NHRA News: Bill "Farmer" Dismuke, former NHRA National Tech Director, passes away (8/31/2004)

Bill "Farmer" Dismuke, former NHRA National Tech Director, passes away

8/31/2004

One of drag racing's colorful pioneers, Bill "Farmer" Dismuke, passed away on Friday, August 27 at his home in Sylmar, Calif. As NHRA's National Technical Director from 1960 until his retirement in 1988, he was influential in developing NHRA's Stock, Super Stock and factory muscle car classes while guiding technical operations in the sport's other classes. He was 79.

As NHRA's national tech director from 1960 to 1988, " Dismuke was not only instrumental in helping establish organized drag racing's rules, classification systems, and tech inspection procedures, but he played a role in the joint effort between NHRA and Detroit's automotive manufacturers in promoting performance cars. This not only spawned the muscle-car era, which produced the Mustang, Camaro, GTO, 442, and other vehicles for the performance-oriented baby boomer market, but it helped accelerate drag racing's growth in popularity all over the country.

Dismuke, like so many of NHRA's early officials, gained his organizational skills by helping conduct sanctioned events as a member of a car club. "I lived in Springfield, Mass., in the early 1950s, and I owned a '33 Ford five-window coupe," recalled Dismuke in a 2001 National DRAGSTER interview. "In 1953, we got all of our local car clubs under a group that we created called the Massachusetts Automotive Council (MAC). We ran races at the local Orange Airport one Sunday a month during the six warm-weather months of the year."

MAC later became the New England Timing Association, and Dismuke began working as a tech advisor for NHRA Division 1 Director Ed Eaton in 1957.

After Dismuke met NHRA founder Wally Parks at the 1960 Nationals in Detroit, he was offered the position of Division 1 director and national tech director. He moved to the West Coast in 1961 to serve solely as national tech director.

At the time, NHRA listed its categories by car, engine, and class on mimeographed sheets of paper. Dismuke decided to list the classes by horsepower-to-weight ratio so that the weight factors could be changed without redoing the multi-page classification guide.

Dismuke's first experience with Detroit car manufacturers was at a 1960 meeting. "Pontiac's Jim Wangers had set up the meeting with all of the car companies," Dismuke said. "We had Vince Piggins and Paul Prior from Chevrolet, Jack Passino and Charlie Grey from Ford, Frank Wylie from Dodge, Ronnie Householder from Plymouth, Jack Chakmakian from American Motors, and many others. We told them how we were going to do the classification guide, and they went for it.

"The biggest challenge at the time was achieving some degree of regularity in the horsepower ratings. At one factory, the sales department would come up with the ratings, and at another it would be done by the engineers. I think Prior was right on when he said it would be best if everybody 'lie the same.' "

As Detroit saw how performance images created at NHRA drag races helped sell cars, it initiated the horsepower wars. The Chevy 409s, Ford 406s, and Chrysler 413s soon grew into 427s, and Detroit further enhanced performances with special performance packages that included multiple carburetor induction systems, wilder camshaft and valvetrain combinations, and lightweight body components.

Said Dismuke, "It wasn't before long that the manufacturers' reps would start asking us in July what the agenda would be for our winter meetings. They wanted to know where their cars were going to fit in the higher classes."

As the Stock classes grew in both size and performance potential, they began to create more challenges for the tech department. "About 60 percent of our tech inspection was with the stockers compared to 40 percent for the hot cars," said Dismuke. "With the hot cars, safety was the big thing. But the stockers had to deal with horsepower ratings, using stock components and the like, which required a lot more time to check out.

"The division directors picked their own tech directors, and they were all at the rules meetings. We all shared what happened in the field and kept everyone up to date on things to look for. We'd see lead being placed in the axle housing for ballast, using thin stovepipe for mufflers to save weight, and things like that. There was no way we could get ahead of the racers because there were too many of them. Our job was to just keep up with them.

"Boy, the 1960s were something else. You never knew what was coming up or how we were going to get them teched. Once, at Indy, we had more than 1,500 cars come through the tech line. And then there was the 1965 Winternationals, which was run in its entirety on Sunday because we had been rained out on Friday and Saturday. But that was the extra work of the racers that time. They worked harder than we did, and we couldn't have done it without them."

Dismuke, who got his "Farmer" nickname when he drove a vegetable truck for Farmer Brown Inc., in the early 1950s, was instrumental in computerizing the NHRA tech department during the 1970s. Computers proved to be invaluable in calculating corrected altitudes, horsepower-to-weight ratios, and many other figures.

"Our first computer was an old Apple II that didn't even have a floppy disc," he remembered. "We'd work off of a tape recorder plugged into the computer. It was still a step up from the calculator. Altitude corrections used to take as much as four hours, and we could do it in just a couple of minutes with the computer."

Dismuke, who also served as NHRA's supervisor of FIA sanctioned SCTA land speed records conducted on the Bonneville salt flats in Utah, employed much more modern versions of computer technology before he retired from NHRA in 1988.

Dismuke is survived by his wife Ginny.

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