be John Force, but only because they don’t know how hard it is to be John Force.

I’m not talking about how he has a mean limp right now after his crash last September or how, like any dad, he’ll fret when his daughters drive to the mall let alone to the big end. For all of his successes – Wally trophies and championships that overflow his headquarters, adoring fans, TV shows, media appearances, and all of the other trappings of success – I feel as if he’s a bit of a tortured soul sometimes. For all that drag racing has given him, it’s also taken from him. It has cost him sleep, hair, stomach upset, and peace. For a while, it claimed his marriage, and it took Eric Medlen for all time. That one still hurts and will for a long time.

And for all that he has given drag racing – a modern-day hero, a Don Garlits for this generation of fans, and an inspirational success story to kids everywhere that, yes, you can grow up poor and still become a champion, on and off the track – it still feels to me as if he thinks that’s not enough.

I’m not going to pretend to be in John Force’s inner circle, but throughout the years, we’ve become good friends, and he knows he can call me anytime, any day to talk about what’s on his mind. I’m under standing orders to call him if ever I get wind that the fans are turning against him for any reason so he can “fix it.” He calls sometimes just to chat about our first grandchildren, who are roughly the same age. My grandson Jaden shares John’s birthday, which was yesterday. Sure they’re separated by 55 years, but he brings them closer every time we talk.

And then sometimes, sometimes … he just needs to talk, as he did Tuesday after Ashley had won in Atlanta. He picked up the phone in the middle of the night wherever he was, and though he had every right and opportunity to talk about how he had turned another raw rookie into a national event winner, he left a very long, personal, and emotional voice mail.

He couldn’t sleep, he said, so he got up, put on his robe and his ever-present Castrol hat, and prefaced his message with the caveat that “this probably won’t make any sense, because it doesn’t make any sense to me … maybe I ate too many pickles for dinner” and continued to talk until the voice-mail-message limit cut him off. Then he called back and talked some more.

With all that he has already given us – new sponsors, big sponsors, safety innovations, technological centers, major media exposure, reality TV shows, Robert and Eric and Ashley, and so much more – he still has more work to do before he pulls that last parachute. He wants to ensure that the much-publicized next generation has the tools and the support to keep this ol' hot rod of a sport going strong. He sees us lose pioneers of the sport -- much like we could have lost him last year -- and he's thinking of ways he can help. Me, I think he thinks too much. I know he probably reads too much into dreams and visions and subconscious and that he lies in bed for hours trying to figure out what it all means, how he can save the world.

Sometimes he throws money at the problem, sometimes people and technology, but mostly it’s just his heart and his soul. I remember making a special trip to watch him in Noble, Okla., in 1992 at a Division 4 points meet. He was fresh off the “I saw Elvis at 1,000 feet" episode in Memphis and worried about the future. He rolled into Noble with a car that was built like a tank, a Funny Car From Hell aimed at him never having to go there again at a time when he was the class leader in fireballs. It had a spare parachute mounted under the body. After noting that his car had pivoted on the oil pan in the Memphis fire after the tires had blown, he had six-inch billet aluminum wheels welded to the bottom of the chassis to keep ‘er rolling straight. He had small aluminum wings in front of the butterfly steering wheel, precursors to today’s “doghouses.” It had a ginormous parachute-deployment button on the inner roof instead of the traditional smaller handles. He had a button to trigger the fire bottles instead of the traditional extra handle on the brake handle that forced a driver to momentarily stop pulling on the lever to activate.

And, of course, the pièce de résistance, a full-blown, 007-worthy, body-ejection system to cast off the burning shell if things got really ugly. Triggered by another button, it would unlatch the front catch that held the nose of the body to the chassis, then a pair of large cylinders would lift the nose of the body a foot off the chassis, where the wind could catch it and flip it off the car. The body was tethered to the chassis with a 20-foot steel aircraft cable.

I don’t remember the thing ever getting a trial by fire, so to speak, and it was so ungodly heavy that Austin Coil ditched it not long after, but the thought process was there. It was Force trying not just to save his own bacon from the fire, but that of others in the class. He did it again last year, in the wake of the Medlen tragedy, throwing everything he had in his arsenal at it -- money, expertise, people, technology – and collaborating with NHRA and manufacturers and other racers to build a better mousetrap and to build a foundation in Eric’s name. It’s part penance and part his nature.

“I help as I can,” he told me simply once. “I like to help. I’m just trying to sort out my life and what really matters.”

Even though he has already given the sport so much, I feel as if he thinks his work isn’t done, as if he owes the sport still more. It’s a tremendous burden he places on himself.

Force can be a powerful ally, and he knows it. He commands respect and possesses power and influence within the sport. Everyone wants him on his or her side, and sometimes he’s the unwilling rope in political tugs of war. But not only does he want to help, I think he feels he needs to. That’s why he’ll “work the ropes” until he’s dead tired and hand-cramped, why he’ll grab onto that already-dialed cell phone that some fan just handed him so he can talk to some sick kid or some fan’s buddies at the bar, and he’ll do it with a smile on his face, because that’s what important to him.

What matters to John Force is me and you and anyone else who has ever cheered louder than a nitro car. What matters is family. What matters is the sport and the people in it, and that they all get to go safely home to their families at night. What matters is not just that our sport has a future, but that it has a bright one.

What John Force has accomplished in our sport will never be matched, and I’m not just talking about the 1,000 wins or the rest of his untouchable records. I’m proud to work with him, to watch him do his thing, and to call him a friend.

Congratulations, John. Take a week off, will ya?

Friday feedback frenzy

Heading into what promises to be a busy weekend of perhaps record-breaking performances at Gateway Int’l Raceway, I think it’s a good time to take it easy. I’m gonna back the feedback machine out of the trailer and fire ‘er up to share some of the great notes I’ve received the last few weeks. In other words, you guys are pretty much gonna do the work while I put my feet up on the desk and enjoy.

The outpouring of love for the recently departed Gaines Markley was strong. His niece Maria Markley created the video tribute at right, which contains wonderful childhood photos of the former Top Fuel racer and world championship car owner as well as cool vintage race pics.

Rob Bruins, who drove Markley’s Top Fueler to that championship in 1979, reported that Markley’s services were attended by a Who’s Who of Northwest drag racing, including Markley’s pal Gary Beck (who with Bruins spoke at the services), Walt Austin, Herm Petersen, Jerry Ruth, Wayne King, Dick Kalivoda, "Gentleman" Hank Johnson, Jerry King, Lauran Ott, Ted Gord, Jeff Sayer, Bobby Mitchell, Jack Verhilst, Bob and Paula Gage (alcohol racers and Markley's partner in a machine shop; Bob also spoke), and a number of sprint car boat racers for whom Markley had built engines.

“Gary spoke of their youth together and how Gaines taught him about mechanical things and how he always felt Gaines was much more of a natural driver than he,” said Bruins. “I spoke of his wit, knowledge, and mentoring with a few stories of typical Gaines stuff. Bob relayed Gaines’ compassion for helping others and how he was concerned with others not getting proper recognition for the things they did and how if you didn't ask Gaines specific questions on his accomplishments, he wasn't about to toot his own horn. Gaines' nieces and nephew referred to ‘Uncle Gaines' emergency hot line,’ on call for all emergencies, anytime, their personal resident auto-repair guy.”

John Lindsay, owner of the notorious Impulse! line of Funny Cars, dropped me this remembrance of Markley, whom he called “one of the nicest guys that I have ever met.”

“In 1975 or 1976 I had booked my first ‘tour’ -- all of two races with the Impulse! Vega. We had a match race in Edmonton, Alta., on Wednesday night and then had to be in Seattle three days later for the Sea-Fair 64 Funny Car show. On the final run in Edmonton, the Dana 60 rear end in the race car came apart, breaking the ring and pinion and the outdated Posi-traction unit. I ordered a new gear set and a late-model spool from California to be shipped next-day air to Seattle, and we headed down the highway to Washington.

“When we got to Seattle, the gears were there, but the airline had lost the spool. I just HAD to make the Seattle race just to have enough gas money to get home, so in a panic I called Jim Eubanks, who was helping me with the car in California. He had lived in the Seattle area before moving to California, and I thought maybe he had an idea to get me out of a jam. All he said is, ‘Call Gaines, tell him that you are a friend of mine, and tell him what you need.’ I had never worked on a Dana rear end and knew nothing about them, but Jim told me that Gaines ran one and could fix ANYTHING! I called Gaines, who I had never met, and explained my problem. His reply was typical: ‘WELL, I can’t fix it until you get it over here, so you had better hurry.’

“I told him that I had all the parts except the spool, and he told me not to worry, that he would come up with something. He gave me directions to his house in Federal Way, and when I got there, he was taking the spool out of his dragster to put into mine. I didn't even know this man until I called him an hour earlier. He totally set up the rear end, showing me the do's and don'ts of the breed, and all for the price of ‘You owe me a favor if I ever need one.’ Gaines never missed stopping by my trailer every time I was in Seattle just to say hi after that day. He will be missed!”

As excited as I was to have stumbled across a display photo of the Markley-Beck-Rhoades BB/GD that I ran in last Friday’s column, I was even more excited to hear from the man who shot that photo, John Dutton. Because the image in our possession did not have a photo credit on the back, I had no idea who shot it until Dutton’s e-mail showed up, complete with a scan of the original proof sheet from the photo shoot, which Dutton says took place Sept. 22, 1968, at the Mayfair Shopping Centre in Victoria, B.C., to promote an upcoming BB/GD match race at Van Isle Dragways – where Dutton was the strip photographer and relief announcer during the mid- to late 1960s -- against Gary Shepheard and Bert Sweeting of Victoria.

