No “Sunday! … Sunday!” for George’s Million Dollar Race

Check out THIS flyer!

9/7/04

hose of you who are not on George Howard’s mailing list should be. Take his latest offering, the flyer for the 9th annual BTE Million Dollar Race, to be held September 23-26 at Memphis Motorsports Park in Tennessee, wherein, for a $2,000 entry fee with a $500 buy back, one has the chance to win a million bucks, providing 500 racers belly up to the MMP bar. If 125 racers buy that $2,000 tech card, the winner gets $100,000. If it’s from 251 to 275, the payout to the winner is $265,000, and so on. The runner-up always gets $50,000 at the Million, but you know how we racers are … at the last BTE Million at Memphis, the splitting started at 16 cars, with some of those guys taking home pockets full of one hundred dollar bills.

In 1997, George Tamasi Sr. of Pennsylvania drove home with $235,000 in his pocket for winning the Million. How do I know? George told me, right there in his latest BTE Million Dollar flyer. It’s an informative piece of paper. A hoot, too.

Scattered about the four-page tome are things like “Show me the money!,” “Now, better than ever!,” “Many ways to win!,” “Win a dragster!,” “Win a custom E-Z Go golf cart!,” “Write your own history. Change your life …,” “ESPN 2 weekend coverage,” and more. You’d think Howard was putting out his own edition of the Publisher’s Clearing House millionaire’s prize.

There is a method to this madness. It’s Howard’s way of saying, “I’m putting on a race. Everybody come! There’s money to be made here.” His flyer will reach 20,000 racers on the George Howard Inc. mailing list. Everything you need to know about the BTE Million is on those four pages --- the dates, the races (gambler’s race starts on Thursday, September 23, with two Barker Trailer Sales Twin 20s on Friday and Sunday), the complete payouts (based on car counts), the schedule of events, even the free stuff that Howard will give away, such as: a new Corvette, a new 28-foot Freightliner motor home, a new RaceTech dragster with Dino paint job, a new Daytona/Pace trailer, and an E-Z Go golf cart. Everybody who buys a weekend pass is even eligible for a free “Beale Street Bash” cookout provided by BTE and RaceTech.

There are profiles of every Million Dollar Drag Race winner on page three. We read that the first, T.J. Tracey of Memphis, won $175,000 and first place over 157 other racers, enough money to allow him to open up his own racing fuel injection business. It reveals that Tracey mortgaged his own house to get the $2,000 to enter.

“How will it change your life in ’04?,” a blurb asks. Read on and you’ll find out that in 1998, when Troy Williams Jr. won, he took home $201,000. That Alabamian Joel Reynolds, who won in 2002, was also the runner-up at an earlier Million, and he did so in a door car, the only one to ever win a Million. And finally, Johnny Labbous, an honest-to-goodness founding father of bracket racing (Papa Johnny goes back to the 1960s in his series of Mopars) tells us through the 2004 BTE Million flyer that “whatever it takes to find the money, get sponsors or whatever, GET IN THIS RACE! If you’re going to win ONE race every year, this is the ONE to win.”