Drag Racing Online - My First Time

Over the years, Don Prudhomme has epitomized drag racing cool. Ever-so-slightly slouched, his arms hanging loose at his sides, he talked the talk and walked the walk of a confident man who seldom relied on explanations for anything he did. What you see is what you get. Prudhomme, a stand-up, my-record-speaks-for-itself guy who now fields his own Top Fuel (Miller Lite) and Funny Car (U.S. Tobacco) team, has been considered for years as one of the sport's greatest drivers. He won four straight NHRA Funny Car World Championships (1975-78), ran the first Funny Car five, the first Funny Car 250, and also nailed down four AHRA World Funny Car titles. In NHRA competition, he won 35 Funny Car titles and 14 Top Fuel titles, and, until John Force hit his stride, was considered the greatest Funny Car driver ever.

We asked him how all this got started. What did he remember about his first drag race?

My racing start was all based around the Road Kings car club in the San Fernando Valley (near Los Angeles) and you got to keep in mind that drag racing back then, and we're talking the late 1950s, was in its infancy.

The club had a dragster and they raced it locally. Well, I had this '27-T Ford roadster and it was powered by a big-inch Buick with six two-barrel carburetors. I had a chance to take it out of the roadster and put it in the dragster, which is what we did. There were three of us that drove the car and one day at San Fernando Raceway, I got a chance to drive it.

It was so great. You gotta remember I was like 18-19, somewhere in there, and I just got a huge thrill out of putting on the firesuit, the helmet, and sinking myself down into the driver's seat. Then you nail the throttle, and even though it probably ran around 130-135 mph, you had this incredible feeling of speed and power.

I won that day and that just made the whole deal incredible. I beat some guys, the club was happy, and it was just so great!

I remember thinking that race was the first time in my life that I felt that I was good at something. I wasn't that hot in school, but at the drags that day I thought that maybe this was going to be a career or something; that I was meant to do this.

From that point on, I did whatever I could to get my next ride. It wasn't long after that day at San Fernando that I sold my roadster without engine and used the money to buy Tommy Ivo's old single-engine Buick chassis. I took my Road Kings engine out and put it in that car.

My dad, Newman Prudhomme, owned Van Nuys Auto Body and it was painted on the back of the car, so now I had a car with all the stuff on it and I was on my way. I was still a kid then, but I knew that come hell or high water, I was going to race.

[Editor's Note: Prudhomme's first "big" win came a year later in the Van Nuys Auto Body car when he won the B/Open Gas Dragster class at the 1960 U.S. Fuel and Gas Championships in Bakersfield, Calif. with a speed of 139 mph. Two years later, the 20-year-old Prudhomme and 22-year-old tuner Dave Zeuschel won the Bakersfield Top Fuel title.]

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