Beck confirmed the story, adding that Canada Dry soft drinks and drink mixes sponsored their car for that match, hence The Basic Bar sign propped next to the dragster. Dutton was a busy guy back then; he also covered Mission Raceways and was a weekly columnist for Drag News (Canada Notes), plus a regular contributor to International Wheelspin News, Road and Motorsports Magazine, and, of course, National DRAGSTER.

Northwest dragster veteran Sayer also got a kick out of that old photo and, like Lindsay above, received a welcome tech answer to a problem courtesy of Markley. “Seeing the picture of the Markley, Beck, and Rhoades BB/GD brings back some real memories. The first dragster that my wife, Carol, and I had was a similar Harris-chassised BB/GD, and we were bit by them several times while they were winning the Division 6 Super Eliminator championship. Even then, there was a lot of talent in the other lane whenever I pulled up to race them. Gaines always took time to talk whenever we were at the track, whether it be a local match race or a national event. I remember in Pomona in the early ‘70s, we were in the staging lanes with our Top Gas dragster looking at some dents in the rocker covers from the ‘trick’ exhaust rockers I inherited from somebody. We were undecided on how to attack the problem before the dents became holes; Gaines took one look and said, ‘Double up on the gaskets, but be sure you glue them together.’ It worked, and we got in.”

Greg Ozubko, whose paint schemes have adorned famous drag cars for years, grew up in Edmonton and had the opportunity to work with Markley and Bruins. “When I was a young boy, growing up and virtually living at the track in Edmonton, I did everything I could to help just about any or every racer who came to town. There were four of us who did this: Ian DeLaSalle, Brian Davidchuk (who later drove in TAD), Rob Flynn (now crew chief for Top Fuel’s Rod Fuller), and me. I had the immense pleasure, both at the time and even now when I think back, of being allowed the privilege of helping Rob Bruins and Gaines Markley in the world championship year when they came to Edmonton for the divisional points meet and, as I recall, another race that year or the adjoining years. I was allowed the privilege of working on the car doing really trivial things that to me at the time were huge and the ultimate thrill of riding in the tow vehicle. Seems to me there were no reversers then, and pushing the car back after the burnout might have been the ultimate. I did this for many teams, but to this day the one that treated me the absolute best and allowed a pain-in-the-ass kid a truly great thrill was Rob and Gaines. Rob was the consummate gentleman. Gaines funnier than the day was long and, yes, always deeply thinking, but in somehow a funny way. They both have always had a special place in my mind and heart, and I am ever grateful for that. I was very saddened to learn of Gaines’ death. I wish I had the chance to thank him in person.”

Following my recent hero-worshipping of Shirley Shahan, reader Dan Tuttle dropped me a line to not forget the late, great Roberta Leighton. Leighton, who passed away Nov. 15, 2002, was another super-talented female driver in the early 1960s and the sister of longtime former NHRA whirlwind P.J. Partridge. Leighton began racing in 1953 and worked with NHRA founder and President Wally Parks to lift the notorious no-females ban in place through mid-1962. She rewarded his faith and decision by winning the J/Stock class championship in Indy that year, becoming the first woman to win a trophy of any kind at an NHRA national event. She competed in NHRA class competition through 1978, then bracket raced for 12 years, served as a track official at many national, divisional, and local races, and played a major role in the operation of Division 7's Inyokern Dragstrip. Her son, David, is a reader of this column, so I hope he will share some stories with us in the future.

I also heard from Bob Kenworthy, president of the Colorado AMC Club and director of the American Motors Owners Association, which put on the 2007 American Motors Owners Association Mile High International Convention at which Shirley was pictured in my previous column.

Kenworthy picked up Shirley and husband Ken from the airport in an AMC Jeep Wagoneer limousine, and Shirley and fellow former AMC racer Lou Downing, the original pilot of the Pete's Patiot AMX, were scheduled to be guest speakers and were the talk of the convention all weekend.

When the action shifted to Bandimere Speedway (fast fact: John Bandimere Jr. once owned and raced a '69 SS AMX, known as the Frog), Kenworthy arranged a special heads-up match between Shirley, in her restored Drag-on Lady AMX, and Downing, in the famed Pete’s Patriot. According to Kenworthy, the two AMXs had never met heads-up in all their years of racing. Unfortunately, Downing’s mount threw a rod on a test run, so he had to find a suitable substitute and came up with an appropriately painted red, white, and blue '71 Gremlin owned by a local racer to help kick off the night. Shirley, who hadn’t been to Bandimere Speedway since 1972, laid down a pretty burnout and showed that she still knows the fast way down the track with a 10.4-second clocking.

At the convention banquet, Shirley and Downing talked about their racing histories, and, according to Kenworthy, “You could have heard a pin drop in the room with over 400 people enjoying their stories.”

I know the feeling!

You’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, to the March 31 entry, to find the origin of this one, which is a tale about Englishman Clive Skilton’s victory over “Big Daddy” Don Garlits in a 1977 match race in Jackson, Miss., as told by Billy Donahoe, who was there.

“It was late March '77,” he recalled. “Two friends went with me to the track, Riverside Raceway, in Pearl. One of my friends was a fan like me; the other one, this would be his first time at the track. We had built up ‘Big’ for two weeks, telling him that this was going to be an easy race for ‘Big.’ One thing my friend had in common was our love for Led Zeppelin. The concert movie The Song Remains the Same had come out a few months before, and we had caught it a few times at the midnight movies. If you've seen the film, you know that each member of the band had a fantasy scene in the movie. The late John Bonham's fantasy was much more regular than the other three: riding his chopper, driving his hot ride, having a brew, and driving a Top Fuel dragster. Clive Skilton's dragster. Since I was into the sport, I thought this was pretty cool.

“When we got to the track, Clive was already there parked in the staging lanes, which was about the only paved spot. When he opened the side door on the trailer, there was a picture of the car from the movie. To say the least, we about had a fit. ‘Big’ showed up later. When he rolled out his car, I almost had another fit. The year before, he had match raced Shirley there with the long '76 car. This time, he rolled out the 5.63/250 '75 car. I knew we would not see any times close to that, but it just made me that much more positive that ‘Big’ would win all three rounds.

“It was a very cloudy day. You could almost feel the rain in the air, but they managed to get all three runs in. Clive got the win all three rounds. I don't recall what the times were; scoreboards were not even a dream at that point, at least at this track. We left the track a little wiser, a little more humbled. And realized that ‘Big’ was human after all.”

And, finally, it didn’t take long after my version of the Vallco Drag Racing Game arrived for the troops to gather round the cardboard quarter-mile for a little match race. Senior Editor Kevin McKenna, Copy Editors Sarah Barnes and Melissa Pasillas, Editorial Assistant Miesha Payne-Reid, NHRA.com Webmaster Jade Davidson, and yours truly each blindly drew a pair of cards from the 1977-season Funny Car deck and set to qualifying. Falling back into my old habits, I, of course, kept notes while the ladies got a bit of a history lesson on Funny Car racing, ‘70s style.

Miesha rolled Dale Pulde’s gorgeous Mike Hamby-tuned War Eagle Trans Am to the low qualifying spot at 6.14, followed by Dale Armstrong in Mike Kase’s Speed Racer (6.18) and Kenny Bernstein (6.20); Tom Hoover’s Showtime Corvette was fourth at 6.21 to round out the top half of the field. Gene Snow’s Arrow was slotted fifth at 6.21, followed by Billy Meyer’s Hawaiian Tropic Citation (6.24) and Al Segrini in the Custom Body Arrow (6.26). Alaskan Jim Moore rode the bump with his Arrow at 6.33, which bumped out former world champ Shirl Greer’s 6.38. Qualifying was a bit of a flametacular as Rob Williams in Roger Guzman's Assassination Arrow, Denny Savage in the Powers Steel Camaro, and Kosty Ivanoff and the Boston Shaker Corvette all experienced debilitating top-end fires and missed the cut.

We went old-school with the ladders, with No. 1 facing No. 5. Armstrong had low e.t. of round one with a 6.14 to 6.36 whacking of Meyer, followed by Pulde’s narrow 6.19 to 6.26 melting of “the Snowman.” Segrini nipped Bernstein, 6.25 to 6.32, and Hoover advanced easily over Moore, 6.29 to 6.55. Hoover took charge in the semi’s with a brilliant 6.05 (low e.t.) to best tire-hazing Armstrong’s 6.22, and Pulde continued his march with a 6.13 win after Segrini’s mount nosed over at the top end and slowed to a 6.59.

The final was all Hoover, as he and I mowed down Pulde and Miesha wire to wire, 6.17 to 6.37. I could also feel the smiles emanating from Minnesota.

Yesterday it was all about Top Fuel. Brad Littlefield masterfully guided Connie Kalitta through a tough eight-car field that sported a 6.05 bubble that was too stout for the likes of Graham Light (yes, that Graham Light), Chris Karamesines, Clayton Harris, and seven others. Dave Uyehara and I qualified low and had low e.t with the Good, Bad, and the Ugly car at 5.77 but lost to "the Bounty Hunter’s" 5.84 in the semi’s. Kalitta had run 5.86 in round one to best Jeb Allen and outdueled the Sarah-wheeled Gary Beck machine on a 6.08 to 6.02 holeshot in the final. Vegas better beware if Brad ever steps up to the craps table.

Years after I first played the game, the thrill still holds, and the fun is big for old-time fans like me. Game creator Greg Zyla reports that he has gotten great feedback and stories from longtime customers and has sold off a lot of his surplus of games since my article here last week, but he’s offering a wide variety of options. You can reach him at extramile_2000@yahoo.com.

