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Your first race
Just got back from a great trip to St. Louis. For all the traveling I’ve done over all the years, this was my first trip to the city and to Gateway Motorsports Park. It’s one of the few tracks on the tour I hadn’t been to, so it was fun to have a…
Follow-up Friday
With this week’s Indy semi-coverage issue of National DRAGSTER safely at the printer, it’s back to Indy for the Big Go, round two. Three days at home was just enough to get the issue completed, proofed, and electronically bundled off to…
Pat Garlits: The Great Woman behind The Man
“Don [Garlits] had many close partners -- his brother Ed, Connie Swingle, Art Malone, Tom 'T.C.' Lemons, Emery Cook, and a few others. But it was his lifelong partnership with a sweet girl named Pat Bieger from…
1982 Indy: The Nitrous Nationals (or not)
This year’s Mac Tools U.S. Nationals presented by Auto-Plus will mark the 30th anniversary of one of the greatest Funny Car runs in drag racing history, Don Prudhomme’s stunning 5.637-second blast during qualifying at the…
Backtrack Tuesday: This, That, and Other Things
It’s Backtrack Tuesday at the DRAGSTER Insider, and I'm working hard to cleanse the inbox before diving into the two weeks leading up to the Big Go, the annual Mac Tools U.S. Nationals presented by Auto-Plus…
Putting a face to the name on the card
I’ll admit that my West Coast upbringing does at times bias the stories you read here, and although as a teenager I could easily recite a long list of match-race-only West Coast Funny Cars of the 1970s, my East…
Dale Emery: A life of Pure Hell, wild rides, and big wins
Race fans are accustomed to seeing Funny Cars pointed every which way on the dragstrip. When they’re not pointed toward the finish line, they can be found zigzagging around their lane (and sometimes the other). We’ve seen them bank off of guardrails…
Play it again, Sam
Sam Schermerhorn today, with girlfriend Paula and their pal, Budda
I have a pretty good grasp of drag racing’s history and even of some of the more obscure names from its past, but I’ll admit that…
More thrills from Indy '77
Although I remembered the 1977 U.S. Nationals in Tuesday’s column for Richard Tharp’s frightening near collision with Gary Read in round two of Top Fuel, as I was thumbing through a couple of thick folders…
More tall Tharp tales
Apparently, the world loves a good Richard Tharp story.
Response to Friday’s column about “King Richard” was off the charts. I guess I could have predicted that, but still I was amazed at the outpouring of kudos to me and…
'King Richard': Damndest Thing You Ever Saw
Frankly, I don’t even know where to begin when writing on The Life and Times of Richard Tharp. It has been an article I’ve wanted to write for years but put off for the same reasons I’m facing now staring at a mostly blank…
Peebles, Woodall, and a golden era
From his first slingshots to the final rear-engine car (bottom), Jackie Peebles' dragsters were adorned with 24-karat gold plating.
Fire burnout, Mexico City, 1978…
Remembering 'Joe P.'
If you turned 21 years old yesterday, I’d like you to raise a glass of your now-legal-to-drink favorite alcoholic beverage and toast the memory of Joe Pisano, who left us on the day you were born, July 19, 1991.
Seems…
I'd give my left arm to own that ...
You can sell just about anything on eBay. Your KC and the Sunshine Band albums. Your collection of Beanie Babies. Your shoebox full of Honus Wagner baseball cards.
What you can’t sell, however, is body parts.
And…
There's more gold in them thar stories
OK, so I lied (I warned you!). Even though I said no new column until July 13, here I am because I found myself with spare time at the end of Wednesday before heading out Thursday for Chicago, so here is a new column. The subject is still a golden…
All that glitters is not Greek
Steve Reyes
It didn’t take long after Friday’s column about “the Golden Greek’s” gold-plated ride to hit the virtual presses before folks started reminding me that Chris Karamesines wasn’t the only one to adorn his…
The golden 'Golden Greek'
If you’re a real drag racing fan – and you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t, right? – when you think of Chicago, you think of Chris Karamesines. With the Chicago national event looming just ahead, my thoughts certainly turned this week toward “the…
A challenging 'Challenge of the Sexes'
On Sunday, Alexis DeJoria came within just one round of becoming the third female to win an NHRA national event Funny Car crown before she smoked the tires in the final round against Ron Capps, yet it hardly made…
Leroy 'Doc' Hales: World's fastest doctor
WDIFL.com
In my early years here at NHRA, in the early 1980s, a lot of the staff spoke reverently of Leroy “Doc” Hales, a former Funny Car racer who had joined the NHRA team after his career and became an integral…
Fighting fires
(From above) Funny Car racers Jim Adolph, Shirley Muldowney, "Cogo" Eads, Barry Kelly, Ron Fassl, Butch Maas, and Jim Nicoll suffered nasty fires in '72-73.
(Top and bottom photos, Leslie Lovett; all others…
Force's fire-fighting flopper
John Force had quite a trial by fire in the early 1990s, including the famous incident in Memphis, Tenn. (below), after which he proclaimed, "I saw Elvis at 1,000 feet," and led to the creation of an over-the-top design…
Cleaning out the mailbag
Welcome to the day-late-and-a-topic-short DRAGSTER Insider for this week. I’m a day behind, like most of you are, after Memorial Day, and with travel Thursday to Englishtown for one of the greatest events on the tour precluding any chance…
Thirty years in heaven
(Above) Me, in 1985. Sharp-eyed readers will note the typewriter (electric at the time, but I started on a manual), the photo-sizing wheel (Photoshop? Ha!) and the pica-pole ruler by my left hand, and pen-and-paper method of…
Top Fuel blowovers, Part 4
It was more than two years between Shelly Anderson’s blowover at the 1996 Brainerd event and the next one to befall a racer, but Pat Dakin won’t soon forget when his number came up in Topeka in the fall of 1998. Racing Doug…
Top Fuel blowovers, Part 3
Like a Top Fueler flipping overbackward and returning to earth pointed in the wrong direction, I’m back for part three of the blowover chronicles, beginning with a little historical tidying up before we continue the chronological account of all…
Top Fuel blowovers, Part 2
At first blush, the twin blowovers in June 1986 and August 1987 by Don Garlits’ similarly enclosed front-end Swamp Rat XXX and 31 dragsters may have seemed to be a plague upon his streamliner design, but within a few years, it became clear that…
Top Fuel blowovers, Part 1
The streamliner series was, predictably, well-received, as I think we all have a soft spot in our hearts for experimentation and oddball efforts. As you may recall, very few of the streamliners or other aero-influenced Top…
Flying high: Harry Schmidt and the Blue Max
Harry Schmidt, right, with Raymond Beadle
(RayMar photo; Marc Bruederle collection)
Surprise. Bet you didn’t expect to see me this week, let alone on Thursday. Then again, I didn’t expect us to…
Remembering "the Bird"
Last Thursday, a strong turnout of the NHRA family came together at the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum presented by Automobile Club of Southern California to honor our longtime friend Bernie Partridge, who died a week…
Top Fuel streamliners, the sequel
After Top Fuel’s streamlining experimentation phase in the mid-1960s burned out after just a few years, the conventional slingshot didn’t change much beyond the standard addition of a body to cover the frame of the “rail…