The Caboose was Loose

Johnny Labbous Sr. won the 2003 B&M Million. Here's how he did it.
by Dale Wilson

Photos by Dale Wilson
10/8/03

Dale Wilson is a bracket racing "retiree" who was editor of Bracket Racing USA from 1991 to its demise in 1998. His latest dream is to return to racing in either a front-engine dragster, a slow motorcycle or the family Mazda wagon. Everything else he has is for sale.

wanted to make a $20 bet with George Howard, but we never settled on exactly what we were betting on, or whom.

I told him that I thought a "hitter" would win his B&M Million, he thought it would be an unknown. As it turned out, the winner of the 2003 B&M Million Dollar Race, held on the last weekend of September at Memphis (Tennessee) Motorsports Park, was both. And neither, if we had gone by the rules we were to set up a week before the race.

Me: "George, I'll bet you $5 --- no, let's make it $20 --- that the winner will be a 'hitter'," I said. "You know, somebody like Scotty or Edmond Richardson, or Todd ("Bones") Ewing, or (Kevin) Pruett or Tim Archer, or the Williams brothers, Gary and Troy, or one of those 'young guns,'" I said, guys who regularly follow --- and win --- the big-money races like the B&M series or George's "Twin 20s" or the Carolina Coalition or the Tenn-Tuck series. "Somebody known," I told him. George said no; he disagreed. "It'll be an unknown, somebody we've never heard of, but somebody who is still good at bracket racing."

The winner turned out to be a "hitter," all right, a racer from the old days, somebody well-known to most bracket racers but a guy who hasn't won a BIG race like the B&M Million in a long time. The winner of this year's B&M Million turned out to be Johnny Labbous Sr.

When the splitting of money and all the talking was over, Labbous Sr. drove away from Memphis on that Sunday evening after the race a whopping $90,000 richer, his trusty "Labbous-green" Mopar 440-powered '88 Woody dragster tucked neatly away, with wife Pat riding shotgun. The "old man" of southern bracket racing (Johnny is now 57) defeated relatively unknown Terry Newbauer of North Canton, Ohio, in his '42 Willys coupe (yes, they DID make a few models that year) for the big money, the glory and the prestige of being the 8th winner of the Million Dollar drag race. Newbauer got $60,000 for his trouble on that two-way split, with another long-time hitter, Ken Sullivan, of Carrollton, Ohio, getting the lone semi-final dough for racing good friend Jeff Valdez's, "Mexican Jumping Bean" dragster from Georgia.