Okay, now here's one for you. Our close friend, Tommy Motes, of Conyers, Georgia, got runner-up in Pro on Saturday of a big two-day race in late March at Atlanta Dragway, then won on Sunday. Even with splits in the finals, he took home nearly $2,000 in winnings. He averaged 0.525 lights, and his big-block, alky-driven dragster ran dead-on each round, except for the times he "womped" the throttle pedal on the top end. How did he do it? "To tell you the truth, for the first time in a long time, I was just relaxed the whole weekend," he said. "I was by myself, so I didn't have to deal with anybody else. I just made rounds, came back and put fuel back in the car, sat around and went up when it was time. Plus (friend) Lloyd Kaylor said don't drink any Cokes, so I didn't. I drank water both days."

Chris Phillips, track manager for Montgomery (Alabama) Motorsports Park, has seen some mighty funny superstitions in his two years of running the track. "Some people don't touch money the whole weekend they're racing," he said. "They run a tab on everything because they don't want to touch any money. Then they pay their tab when they're done. They'll say it's bad luck otherwise. Some people won't accept a '50' (a $50 bill) for change. Jerry Busby of Fairhope (Alabama) won't even look at one. He turns his head when you open the door to give him his money, in case there's a '50' on top. He thinks that if he sees a '50,' he won't win the next round."

Some of Phillips' customers won't pick up their winnings until the final day of the event is over. "Picking up your winnings early, they say, produces bad luck," he says. And almost everybody he knows who races has a lucky stuffed animal in their racecar. "I have one, a lucky Pink Panther that I've had in every car since the beginning. He's a pretty nasty thing, too, by now," he says. And some racers won't go up to staging unless a certain crew member is there with them.

Then there's Tim Glover of Cumming, Georgia, a good friend of mine and a former contributor --- blurbs and all --- of Bracket Racing USA, my old magazine. If wife Wanda, who is now retired from racing, ever won a race, Tim would actually go up to the starter and kiss him on the cheek. Then he'd jump up and down and kiss the ground, just like Christopher Columbus the explorer (but not Christopher Columbus the bracket racer).

Glover was so particular about the weight of the family's Camaro that he put the gas in with a Gatorade bottle, so he would know exactly how much the car would weigh when ready to go.

It must have worked --- Wanda was crowned the NHRA Division 2 Sportsman champion one year.

"People are always giving their racecars names," Phillips says. "My blue dragster was called 'Alexandria,' but my (Bad News Travels Fast) Vega wagon ain't done good enough for me to have to give it a name," he says. His Camaro is called 'Maximus,' after Russell Crowe's character in the movie "Gladiator," but his white Vega is just called "The Flying Fortress," like it says on the sides of the door.

Even race engines carry their own superstition. He remembers that once his good friend and past NHRA U.S. Nationals Super Gas champ David Simmons of Suwanee, Georgia, had a motor that carried a name. "'Lucille,' maybe. I can't remember," he says. (Isn't that the name of B.B. King's guitar? If I were to ever win the U.S. Nationals, I wouldn't care what the name of my motor was. Even if it was "Osama.")

Chip Horton, of Jesup, Georgia, is the 2002 IHRA Summit world bracket champion, the guy who won the first IHRA bracket world series and collected $111,000 for that win, plus a new 40th-anniversary Grand Prix, a race-ready Reher-Morrison big-block, big-hp engine, a Buell motorcycle and a whole lot more. "That year I won $221,000 total bracket racing," Horton says. And by the way, he races with one leg only, his right, after his left was amputated in an off-road accident when he was a teenager.

Horton has his superstitions. "I won't race a woman," he says. "I've raced them about a hundred times, and 75 of those times I've been beat by one. They have the edge on all men. And I run the left lane only. I can't run the right 'cause I have a post behind me that interferes with my sight on the top end. I can see better out of the left. I also pat the gas in the burnout box. I'm afraid my old car (his '70s-era "Trinity" Dodge) will break if I hold down on it. The last time the engine was out of it was in 1993. Hey, it's the original motor, with matching numbers. My hood is welded on. I couldn't get it out if I had to."

Alabama race promoter George Howard is all set when one of his best racers, Kenny Underwood of Tampa, Florida rolls through the front gate. "He will not drive a car that has green on it," he says. "When he comes in the gate, he hands his wallet to the person running the gate so he won't have to touch the money. It's bad luck. And one time we had to make up a white-colored Million Dollar Race decal for him because the ones we normally gave out for that race had green in them. He'd take a Magic Marker and color out the green otherwise."