Suddenly, I feel the need to roll some dice. I’m outta here.

The Drag-on Lady: Racer, pioneer, mom

Shirley Shahan then, in the winner's circle, Pomona, 1966 ...	... and now, at the NHRA California Hot Rod Reunion last October.
Shahan's groundbreaking win at the 1966 Winternationals was the focus of ABC's Wide World of Sports camera crew.
With H.L. on wrenches and Shirley at the wheel, the couple was the sport's premier husband-wife duo of early drag racing lore.
The Shahans' kids -- from left, Steven, Robert, and Janet -- were a constant sight at racetracks with their parents in the 1960s.
In addition to her quarter-mile heroics, Shahan took part in long-distance economy runs on behalf of Chrysler. She won the event in 1968.
Shahan's Drag-on Lady AMX Super Stocker, which debuted in 1969, was a crowd-pleasing record setter. This is famed Irwindale Raceway.
Still loyal to her AMC days, Shahan was guest of honor at last year's National AMC Convention in Denver.	Shahan and her kids' sometime babysitter, Ed McCulloch, at last year's California Hot Rod Reunion.
Shahan's son Bob created and races this replica of his mom's '68 Dodge.

Last Monday, your humble doorkeeper to drag racing’s great untold stories cited the accomplishments of our two groundbreaking Shirleys: Shahan, the first woman to win an NHRA event, and Muldowney, the first to do so in a Pro class. I’d dare to wager that the vast majority of you, whether you’re new to the sport or have been around since it was a good thing when a Top Fueler smoked the tires during a run, know all too well the exploits and heroics of Ms. Muldowney: three-time NHRA Top Fuel world champ, subject of an award-winning movie, and testament to the fortitude of the human soul and the need for speed. But it occurred to me sometime afterward that Shahan’s name, let alone her story, might be unfamiliar to many.

When I wrote that piece, I was on my high horse about Danica Patrick being called (by some, since retracted) the first woman to win a major auto racing event, and I’ll admit that when I wrote “I’d better get Shirley Shahan on the phone and let her down gently,” it was on a type-and-duck basis because, while as far as I knew she was still gracing our planet you never know anymore; so it was doubly wonderful to hear from her after the column appeared. She thanked me for my kind words about her career and for giving her the chance to relive her experience and said, “Thanks to all your fans who read your articles and remembering me as being the first. It was a great thrill at the time and still is. I especially remember the fans who stood up as I passed by after my final run, cheering for me. I will never forget them and their support.”

And, well, you know me … never one to leave well enough alone. So I begged her – I’m not proud, you know -- to share the details of her amazing career with you all.

It took a while for her to get back to me – “us retired folks are just really busy,” she explained (she turns 70 this June) – but when she did, her story was rich with detail just ripe for this column. I had planned to run this Monday, but then Ashley Force struck another first for women drag racers, so this column is doubly timely now. And so here is the story of the career of the amazing woman known to many as the Drag-on Lady. (For the record, though her name now is Shirley Bridges, I’ll stick with Shahan here for clarity.)

Shahan was born and raised in Visalia, Calif., a city with oak-tree-lined streets in the heart of central California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley and home to the Visalia Vapor Trailers, NHRA’s longest active NHRA Car Club. Shahan took to automobiles the way some girls take to dolls. She learned to drive at age 10, at the wheel of her dad’s ’34 Ford pickup. As the oldest of four children, she also was dad’s mechanic helper during his own racing forays. “At an early age, I knew the difference between a 5/8 and a 9/16,” she recalls proudly.

Although her first teenage love was fast-pitch softball – she had a cannon of an arm, hewn by loading and unloading her dad's roofing truck, and could reach home plate in one throw from her centerfield position – after earning her driver’s license, she spent weekends cruising Main Street and racing against the boys in the family’s Studebaker pickup.

She married early, at age 17, and she and H.L. Shahan initially had a couple of cars, a ’55 Chevy and then a new ‘56 Chevy with a 265, that she drove to work and raced every weekend at the drags after H.L. became the flag starter at the local races in Visalia.

“We found I could drive as well as he if not better, and it received much more attention,” she said modestly. “The upper-body strength I had benefited me shifting gears. We usually raced Bakersfield the first Sunday, Madera the second Sunday, and Visalia the third Sunday. Fremont, Santa Maria, and Half Moon Bay were usually the fourth weekend.

In 1958, the Shahans bought a new Chevy in which she won the first Bakersfield March Meet, in 1959, against the best that California had to offer.

“We had never really raced any of the L.A. crowd until that race,” she recalled. “I understand that Don Nicholson, Tom Sturm, Arlen Vanke, and Hayden Proffitt were all at that meet, although I did not know any of them at that time. My driving locally around the San Joaquin Valley was not a real novelty; people were used to me driving, but when we began to venture out a little bit, they didn't like being beaten by a female.

“I remember a time [in 1960] when I won my class, and when I came back to the pits found out we had been protested,” she recalled. “In those days, $50 was all that was needed to see if you were legal. I stepped out of the car, and when the protester saw me, his mouth dropped wide open. I was seven months pregnant. I guess that really shocked him!”

The mother of three kids – Janet, Steven, and Robert – she handled those responsibilities, kept a job at Southern California Gas Co., and kept racing, but it wasn’t easy.

“There were lots of times I left work on Friday, drove to the races, raced, drove all night to get home, and went to work on Monday morning," she remembered. "When we were racing, the kids used to travel with us as much as possible. Sometimes we would take all three at one time, or I would fly home and pick one up and exchange for another the next month.”

In 1963, they bought a Z11 Chevy with an aluminum front end that they ran locally while H.L. was tuning for a young hot shoe teen from Tulare, Butch Leal, and for Ronnie Broadhead. In 1965, the Shahans got their first Hemi. Shirley had wanted a stick shift, but the gurus at Chrysler said she couldn't handle it. Even though she had never driven an automatic before nor used a tachometer, she began winning Division 7 points meets and setting NHRA records in California, Utah, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon.

Shahan’s fame grew, and in the mid-1960s, she hit a hot streak that carried her name into the history books. Late in 1965, Shahan was runner-up in Top Stock at the Hot Rod Meet in Riverside, Calif., and followed with a runner-up at the 1966 AHRA Winternationals in Irwindale and a win at the NHRA Winternationals in Pomona.

“What a thrill!” she remembered. “It was at this time we started getting phone calls to go back East and race. I honestly did not realize what an impact I had made in the sport of drag racing.”

She quit her job April 15, 1966, to go on tour with a Super Stock car. They raced all summer and didn’t come home until after the Nationals in September. “To be competitive in our match races, H.L. put on injectors and moved the rear wheels forward,” she said. “We raced all over the United States, including Hawaii, and in Mexico City. I'm proud to say we won the majority of our races.

“Match racing was an experience; eighth-mile tracks, four abreast, short shutoff areas, driving all night to get to the next race, meeting new friends, bumpy unsafe tracks, matching wits with the promoters, TV, radio stations, newspaper offices, track managers, and getting paid. I raced against Tom McEwen when he had a jet car. He gave me a half-track head start and still went past me before the finish line at almost 300 mph. Hubert Platt (in my blonde wig) once drove to the starting line pretending to me, and everyone fell for it. I also got to be a contestant on Hollywood Squares and To Tell The Truth (Bill Cullen guessed that I was the drag racer; he was very sharp). That was great!"

The Shahans raced full time from 1966 through 1968, including the NHRA national events in Englishtown, Bristol, and Gainesville, and Shahan represented Chrysler in the Mobil Economy runs those years, finishing second, fourth, and, ultimately, first, edging out Chrysler's in-house pro driver, Scott Harvey.

But their long run with Mopars was about to end.

“Late in 1968, we were approached by American Motors to run a '69 AMX,” she recalled. “As they were offering a salary and wanted us to campaign in the Los Angeles area for the LA AMX Dealers Association, we decided to make the switch. We felt we needed to be closer to home for our kids.

“What a neat car and so fun to drive!! I was back to a stick shift, yeah! In 1970, we won our class at the Winternationals, setting both e.t. and mph records during the season. We did do some match racing with the AMX but stayed pretty close to the Los Angeles area. The AMX was such a kick to drive. I think everyone was a little amazed when I stood it on the bumper at Lions Drag Strip.”

The team qualified the AMX for the Nationals but was disqualified for a technical infraction. In 1971, they ran an AMC Hornet in Pro Stock. While Shahan enjoyed driving the car, it was not competitive, and a request for an updated car was turned down as AMC was putting its bucks behind Roger Penske’s Mark Donahue-driven NASCAR entry.

When H.L. was offered a job building engines in Denver in 1972, Shahan hung up her helmet and called it a driving career after 19 years and devoted herself to her children. She went back to work for the gas company, and by the time she retired, she was a supervisor in charge of a $6 million budget and 100 employees.

Many women -- more than 40 to date -- have followed her to the winner's circle of an NHRA national event, including Muldowney, whose first win was 10 years after Shahan's Pomona breakthrough. She left behind  a trail of trophies, broken records, and frustrated foes and got on with the second half of her life.

“It was a good life; I'm proud of what I've accomplished," she said. "I've since remarried (Ken, a retired fire chief in Tulare). We attend some drags and have started doing some nostalgic events. We play golf, travel in our fifth-wheel and try to stay close to the family. I am surprised at the fans who remember me after all these years. I still am in contact with some of the old racers and like good friends who remain such, even after all these years."

She lives in Tulare, and all three kids are nearby. Janet, her oldest, and her husband compete in tractor pulls with Shahan’s grandson at the wheel. Steven, her oldest son, has a silk-screening and monogramming business in Tulare and is a sometime crewmember for Steve Faria. Robert, her youngest, works for the city of Tulare. He has a replica of her '68 car (minus the Hemi) that he races and takes to car shows. “So we're all sort of involved in racing some way,” she said. “It seemed to rub off."

