Spring is in the air...Mopar wins...all is good!

3/8/05

know, it sounds like I am a Mopar fan, right? You guessed it, I am!! Always have been and probably always will be. I can appreciate what the Bowtie racers have done, but with 85 percent of the drag cars powered by some sort of GM engine they should win everything. I thought it was refreshing to see Alan Johnson put together that Pro Stock win at Phoenix last weekend.

Speaking of Pro Stock, I have to give some kudos out to Erica Enders for all the hard work her team has done to get her qualified in only her second Pro-Stock event. Stop and think how many “old guys” didn’t qualify and probably never will. I can hardly wait until she straps a hole-shot on Kurt or Warren Johnson and they have to come over to the camera and shake her hand. PRICELESS!!

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I also must mention longtime friend of the family, though we haven’t seen him much lately, Tommy Johnson on his much needed win in Funny Car at the Winternationals. Think about all the work that crew has done for two years and they have one victory. That is dedication to the MAX! Congratulations to the Skoal crew, Tommy and the Snake. Now I also hear Tommy Jr. is going to be an uncle real soon. His sister, Wendy is due anytime and guaranteed… there will be another racer born that day!!

Some of you are probably wondering what the heck this stuff has to do with bracket racing, since that is what I usually write about. Well, it is too early for me to be doing much bench-racing around here. Temperatures are in the teens and twenties and just getting the garage warmed up enough to work on the two dragsters is about all I can do for bracket racing right now.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have some things for you to think about as we enter the new season. I have been preparing for a new season of bracket racing since 1975. Thirty years of planning, scouring through parts catalogs, preparing the cars, trailers, tow vehicles, improving my entire race operation to enhance my chances of winning on race day.

Not many of you really know much about me and I do want you to know a little about me so you can see a little better “where I come from” on some of my opinions. I have always lived in Iowa, have a great family with three sons. Have ALWAYS raced some sort of bracket car for 30 years and enjoyed every minute of it (well, maybe a couple times when I let a guy by at the stripe by .001 I didn’t seem very happy!).

I am definitely a low-budget racer, though we have accumulated a lot of “stuff” over the years, just like your family keeps telling you that you have a lot of “stuff," I am sure. I go to work every morning about 7:00 and get home about 6:00 PM. I have to admit it is getting tougher to go out to the shop and work on the dragsters every night, so I am relying more and more on my son, Andy, to do a lot of the preparation work on the cars. Speaking of sons, I have three, Jason who owns an automotive repair shop (and has three sons of his own), Andy who races with me every week and is a tool and die apprentice, and Ryan who is in the U.S. Coast Guard and he and his wife are expecting….what else, a SON, in a few months. My wife, Barb, has been to 99 percent of the races I go to and is an integral part of why I am still racing. If she didn’t support it we probably would have quit long ago.