The return of Tommy Payne Famed southern alcohol Funny Car pilot a little worse for wear, but ready to race again.

6/7/04

Words and photo by Dale Wilson

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.

There was a reason, Tommy told me. He’d been in this hellacious crash last year in Don Stroud’s Pro Modified Corvette at a track near Lexington, Kentucky. The throttle hung open and he ran off the end at more than 250 mph, ending up in some trees 40 feet high. Payne hit one oak tree at more than 200 mph, square-on.

He was conscious throughout it all, sort of the way that “Big Daddy” Don Garlits was when he got his foot sawed off at Lions Drag Strip all those years ago.

“It broke my back in four places, took my left leg off, my retinas were detached,” Payne told me. “It broke all my ribs, broke my left pelvis, tore my left foot off. It took them an hour and 47 minutes to get me out of the car. The first six months, they didn’t expect me to live. I couldn’t get out of bed for nine months.”

Wife Louann, married to Tommy since 1996, tended to him daily, through those nine months of recuperation. When race promoter George Howard, another old friend, heard about it all, he sent a plane up to the hospital in Ohio to bring Payne back to Montgomery. Racers pitched in to do what they could.

“The power of prayer is the only thing that got me through,” Payne said. That and wife Louann.

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There’s more. The doctors sewed his left foot back on, but it is now placed 33 degrees to the left, outwards. “It works, though,” he says. All the toes in his right foot were broken, and they look it even now. “The doctor said, ‘Tommy, we would have fixed them, but we didn’t know that you were gonna make it,’” Payne said. Now 61, he walks with a noticeable limp. “The racing community and God are the only reasons I’m here,” he said.

He is now retired from the transportation business that he has had for so long, but surprisingly, Payne said he is not 100-percent disabled. At Huntsville at the Bama Nats, he was tuning up “Crazy Horse” to that 3.90-something elapsed time, and he and his Brad Anderson hemi didn’t skip a beat. Driver John Sullivan was a good friend of his, and when he got hurt, Payne stuck him in the “Horse’s” driver’s compartment. “I wanted to put the best driver I could in the car,” he said. “Now it’s all in the family.”

That “Crazy Horse” moniker, by the way, goes back at least three decades, and Payne said there is a good reason he chose that for his series of southern Funny Cars. “I’m a direct descendent to the chief himself. He was the Sioux leader who did Custer in. Now ‘Crazy Horse Racing’ is patented,’” Tommy said. He has even had some of the Sioux people journey over to Alabama and bless the Funny Car.

That wreck in the Pro Mod probably did in his driving. But Payne still has a few ticks and tricks left. “I’ve been doing these motors so long that I can feel my way through them. I’m gonna race ‘till the day I can’t race no more,” Payne said. His tuning prowess paid off at Huntsville Dragway when John Sullivan not only set low elapsed time for the whole meet, including alcohol Funny Cars, but also won the race, beating Monty Todd’s stretched ’55 Chevy, now driven by Jim Phillips of Evansville, Ind., in the final. The “Horse” ran a 3.99 at 184.46 mph, only a tick off that 3.96-second low elapsed time shot. Payne had to pull out a reserve engine before first round, to replace the one he “holed” in qualifying. But then, he has been in the same place and the same situation before.

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