Reflecting on her short but glorious career, Shahan concluded, “I was about five years before women's lib. A professional manager would have been a great asset at that time, but the ladies that are racing now are doing such a fabulous job. I take my hat off to them.”

And us to you, Drag-on Lady.

Ashley + Atlanta = awesome

I had a whole other column written and planned for today, but after super Sunday in Atlanta, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the history that was made in what was probably one of the most exciting final rounds in NHRA history.

To be sure, there have been other amazing final rounds in NHRA history when more was on the line -- Joe Amato and Gary Ormsby for the Top Fuel title in 1990 and Tony Schumacher and “The Run” against Doug Kalitta for the Top Fuel title in 2006 spring to mind immediately – but to have Ashley Force, gunning for her first Funny Car win, racing her dad, who was going not only for his 1,000th career round-win at his 500th event (how’s that for symmetry?) but also his first win since a near-career-ending crash last September … wow.

I’ve actually been kind of stunned to read on message boards and in a few e-mails this morning that people are suggesting that John “let” Ashley win the final. Sure, his .170 light and up-in-smoke effort were far from what he desired, but take it from someone who knows John Force pretty darned well, there isn’t a chance that he threw the race for her.

First, John is ultra competitive. Fourteen championships and 125 event wins prove that. Second, we all know he still feels like he has something to prove after his wreck. And third, and most important, there’s no way that John would want Ashley’s first win tainted in any way, shape, or means. And, hey, it isn’t like she wasn’t going to win one sometime this year anyway. Three straight final rounds and the points lead without facing a single other John Force Racing teammate this season prove that she and "Guido" and the boys are getting it done on their own merit.

(It’s deliciously prescient that her pre-race press release included this quote: "Dad and I are 1-1 against each other … Maybe we'll break the tie this week. All I know is he wouldn’t want me to go up there with anything but winning on my mind – even if it meant keeping him from winning his thousandth round.”)

Those of us who have been around the sport long enough have watched Ashley grow up around Funny Cars. She’s been a constant sight in John’s arms in winner’s circles or holding his hand walking through the pits since she was a toddler, and to see her get her first win in the class in pretty special. Our little girl is now all grown up.

A lot of us felt the same way when we watched Larry Dixon win his first title (in his second career race!) in Arizona in 1995, having seen him perched atop his dad’s knee in the cockpit of the Howard Cam Rattler all those years ago in the Pomona winner’s circle, and to watch other second-generation pilots like reigning world champs Tony Schumacher, Tony Pedregon, Jeg Coughlin, and Andrew Hines, along with Matt Smith, Scott Kalitta, Brandon Bernstein, Cruz Pedregon, Del Worsham, Rod Fuller, Tommy Johnson Jr., Melanie Troxel, Steve Chrisman, Mike Smith, Troy Buff, Todd Paton, Kurt Johnson, Allen Johnson, Dave Connolly, Greg Stanfield, Bill Glidden, Rickie Jones, et al, follow their fathers into the cockpit makes us all proud about the legacy and continuity of our sport.

I don’t like to root for anyone in particular – that makes it hard to do my job – but there are times when I have hoped one final-round opponent would beat another for historical or news-coolness factors, and I can honestly say I would have been happy no matter which Force won.

It was a historic moment in NHRA history, and I wish I would have been there to see it. I was too young to be thousands of miles from home in Columbus, Ohio, to see Shirley Muldowney’s gender-smashing first Top Fuel win in 1976, but I was in Reading in 1996 to see the first of Angelle Sampey’s 41 wins, so I’m one for three.

I guess, in retrospect, it’s not surprising that Atlanta was the site of this history. After all, it was at this race one year ago that father and daughter first faced one another, with Ashley scoring a decisive win and reaching the first semifinal of her Funny Car career. She also won this event, in Top Alcohol Dragster, in 2006. And it was at this race 25 years ago that Amy Faulk became the first female winner in Comp eliminator and 20 years ago that Kathy Woeber became the first female winner in Super Comp. And let’s not forget the 1982 Atlanta event, where Lucille Lee became the second woman to win in Top Fuel and do so in the first all-team Top Fuel final against Steve Hodkinson.

Ashley’s Funny Car win means that there’s now only one class in NHRA competition – from Top Fuel to Super Street – in which a female has not won, and that is Pro Stock, where Erica Enders has twice been a finalist. Faulk has the rare honor of having been the first in two classes, Comp (1983 Atlanta) and Top Alcohol Dragster (1990 Baton Rouge, La.). The other class firsts were recorded Bunny Burkett (Top Alcohol Funny Car, 1986 Reading), Judy Lilly (Super Stock, 1972 Winternationals), Vicki Beam (Super Gas, 1989 Gainesville), and Deborah Ridenhour (Super Street, 1991 Houston). Senior Editor Steve Waldron is recapping all of these breakthrough wins in the current issue of ND’s Out of the Groove column, which will appear in the same issue as our Pro coverage from Atlanta.

With only Enders currently on the radar in the class and still putting together her backing, it may be a while before the last barrier falls.

Last week in this column I briefly discussed Shirley Shahan’s win at the 1966 Winternationals, the first NHRA national event win by a woman in any class (and will have more on her career Wednesday), but I more closely correlate Ashley’s Funny Car win in Atlanta with Muldowney’s Columbus Top Fuel triumph for a couple of reasons. First, obviously, is that Muldowney’s win took place in the sport’s other top Professional category, and second, as Bob Frey would say, in the interest of fair reporting, well, Shirley won an IHRA event of some sort in Rockingham, N.C., and I can’t find a record of whom she beat along the way to victory to say whether she beat a bunch of heroes or nobodies, but she still owns that distinction.

We do know who Ashley beat for her title: four solid racers with 178 wins between them -- Poppa John (125), Ron Capps (25), Del Worsham (22), Jim Head (six) – and earned lane choice for the final and ran the second quickest e.t. of eliminations (4.837) in the final. That’s a pretty good day’s work.

It also assured that she won’t meet the same fate as her father, who took nine final-round appearances to finally seal the deal in Montreal in 1987 (I was there!). For the record, she scored in her 27th start, he in his 75th.

The story is deserved front-page news on sports sections across the United States, including the usually stingy Los Angeles Times, and, of course, she’ll be on the cover of this week’s National DRAGSTER (sorry, Mike Edwards), as she has dreamed about. “I am really aiming for getting that National DRAGSTER cover,” she said a few weeks ago about the publicity blitz that has placed her in Men’s Fitness and other magazines, “which means I got my first win. That would be the best way to kick off all these media things.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Speaking of this topic, I was taken to task last week by a few people for “downplaying” Danica Patrick’s IndyCar win. Although I merely was pointing out that her win was not, by a long shot, “the first major win by a woman in motorsports,” apparently the link landed in the hands of some IRL fans, one of whom had this to say:

“Are you as out of touch with reality as your article makes you sound or are you just that biased towards drag racing that you’re blinded by it, as are the rest of your fans?”

He then prefaced his comments with a disclaimer that what he had to say “isn’t meant to take anything away from any of the other females who drag race or have ever drag raced.” Oh really?

“Let’s take a look at what we have here. Danica Patrick races at up to 230 mph, lots of times within inches of other competitors for sometimes lap after lap after lap. She does have to turn, too, mostly left but sometimes right. She also has to pass other drivers and often weave in and out of back markers she is lapping at that same 230 mph, still within inches of her competitors. Did I mention yet that she does this for sometimes up to 500 miles in just few hours, this 500 miles being after practice and qualifying during the rest of the weekend.

“Let’s see what your drag racers do. At the most, the luckiest driver for the weekend makes eight quarter mile runs (easy math, two miles). Whew, wears me out. Most of those runs (Shirley Muldowney excluded) for the other females you mentioned were probably barely 100 mph. How close was her one and only competitor on the track at the same time? Maybe 50 yards away. When was the last time you saw a drag racer pass somebody or lap a back marker ...oh yeah, did I mention at 200+ mph.

“Will Danica Patrick ever be one of the top five drivers in her sport? Maybe not, but if I’d had a vote on Shirley Muldowney, she wouldn’t be one of the top five in hers either. Too, I can guarantee you that what Danica Patrick does is a heck of a lot more competitive, a heck of a lot more dangerous, and a heck of a heck of a lot more fun to watch than your drag racers. Watching a few Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars accelerate from 0 to well over 300 MPH in about 4.5 seconds is neat; the rest bores me to tears, especially the interviews. Let’s give Danica her due; she’s well above the drag racing world.”

Apparently this guy is as much a “homer” for his sport as I am mine, which is all fine and good, but I probably don’t need to point out the most egregious of his assumptions and his estimations about what it takes to pilot an 6G landlocked missile, nor about Muldowney’s standing in our world. Also, nowhere in my column did I denigrate Danica’s skills or what it takes to win an IndyCar race. There’s no disputing that they’re two different kinds of racing, each with its own challenges and perils. Yes, to be sure, Danica’s type of driving requires more of what would be called traditional driving skills, but she also gets 500 miles to make up for any mistakes. Ashley gets a quarter-mile, if that.

I have absolutely nothing against Danica and salute her for her accomplishment. She’s done a good job of branding herself and seems to be making a good living at what she does, and now that she’s found the winner’s circle, no doubt can do it again.

But I bet Ashley beats her there.

