Music and Alcohol Funny Car Racing DO Mix
... if your name is Nancy Matter
Story and photos by Dale Wilson
8/8/06
eekdays, Nancy Matter works with the stars. As a recordings master engineer, she has hands-on taken the sounds of The Who, Peter Gabriel, Ray Charles, Molly Hatchet, Duran Duran, Run from Run-DMC, White Zombie, Barry Setzer, even the sound tracks from the movies “March of the Penguins” and “Once Upon A Time In Mexico” and made them better. With the recordings from a recording studio, she cleans them up, “sweetens” and finalizes them, and then sends them to the manufacturer who ultimately packages them and puts them in the thousands of CD bins in stores across our country, or else they go to major movie studios across the globe. “I’m basically a music engineer,” she says.
But on weekends, Matter, 43, of Austin, Texas, listens to the “sweet” sound of another kind, the thunder, rattle, pop and roll of her own alcohol Funny Car. Her ride is a 2002 Hairy Fiberglass-bodied Camaro with a Fontana engine and heads, and a PSI blower and intake, and it has taken her to 5.94-second elapsed times at 244 mph in NHRA Division 4 settings. It is her first Funny Car. Previously, she raced a Super Comp dragster.
If -- pie-in-the-sky -- she were to get the proper funding, Nancy Matter would go fuel Funny Car racing in a heartbeat. But for now, her “ERR” (for Ethanol Racing/Research)-emblazoned alcohol car will do nicely.
Matter’s business is called Moonlight Mastering -- she once did moonlighting service within the recording industry, following another job during the daytime -- and she owns it herself, after working as an accountant (boring!, she says) and then getting a degree in the recording arts and working in Burbank, California, for the Disney Corporation for 10 years. People within the industry kept telling her that she was pretty darn good at what she did, so eight years ago, she set out on her own. She moved to Austin. “I moved to Austin because it’s a good music town, and I was done with L.A,” Matter said. “I had been there all my life and was ready for a change, and the racing is a lot better here in Texas, so we bought a house that had a recording studio already built on the premises. It’s good.”
She is divorced, with two grown children, son Ryan, 23, and daughter Jamie, 21. She lives with her significant other, Jeremy Mitchell, and a dog and a cat. All three major people in her life know drag racing, and in fact, Mitchell works on the Top Fueler of Allen Hartley of Omaha, Nebraska.