The Return of Tommy Payne

Famed Southern Alcohol Funny Car Pilot a Little Worse For Wear, But Ready to Race Again.

6/7/04

ommy Payne, in his own way, helped me get involved in drag racing. He didn’t know it then, and he probably doesn’t know it now, but he made an impression on me on that Sunday afternoon in late summer of 1962 that has never left.

The place was Lassiter Mountain Drag Strip in Birmingham, Ala., and Tommy was making a pass in his C/Gas ’55 Chevy, the one I’d seen earlier at the East Lake swimming pool that sported a bored-out 283 and a trio of two-barrel carburetors. That was one of the first hot rods I’d ever seen, and was the first hot rodder I personally knew.

I went to grammar school with Tommy Payne, Huffman Grammar School, 1957-’58. He and his brother Louie were well-known even then --- it was Louie who drove his own car, a ’53 Plymouth, to school. He was in the seventh-grade at the time. Tommy followed with his own car only a bit later. Imagine --- they both had their own cars even before they started high school.

Anyway, there I was at Lassiter Mountain, standing on top of the hill that made up staging, and Tommy Payne was blasting his way down the quarter-mile in his C/Gas ’55, when all of a sudden the car spit out its drive shaft. Boom! Clank, clank, clank, and there it came out the back, bouncing off the track and seemingly hanging in the air a good 10 feet above the Chevy, just hanging there until Tommy cleared the explosion and the drive shaft plummeted back to earth. I think he may have torn his pants because of it.

I’d never seen anything like it. I thought, "How could a car be so powerful and so fast as to throw a hard piece of metal out its rear end?" Wow! This drag racing stuff was neat. I was, as we straightliners all say at one time or another, hooked. I ended up writing about Lassiter Mountain for drag papers and magazines, and in 1986 I won $1,000 for finishing first in my old Sikora front-engine dragster. I owe Tommy Payne, among others, for a career in drag racing.

Payne graduated to other cars, from gassers to Super Stockers to alcohol Funny Cars (1976 to 2000), and actually ran a nitro Funny Car in 1966 and 1967. If memory serves me right, he once raced a factory-built Super Stock 413 called the “Little Judge,” named after Alabama’s “Fighting Judge,” George Wallace. I heard that he and some pals waited all day at the train station just to get the car unloaded and ready to race.

Now let’s switch to April 2004, the Bama Nationals at Huntsville (Alabama) Dragway. Tommy Payne, now of Montgomery, was there with the latest incarnation of his “Crazy Horse” series of alcohol Funny Cars, a 2002 Firehawk that set low elapsed time of the eighth-mile event at 3.96 at 187 mph, good for No. 1 in TA/FC. “It has gone quicker, a 3.89 at 193 at San Antonio,” Tommy told me.

Strange thing, though --- a guy named John Sullivan of Ohio was driving the “Horse” --- evidently very capably, too. That’s the first time I’d seen Payne out of the driver’s chair. He was doing all the tuning.