The loss of Gaines ... and Beck's 'secret'

How's this for a cool find in our photo files? Beck, right, Markley, center, and Bob Painton with the Markley-Beck-Rhoades BB/GD in 1968. (John Dutton photo)

R. Gaines Markley -- just Gaines, to those who knew him -- had been sick for a while, and his death yesterday, while another sad addition to an already heart-wrenching season of losses, was not totally unexpected. His pending passing was kept from the news out of respect to him and his family, but it gave me time to find out more about the man before everyone said their final goodbyes, and two-time NHRA Top Fuel world champ Gary Beck was first in line. The two have been chums for 62 years, since grade school, and grew up together in north Seattle.

“We lived a block apart,” he reminisced. “His parents and my parents were good friends, and our moms even golfed together. We’ve known each other since we were 5 and went to school together through high school and both joined the Emperors, a charter NHRA car club.

“We both had fast cars in high school, but joining the Emperors got us off the street because to be a standing member in a club you had to have a good driving record, and that got us into drag racing,” he recalled.

The duo lived together after graduating from Lincoln High School in 1959 and began their racing careers with gas-burning altereds and dragsters in which they traded off in the cockpit each week, but success did not come easy for the two future world champions.

“It took us a long time before we won anything,” he recalled humbly. “I don’t think our first dragster beat anyone. After a few years, we finally figured it out. It was good times. We learned how to drag race and how to win and kept the car in our garage at our house.”

They won a couple of NHRA Division 6 Super Eliminator championships, which earned them trips to the World Finals, and later took on a couple of partners to run the Markley, Beck, Rhodes & Sweeting entry.

In the late 1960s, Markley, who was a Ford mechanic by trade, began racing fuel cars, and Beck, who was in the construction business, moved into 200-mph front-engine Top Gas dragsters – with which he at one time held the NHRA national record -- and ultimately into rear-engine Top Fuelers with Ray Peets.

Beck won the 1972 U.S. Nationals Top Fuel title in his national event debut, but he was far from an overnight success.

To  many, Beck seemed to come out of nowhere to win Indy in 1972, upsetting the field – including the “King of the Northwest,” Jerry Ruth, in the final -- in just his second outing in a Top Fuel dragster and at his first national event. Although the lead paragraph of National DRAGSTER’s story in the Sept. 15, 1972, issue was “Gary Beck won Top Fuel Eliminator at the Nationals. Gary who???” (so he, rather than Marvin Graham, who went from obscurity to Indy champ two years later, could well have ended up with that infamous nickname), as his extensive time behind the wheel shows, he was far from a rookie.

“As we coined it back then, ‘I was a 15-year overnight success,’ ” he recalled with a laugh.

Beck won his first world championship in 1974 with Peets’ Export A car and another nine years later in Larry Minor’s vaunted machine. Both cars were the dominant performance machines in their era. The 2008 season marks the 25th anniversary of Beck’s dominant season with the Minor car – capped with a championship and back-to-back stunning runs of 5.39 at the season’s final two races – and we discussed briefly that great season, which will be the subject of a future column. Beck has been reliving the early 1980s watching some old Diamond P tapes. “It’s amazing what was going on back then,” he said, “and to listen to Steve Evans and Dave McClelland announcing them, it’s really special.”

But our story doesn't end there.

Gary Beck, not really a Canadian. Who knew?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a well-received and still-discussed April Fools' story proclaiming that “Aussie Dave” Grubnic was not in fact Australian at all but had been born in Azusa, Calif., and taken on the Down Under personage and Crocodile Dundee accent to boost his marketing profile.

The story, of course, was not true, but I’m about to do a fair bit of rewriting of a piece of drag racing knowledge that many of you have had stuck in your trivia caps for more than three decades.

Beck is not – and has never been – Canadian.

Take a while to let that sink in. I know -- shocking, right? I know what you're thinking: What's next, Phil? The big tires belong on the front? Roland Leong's not really from Hawaii? 

For as long as I’ve followed drag racing, Beck was the guy who rode out of Edmonton and onto the history pages with a stunning Top Fuel win at the 1972 U.S. Nationals. Partnered with car owner Peets, they were the scourge of Top Fuel in the early 1970s. Their Export A dragster – sponsored by a brand of Canadian cigarettes – was a terror everywhere it went. I remember when Frank Hawley, of London, Ont., won the 1982 Funny Car world championship, he was hailed as the second non-U.S. citizen to win an NHRA Professional title. Well, guess what? He’s now the first and still only.

Yes, race fans, Beck was born and raised in Seattle, a stunning revelation that came about innocently as I interviewed him about Markley. Beck moved to Canada in 1969 when he married his first wife, Penny, who was Canadian, and teamed with Peets, who was Canadian, but Beck is U.S. born and bred.

“My professional racing career started in Canada with a Canadian racing team, so I can see why people assumed I was Canadian, but I only lived in Edmonton for three years before we moved to California,” he said. “But the part about me being a Canadian was all a hoax. I’ve had that label for many years and still do. I can keep telling people the truth, but it never ends.”

Maybe now it does.

Today Beck, like many of eras past, is enjoying the nostalgia racing scene, working on a car owned by John Rodeck and driven by Beck’s son, Randy. Bill Wolter, a crewmember from the Minor days, also works with the Becks, and fellow Hemet Mob henchman Terry Caldwell fields an alcohol-burning dragster.

“That’s very competitive and a lot of fun,” said Beck, who also attends Jr. drag racing events to cheer on his teenage niece, Cami, but don’t look for him to crawl back behind the butterfly.

“I’m done with driving,” he said. “Just to do it would be fun, but you’d want to do it well.

“I’m 67, and my eyes aren’t as good,” he added with a laugh, “and the first time they made us run at night, I wouldn’t be able to see.”

Rob Bruins had the honor of cackling one of Gaines Markley's old rides, the Assassin, at the 2005 California Hot Rod Reunion.

I also got some great comments on Markley from his former championship driver, Rob Bruins, a regular reader of this column.

“His given name is Ronald Gaines Markley, and on some of his earlier cars, he had R. Gaines on the car, and he loved to just play with people when they asked what the R stood for. He liked to tell them it was for ‘romantic.’

“I had met Gaines in 1972 when I was crewing on Herm Petersen's first rear-engine car. He had tutored and guided me when I started driving an injected fuel car I bought in 1974. I teamed up with Gaines in June 1976 when I parted company with Jim Green after a six-month stint driving the Green Elephant Funny Car. Gaines had just had an accident at his machine shop that required some delicate surgery to his hand to repair a deep cut. Gaines asked me to do the maintenance on his car while he was mending. He couldn't really bend his hands for weeks and wasn't supposed to get it wet, let alone clean parts in solvent (or gas as was common). While Gaines was paying me to maintain his car during the week, I was asked by the Bubble Up team, [Jerry] Verheul and [Gordie] Bonin, to drive their dragster on the weekends to get it sorted out before they would have Gordie drive it; that way they could concentrate on their Funny Car.

“So that went on for a few weeks when according to Gaines, the Bubble Up guys approached him at a race and asked, ‘Are you going to let the kid drive or can we have him full time?’ No one ever asked me what I wanted to do. The Bubble Up guys decided not to go to the last PDA race that year at Orange County, so at Fremont I jumped tow rigs and went down to Orange County with Gaines. As we were headed for the staging lanes for the first qualifying pass, Gaines told me, ‘Grab you your stuff; you’re driving.’ I drove from then on.”

Bruins, left, and Markley, 1979 NHRA Top Fuel champions.

They won their first race together in Seattle in 1978 and the championship in 1979. Gaines was the best man at Bruins’ wedding in 1980, but they weren’t racing as often then, and Bruins was taking odd jobs to keep his income afloat. It all came to a sad end at the 1982 Winternationals, where they failed to qualify, and Bruins, still reeling from the stillborn deaths of his daughters, had had enough.

“I sat down with Gaines and Earl [Whiting, Markley’s new partner] and told them I needed an income and if they couldn't provide anything, they needed to find a new driver. The next day there at the race, it looked like an unemployment office, the drivers at the trailer asking for that ride. It was none of Gaines' doing why I left, and he knew it.

“Gaines and I both thought so much alike it was at times scary,” he recalled. “We are both tight with a dollar. In 1979, he sent me on the road to events, and he would fly in. He would always give me a stack of cash when I would leave the garage, and he had given me a credit card. We were a few months into the season, and I asked him how we were doing financially, and he told me things were fine, but he was a little worried about when the credit-card bill would show up. I asked why there should be any credit-card bill, I had been paying cash for everything; he gave me a big hug.”

I went back and reread National DRAGSTER’s coverage of Bruins’ championship season, and it was fraught with hard times. As we know, they didn’t win a single national event – the only team in history to win a Pro title without doing so – but owned the divisional series with six wins. Not that the path to glory was easily paved.

For example, Bruins and crewmember Butch Horn lost the alternator on the tow rig on Highway 90 in the Dakotas on the way to Columbus, Ohio, and drove two hours into Fargo, N.D., by firing up the trailer’s generator and running an extension cord to a battery charger tucked under the hood. A few weeks later, the truck’s engine gave up the ghost somewhere outside of Warm Springs, Mont. Bruins phoned Markley, who patched together an engine and borrowed a truck and a cherry picker and set out from Washington to rescue them; for the next 40 hours while they waited, Bruins and Horn took turns walking the half-mile to a nearby store whenever they got hungry. By the time Markley arrived, Bruins and Horn had the hood off and engine ready to come out, and they completed the entire engine swap at highway’s side, with semi trucks roaring past, in just about five hours.

They battled fluke breakage and tough times but walked away champions at season's end and remained friends long after they stopped racing together.

“It was also Gaines who suggested to the Byron brothers that I might be available to drive their Competition eliminator dragster,” he noted. “That union resulted in a division championship and several national records in 1993.

“I can tell you if I had lived closer to Gaines, [his wife] Annie would probably have had to kick me out of the garage at night so we would both get enough sleep to go to work the next day. He just knows so much about all things mechanical and is a great storyteller. Words can't tell you how I valued his friendship.”

'The Big Bang'

Imagine if a photo of a cataclysmic event taken 36 years ago instantly brought your name to people’s lips. Imagine if, despite your other accomplishments in life and racing, this one moment frozen in time on film became your legacy. Then you’ll know what it’s like to be Larry Brown.

A couple of weeks ago in this column, we laid out the five favorite images of drag racing photo ace Steve Reyes, and among them was Brown’s incident, an almost indecipherable moment when a massive explosion wrenched the engine from Brown’s dragster as he entered the lights in Tulsa, Okla., in 1972. We’ve heard Reyes’ side of the story, as seen through his camera lens, now it’s time to get the story of what happened from the man who lived it.

I contacted Brown after being copied on some e-mail messages between him and fellow Oklahoma Top Fuel hero Marvin Graham after the passing of fellow Okie Bobby Hightower. One thing led to another, and I asked Larry to share his tale of that fateful day in Tulsa. He was more than happy to oblige. Here's his story.

Larry Brown today -- still riding hard, but on two wheels.

“I was born in 1940. I tell you this not to bore you but so that you will understand the chronological history of my drag racing past. My first experience at ‘big time’ drag racing came in 1958 at the U.S. Nationals in Oklahoma City. A friend and I soon built a B/Altered roadster and ran it locally around Oklahoma, but I really wanted to drive a dragster. By the early to mid-‘60s, I had partnered with Chester Garris (who was later Marvin Graham’s crew chief) to build a Jr. Fuel dragster that I would drive. The lightweight Jr. Fuel cars were a handful. I used to say that I could never see down the track due to tire smoke the first half and engine oil/blowby the second half. But this would be good training for things to come. This was during the period that Jr. Fuel cars, including ours, were winning Top Fuel races due largely to the Top Fuel cars having traction woes. I drove our car for two seasons with much success, but the allure of Top Fuel was too much for me, and I began to get offers to drive. The tires were coming around at that time, and the Top Fuel cars were far more competitive than the Juniors.

“By the late ‘60s, I had been hired on a winnings-percentage basis to drive a succession of AA/Fuel Dragsters, which was exactly where I had always wanted to be. One of my first rides was the full-bodied Jim Davis Taboo car, which gave Nat Quick his early start in paint design. Next came driving stints for the Dallas-based Chaos Kids, Boyd’s Auto Machine, J.L. Payne’s Busch & Payne’s AA/FD, Tony Casarez, and Robert Anderson. I won numerous races and twice won the Southwest Top Fuel Circuit championship.

“In the spring of 1971, I was offered the ride in Bob Dumont’s new rear-engine dragster. I readily accepted this new ride as it was the first rear-engine car in the area, patterned after [Don] Garlits’ success. The car was built by Mike Stewart of M&S Race Cars and was extremely light, high gear only, and featured a cast-iron 392 with a 3/8 stroker crank. We were very successful immediately; the car was performing well, and driving was fun again: no oil, no fires, no huge blowups, or so I thought. The car was so successful that we decided to enter it in Garlits' PRA Race in Tulsa in 1972. The race would be made up of a 32-car field, and the winner would receive a whopping $64,000! This was an unheard-of payoff at the time, but we liked our chances. This brings us to the real reason you are still reading this article: The Big Bang.

"It was only approximately 100 miles up the turnpike from Oklahoma City to Tulsa for the PRA race. Upon arrival, we soon discovered that we were among almost every one of the top cars at that time. In 1972, there was a mix of front- and rear-engine dragsters, the most common being front-engine, so our car was in the minority. When we rolled the car out of the trailer, we had a fresh 392 engine built by Dumont at his shop in Oklahoma City. The crew was Bill Coleman, Stewart, and Dumont. We went immediately to the starting line to walk the track and discovered that it was so sticky in its preparation that if your shoes weren’t laced tightly, it would pull them from your feet. I tell you this because given these circumstances and the large payout, I’m reasonably sure that most, or all, competitors had engines on kill.

“We ended three qualifying sessions with each run better than the previous but still not where we wanted to be in the field. As we prepared for our fourth and final qualifying effort, Dumont had a long conversation with Leroy Goldstein. Leroy told Bob that he was standing about midtrack and it sounded to him that the clutch had pulled the engine down (long before onboard data). Bobby pulled counterweight from the clutch and added blower speed. [Our next run] netted us the No. 12 spot and being in the top half of the field; that was to be our final attempt. I remember on the fifth and last session of qualifying, there was no one in the lanes – everyone had either blown up all their parts, given up, or were satisfied with their position. It was reported that there were well over 65 cars for a 32-car field. TOUGH!

“We were to run Gary Cochran first round. When we were in staging, Gary told me that I’d better be ready because he was, and to prove it, he showed me that he had on two firesuits, one over the other! As I said, everyone was serious. And he did, after all, drive a front-engine car. I, on the other hand, wore a prototype full-face helmet with an oversized shield and opening that my friend, Bill Simpson, had sent me. I also had the lightest firesuit that Simpson made, much like the suit the NASCAR drivers wear now. My shoes were Simpsons, made for road racers. I felt that I was immune to oildowns, fires, or injury from flying parts. All this just goes to show how much you don’t know. We won the first round and didn’t appear to hurt anything. When we got back to our pit area, there was a gathering of people, photogs and sponsor types that we weren’t used to. Now we had a 1 in 16 chance of winning the race. Not that great, but not that bad, either. The Pennzoil people were there as was Hays clutch, and Goodyear came rolling in the newest and best tires for us to use. With all the help, the car was soon ready to face Dennis Baca in the second round. I’m sure we added a few extra horses between rounds.

“After staging, Baca and I left together (no reaction timers in those days). The car pulled hard, carrying the front wheels somewhere about 100 feet before settling down for a very good run … I thought. At 1,000 feet, I hadn’t seen Baca yet and thought, ‘This is going good,’ but that was about to change.

“Somewhere before the first light, there was a distinct tremble without much, if any, change in sound. The car never did lay over. The tremble became a shake as I reached for the chute release knowing something was definitely wrong. As the lever went down, it was as if it was the detonator on a bomb. All hell broke loose as there was a terrible shudder and a loud BANG! Not at all like a concussion; it was more like a breakage of metal. Then everything went black as the engine passed me by! It put 12 quarts of hot 60-weight Pennzoil and associated engine parts on me. There went my no fires, no oil, and no-broken-parts-hitting-me theory.

“When I finally got my oiled-down visor up, which was hard to do against the force of the air rushing by me, all I could see was smoke ahead – no parts. Good enough, I thought. The car, with the brakes on and the chutes out, didn’t go far at all. Less engine, clutch, and bellhousing, it probably didn’t weigh more than 600 pounds and I around 135. Before I came to a complete stop, I had released the belts and was pushing myself up on the roll cage. Once stopped, I held my opaque visor and stared into the framerails. Where the 1,000-pound engine had been there was only an aluminum oil pan and several pieces of crankshaft and main bearings. It was the most surreal feeling imaginable.

“Dumont and crew were on the scene almost immediately. I was still staring into the empty frame like a zombie, transfixed on what was not there any longer. I heard a crewmember exclaim as he exited the truck, ‘Where’s the engine?’ Someone else said, ‘It blew up!’ Dumont was heard to say, ‘The damn thing didn’t just vaporize, it has to be here somewhere!’

“In the confusion of medical personnel, track officials, and, by this time, spectators, it was about five minutes before I heard the report that they had recovered the bulk of the engine some 300 feet down and to the right of the track. Chester Garris had gone with the wrecker to retrieve it (Chet was always quick to help). After much deliberating on the method, the chassis and tire remains were returned to the pits. I was with the medical people because I had slight oil burns on my neck. I probably should have worn a heavier firesuit. Upon my return, the pit area was complete chaos. It seemed like everyone in Oklahoma was there. When the Goodyear engineers came to reclaim their well-used wheels and tires, I asked them about road-hazard warranty on them. We enjoyed a much-needed laugh together. As we struggled to load baskets of broken parts, we found that we were to run Warren & Coburn in the semifinals. Obviously, we were not going to show.

“Many manufacturers' reps came by the pits to tell Dumont to call and they would do anything possible to help us rebuild. They were very helpful and much appreciated. If I thought the hour after the explosion was a whirlwind, the next week was even more so. My phone rang off the hook, and one call was from Larry Bowers. Our Okie buddy Lee Owens worked for him, so they called to make fun of us, little knowing that in a few short weeks they would have an explosion almost exactly like ours! Poetic justice prevailed. Friends like Kenny Bernstein and Raymond Beadle called to gripe that they had worked for publicity for years and had never achieved what I had gotten in one run!

“The pictures you’ve seen of The Big Bang over the past 35 years or so were, at the time, in almost every newspaper across the nation, including the front page of the L.A. Times, and in almost all of the automotive magazines. It was also featured in the movie Funny Car Summer released in the mid-1970s. The latest pictorial offering was in Steve Reyes’ hard-cover book, Quarter Mile Chaos. Maybe all of this publicity made this run live on in drag racing history arguably as long as any other. The final verdict was that a broken crankshaft was the culprit.

Still pals after all these years. From left, Bob Dumont, Larry Brown, and Mike Stewart, 36 years after The Big Bang.

“For years after this incident, Dennis Baca and I had a running conversation that I had ruined his car’s paint job, to which I always replied that if he hadn’t been behind, nothing would have happened to his paint job.

“Bob Dumont and I raced for two more seasons with some success. Bobby’s business had grown by leaps and bounds and required more and more of his time. Bob decided it was time to retire from active drag racing and concentrate on his business. I certainly missed his capabilities in my later career without him.

In the late 1970s, I started my own Funny Car operation and found how frightening it could be to be on my own for the first time in my career. With much help and advice from people such as George and Tom Hoover, Gordon Mineo, Billy Meyer, and Gene Snow, I became somewhat successful on a regional basis. I ran Funny Cars for the next few years, fielding a Plymouth Satellite, Arrow, Trans Am, and Corvette. My final race was in 1983. I seem to be known better for other accomplishments locally and regionally, but I guess if I only had the incident to call ‘fame,’ I would gladly take it over none.

“In retrospect, I know that I wouldn’t change anything about my career, including the experience told here, because I made so many lifelong friends, and I wouldn’t trade places with anyone in the world.”

Where are they now? Dumont owns Dumont’s Porsche Service, the premier Porsche service center in the Oklahoma area. Coleman owns and runs a fishing-guide service on Lake Texoma in southern Oklahoma. Stewart has a successful business buying and selling machinery in the Oklahoma City area. And Brown? He owned and operated a successful Mercedes repair shop in Oklahoma City but is now retired and “attempting not to fall off the adrenaline wagon.”

P.S. (Happy birthday, Mom!)

Danica who? What about Shirley ... and Shirley? And Judi. And Judy?

If you listened really well this weekend, you could hear it from coast to coast and to the far reaches of the planet. It was the sound of a million drag racing fans going “Huh?!”

So, Danica Patrick is the first woman to win a major auto racing event, is she?

Hmmmm. I’d better get Shirley Shahan on the phone and let her down gently. “You know that Winternationals title you won FORTY-TWO years ago … " 

My e-mail just about blew up this weekend with fans sputtering in outrage, which is cool, as always to see. Our fans, more than in any other sport I can think of, live and die with the recognition of successes – and the slaps in the face of nonrecognition – of the sport. There’s no doubt that Ashley Force is a striking young woman, but her victories in AOL’s Hottest Athlete and Q95’s similar contest were as much a tribute to the voting power of NHRA fans as to her good looks and popularity.

The 1966 Winternationals will be remembered for a lot of things. A year after he had tuned Don Prudhomme to his first win, Roland Leong powered Mike Snively to victory in the Hawaiian Top Fueler, and Gordon Collett collected what would be the first of three straight Winternationals titles in Top Gas, but there’s little doubt that anyone who watched it happen on ABC’s Wide World of Sports or were among the record-breaking three-day crowd of more than 90,000 at Pomona Raceway didn’t know they had witnessed a little slice of history after watching Shahan, a 27-year-old housewife and mother of three, pose in the winner’s circle with her Drag-On Lady S/SA '65 Plymouth.

Sure, there was probably some grumbling from the Neanderthals that “wimmen need to stay in the kitchen” – after all, this was before the Women’s Lib movement -- and it had been less than six years since this little gem appeared in the Aug. 12, 1960, issue of National DRAGSTER, just before that year’s U.S. Nationals: “One of the restrictions to be in effect at the National Drags this year will be the exclusion of women drivers in any class of competition. The girls have been allowed to drive at previous Nationals events, in the street classes only, but last year's experience in which the meet's sole accident involved a female stock car driver prompted the new ‘no gals’ edict.” But Shahan’s win inspired a lot of people, not all of them female.

The lead from the Feb. 25, 1966, issue of National DRAGSTER made it clear that my predecessors at this publication were on her side. “Drag racing’s greasy tee-shirt and blue-jean image received such a thundering jolt last Sunday that it may – hopefully – never recover! A striking blonde that always appears as if she just stepped off the cover of a Paris high fashion magazine captured one of the sport’s most coveted titles from a star-studded field of male drivers.”

Shahan had made her first trip down the quarter-mile behind the wheel of husband H.L. Shahan’s ’56 Chevy 10 years earlier, at age 17, and she had won Super Stock at the 1959 Bakersfield event – with a stick shift -- so she was no fresh-faced rookie or publicity stunt for Plymouth, whose PR ace, Sam Petok, had bestowed upon her the nickname that would serve as her calling card. She later drove in Pro Stock with an AMX, but her career was short-lived when her husband opened his own engine-building shop for a circle-track team.

In Bob Post’s High Performance book, Shahan is quoted as saying that her win in Pomona “was about five years too soon … If it had happened later, in the women’s lib era” her racing career might have turned out differently.

Even if you dared to dismiss Shahan’s win as being in the “amateur” classes of NHRA racing – as well as Judi Boertman’s Stock win at the 1971 Summernationals or Judy Lilly’s Super Stock victory at the 1972 Winternationals -- and even if you read some of the more tempered Danica hype that said hers was the first female win in an open-wheel racing class, I don’t recall Shirley Muldowney’s dragster running fenders when she stomped the boys in Columbus, Ohio, in 1976 -- oh, about THIRTY-TWO years before Danica’s win.

You remember Columbus 1976, right? Muldowney qualified No. 1 by a half-tenth, set low e.t. (plus had low e.t. of every eliminations rounds) AND top speed, and then reset the track record in the final round. All in a day’s work.

As we wrote in the July 25, 1976, issue of National DRAGSTER: “The win for Ms. Muldowney does more than just advance her drag racing fortunes, as it lays a claim for her as one of the more remarkable motor sports athletes going. Where other female drivers are having a difficult time of it in the other forms of motor racing, Shirley certainly must be considered among the top five or 10 drivers in her end of the drag racing sport.”

I don’t know Danica Patrick, but my guess is that she’ll never be named to the top five racers in her sport as Muldowney was in ours in 2001.

You had to love the response from NHRA’s Communications Department that appeared on NHRA.com after Patrick’s “breakthrough” win. A nicely worded congratulations and a subtle reminder that, “Oh yeah ... women winners? We’ve had a few.” Like more than 40!

It’s funny to me that this all comes the week after I wrote a Staging Light column for ND about Ashley Force and the surely coming histrionics of her first Funny Car win.

“In the movies,” I wrote, “the hero always comes riding in on a white horse to save the day, and, in a season packed with story lines ripe for the historical picking, there’s a big moment ready to come galloping down the strip any day now, and it, too, will be astride a white horse, a Mustang in this case. That will be the day, of course, that Ashley Force makes history as the first female driver to win in the near-40-year history of NHRA Funny Car racing.”

As momentous as that moment will be – and for whatever you might think about the difference between driving a Top Fueler and a Funny Car (or a stick-shift Super Stocker for that matter) -- Ashley will know that her win is another building block in the wall of history that women have erected in our sport, just another gap filled in an impressive historical structure.

Ashley has already made history twice in Funny Car – at last year’s fall race in Las Vegas, where she became the first woman to reach a final round, and at this year’s just-completed spring event in Vegas, which she left with the points lead, the first by a woman in the class (and making her only the seventh woman to do so in any NHRA Pro class) – and the way that her team has that Castrol GTX machine running, it seems like only a matter of time before she’s hoisting the Wally in the winner’s circle while her proud papa, 125-time class winner John Force, beams proudly in the wings.

If – when – she wins in Funny Car, she’ll be the 10th woman to win in a Pro class -- or if Melanie Troxel beats her to it -- and you can bet that there will be a long line of women – and men -- smiling in appreciation, dating back to well before 1966.

Racing on the cardboard quarter-mile

The game came with simple one-color cars (below left) that nuts like me customized and repainted. (These aren't mine, by the way.)
Alcohol Funny Car racers John Speelman and John Paris settle a Funny Car match with the Vallco drag racing game. (Photo from the Drag Racing Memories Collection)
(Above) Greg Zyla used profits from the game he invented to help purchase his first race car, this Vega wagon Funny Car that he ran in Super Pro in 1980. (Below) Zyla was recently reunited with the car by current owner William Sell.

If kids today want to buckle into John Force’s Castrol GTX Mustang and take on Gary Scelzi, all they have to do is fire up the PlayStation 2 and drop in a copy of ValuSoft’s Countdown to the Championship video game and away they go.

For kids like me, growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we were excited just to have a little video game called Pong that was pretty much two short vertical rectangular paddles bopping a square ball back and forth across our TV screen.

If we wanted to experience the thrill of drag racing, however, we only had one place to turn: the Vallco Professional Drag Racing board game. Yes, kids, that’s right. We played with dice instead of controllers.

In a nutshell – one that I will crack open further as this column rolls (get it?) along – inventor Greg Zyla developed a series of stats-based cards for all of the era’s big-name racers, and players rolled dice to advance their plastic cars down a cardboard quarter-mile.

There weren't any fancy tuning sliders as in the video game, but you did have to decide whether to launch your car Easy (and risk giving up an early lead) or Hard (and risk tire smoke), then determine how hard to run it the rest of the way. Running Hard might result in low e.t., or you could be forced to draw from the dreaded Broke deck (the game’s equivalent to Monopoly’s Chance cards). Where you ended up on the track’s 10 finish zones after four dice rolls (three for Top Fuel and Funny Car) dictated your e.t. and speed range, which were read off of separate indexed cards and decided by a pair of two-dice rolls.

It may sound rather low tech compared to video games on hot-rodded computers with gigs of RAM pushing jillions of pixels across a screen in true-life images, but back then it was pretty hot stuff. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to get my first copy of the game after seeing it advertised in the drag racing monthlies. I wore that game out – literally. I played it so many times that I actually wore a groove in the middle of the lanes through the white paper covering (it probably didn’t help that I also rolled the dice for each run to see how far each car could do a burnout; even rolls kept the tires spinning, odd rolls ended the burnout; pretty cool, eh? You ever seen a 2,000-foot burnout? I have!).

I’ve known Greg, who also is in the publishing business, for a number of years and finally caught up to him to share with you all – and I know there are plenty of you out there who also had the game – how it roared to life.

“I was a Strat-O-Matic baseball nut, and the game taught me dice-roll probability way before I ever took my first statistics class in college,” Zyla recalled. “Combined with my love of drag racing, I just sat down one day and started putting it together. It was always my original idea of four dice rolls for the cars to get through the quarter-mile. I had earlier played a dice game called LeMans that moved cars forward based on performance, but it was set on a road course not a dragstrip. The original prototype I invented back in 1963 was the one I always stayed with.”

Zyla’s original prototype cards from the mid-1960s include Dave Strickler, the Ramchargers, Don Nicholson, Hayden Proffitt, Ronnie Sox, Dick Brannan, Gas Ronda, Al Ekstrand, Ken Montgomery, and a few other Super Stock and A/FX racers of the day.

The first marketed version of the game, sold in 1975, included only Pro Stockers (31 name drivers and some anonymous cards so you could put yourself in the game) and was based on the 1974 NHRA season. Zyla strove to make the performances of each driver as accurate as possible, charting all runs made in NHRA competition, averaging elapsed times and speeds, breakage percentage, and holeshot wins and losses, all of which were computed by hand. Allowances were also made for things such as holeshot wins and lanes that deteriorated due to oildowns. He added nitro Funny Car (making distant East Coast match racers such as Tim Kushi semi-household names) and Top Fuel by 1977 and even added Pro Comp one year.

Zyla says the Pro Comp cards are a rare find. I’ll admit, I quickly converted my Pro Comp cards into more nitro cards based on my favorites at Irwindale and OCIR, like Mike Halloran and “Smokey Joe” Lee, and on the cars I saw in magazines such as Drag Racing USA and Super Stock. I would regularly update the cards with newer pictures that I’d cut out of the magazines and National DRAGSTER; I ruined a lot of good magazines, and it was an arduous process because the image area on the cards was a very narrow rectangle. When I found the right image shape and size, I’d tape it over the old pic.

I also, of course, like many others, ordered extra sets of the small plastic cars and customized them in varying colors and schemes (Wite-Out and markers at work again!). I staged not only full-on national events and points-based seasons but also did my own magazine-style write-ups afterward. Tell me I wasn’t destined for this job!

Today, as the folks at ValuSoft will tell you, the biggest cost of producing a game that includes real personalities is the licensing fees to purchase rights to use a driver’s name and/or likeness. Zyla never had that problem, in part because it was a simpler, less litigious world, and because his motives were pure.

“I gave the games to the drivers for free if requested, and the only [letter] I ever received was from a lawyer for Don Prudhomme,” he recalled. “When ‘Snake’ realized I was just a single-family entity, he wished me well and told me good luck. It got to the point where drivers were calling me to make sure they were included in the game for sponsor reasons.”

Zyla recalled that before he sold his first game, he tried to collect releases from drivers (which NHRA required before it would accept his ads), beginning at the 1973 Summernationals. He first approached the irrepressible Roy Hill, prototype in hand. Hill eyed him somewhat warily and asked what Zyla would do with the money he made off the game. When Zyla told him his only goal was to get enough money to buy his own race car, Hill was all in and convinced his fellow racers to also sign up. Even the "Grumpy” one, Bill Jenkins, gave his blessing. “ 'Grump' even gave a bit of a smile when he signed his release,” recalls Zyla. “I still have them somewhere.”

Zyla and his father immediately began working on designing and painting the game box and coordinating the reproduction needs, no small task in the days before desktop publishing.

The first ad ran in National DRAGSTER in 1975, but he got his biggest boost from the late Woody Hatten, who worked at Super Stock & Drag Illustrated magazine. Zyla recalls that Hatten had a group of 25 to 30 guys who played the game every Wednesday night. “It was a crazy night each and every night they ran,” he remembers. “Players had to randomly draw, so you never knew who you would get. They’d all put in a few bucks, pay for low e.t. and top speed, and then pay the winner and runner-up, too. Woody said it was some of his best memories rolling the dice. He then wrote a story in Super Stock in 1976, and game sales took off. I used National DRAGSTER and Super Stock for advertising. It all fell together and was a great time in my life.”

Many drivers played the game, including Dick Landy (who bought six), Bob Glidden, and Al Hanna (and my buddy Todd Veney). The game was available through 1980, and Zyla sold about 3,000 of them, at prices from $8.95 to $16.95.

Zyla also promoted the game by sponsoring Pennsylvania racer Bob Reed with the Vallco Games Dodge Charger Funny Car, run in A/EA, in 1977-78. The car was the former Virginia Twister nitro machine. Reed also helped Zyla license in preparation for his own car in 1979.

Although he didn't make much profit, he saved enough by 1979 to buy the former Fletcher Chassis/Clyde Morgan/Dickie Harrell Javelin Funny Car, which he rebodied with a flip-top Vega panel and ran in Super Pro. With the Vega, he won a track championship in 1980 at Pennsylvania’s Numidia Dragway (where Zyla had been the regular announcer), appearing in nine finals in 17 races, winning six and finishing second three times. He was reunited with his old car last summer by William Sell, who bought it, and Zyla couldn’t resist the opportunity to climb back behind the wheel.

Zyla’s racing career was short. When his daughter Allison was born in 1981, he sold all of his equipment to concentrate on his family and on his journalism career and was even involved in television; he won two American Auto Racing Writers and Broadcasters Association and three Eastern Motorsports Press Association broadcasting awards.

A newspaperman from way back — starting as an $85-a-week proofreader at The Valley Citizen in Valley View, Pa. — Zyla is still heavily involved in motorsports, writing a monthly column for Performance Racing Industry, which he has done since the magazine's inception in 1986, as well as for Chris and Corinne Economaki for National Speed Sport News and for Auto Roundup. He has two syndicated King Features columns, one on racing and one dedicated to classic cars that goes to about 1,000 newspapers each week.

He also has a new-car testing column that is syndicated through Times Shamrock Communications, and it appears in papers as large as the Spokesman Review in Washington and in many smaller weekly papers across America.

Son Tim, 18, is showing an interest in drag racing that may carry Zyla back to the quarter-mile.

“I still have lots of parts, including a brand-new complete ATI Powerglide, ATI converter, brand-new tall deck 4-bolt big-block, open chamber heads from my original LS7, several Comp Cams and Isky pieces, brand-new Richmond gear sets, and all the ARP bolts to put this engine together. I even called Scott Weney the other week about stopping down to talk about a chassis, so, sooner or later, we’ll be at the track."

Zyla says that he still has hundreds of fans who want him to resurrect the game but knows all too well the legal and financial hurdles he’d face. Race fans might not get a new game, but a limited quantity of the game is still available.

“Believe it or not, I still get e-mails or calls about the game and its availability," he said. "I have enough games we found in my old house (maybe 100 or so) to fill some orders, but it would be without a game box, as the boxes are in very short supply, but I do have game boards, cards, cars, instructions, etc., if anyone is interested."

If you're interested, e-mail Zyla here. I’ve ordered mine and can’t wait to see how well it has stood the test of time.

Zyla already knows.

“Today, even at age 58, I’ll play with my son Tim for fun,” he admits.

A life well Dunn, and strapping on the ol' feedback

Mike Dunn’s Final Take column that accompanies National DRAGSTER’s Pro coverage from the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series national events is one of the most popular weekly features in the magazine, and it’s always fun talking to Mike to prepare those articles. Basically, I call him each Tuesday night, and we bench race like old buddies for an hour to decide what the content should be. I can pick his brain for things that intrigue me, and he is always meticulously prepared with notes and observations. He has so much knowledge of all sides of the engine – from in front, behind, and inside – that there’s little he can’t address, and in a relaxed, conversational manner that makes it clear he’s talking to you, not down to you.

I was a Mike Dunn fan from way back anyway – probably after seeing him kick ass in bicycle drags in Funny Car Summer – and growing up in SoCal, I got to watch him learn the nitro ropes with his dad, “Big Jim” Dunn, Roland Leong, and Joe Pisano. Being able to talk to him on a regular basis has done nothing but increase my admiration. His work as a color commentator on the ESPN2 shows is first-rate, and, as he’s shown in brief guest stints in people’s cars lately, he hasn’t forgotten anything about driving, either. I’ve been hanging on to this wonderful photo of Dunn for a few years; it was shot during one of the Phoenix test sessions as he was explaining to me the massive acceleration of the fuel cars; I looked like a real goober in this photo, so I mercifully cropped myself out.

He’s not just a nitro guy, either; he has a great appreciation for the Pro Stock guys. The fact that Pro Stock cars have run in the 6.50s and that he earned his nitro Funny Car license in May 1977 with a 6.53 brings that home for him.

“I licensed in my dad’s car, which at the time was the Dunn & Velasco Satellite,” he said. “We actually ran it on alcohol first the year before; we had a 6-71 blower and a small injector, and my dad blocked off the port nozzles and bought an alcohol barrel valve. My dad had a spare two-speed, so I spent $600 of my own money to buy a kit that was out there that you could use to bolt together two two-speeds to make a three-speed. My dad was messing around with the Donovan then, but he didn’t want me to ruin his good parts, so he found an old steel Hemi. Pisano gave me a set of pistons and a camshaft, and Valvoline gave me a drum of alcohol. I ran 7.38 at 178. We switched to nitro for a race at Orange County, where I got my nitro license and even qualified for the show. It was