Do you work on the car?

Densham: If Greg is busy and we’re short on crew guys, I have to just get in there because if I don’t do it, it won’t get done—either that or we’re going to be out here another two hours longer. When you run with a limited number of personnel, and a lot of them new to the sport, you’ve gotta’ do what you’ve gotta’ do.

Is there any interaction crew-wise or tune-up-wise between you and the Force team now?

Densham: Well, the nice thing is that John and I are friends—we’ve been friends for 30 years and we’ll continue to be friends—and you know, if we’re at the starting line we can always ask those guys, ‘Well, what do you think about the track? How far do you think we can go?’

What if a situation arises where you reach the semis or a final round against someone like Gary Scelzi or Whit Bazemore? Are we likely to see someone from the Force camp in your pit offering a little help?

Densham: You never can tell. We obviously want to beat everybody every time we go to the starting line and it doesn’t matter whether it’s one of John’s cars, or Prudhomme’s car, or Schumacher’s cars, it doesn’t matter, we want to whup ‘em. But trust me, if we were racing Bazemore or Scelzi and John’s cars weren’t around, any help that we asked for we would get.

And would you ask for help?

Densham: It’s hard to say. I guess that would depend on how we were running. But our team has got to be our team and we’ve got to be able to go out on our own and we can’t depend on them for help because we want to go out and beat them, too. That’s the

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idea—to beat everyone else that’s here. And my guys are learning, we’re getting better week by week, race by race; we’re all getting better at what we’re doing.

The first weekend we raced this year, when we beat (Tony) Pedregon the first round and blew up and had a big fire, that’s the number-one reason I love this sport. When we got back to our pits, all of a sudden you look over there and see crew guys from three different teams helping us. We would have never, ever made that call to the next round if it hadn’t been for working together with all those people. That’s the same reason when Jack Wyatt was going rounds at Bristol, I was over there helping him, because that’s the way we all did it a long time ago.

Are you pleased with the direction of NHRA racing in general right now?

Densham: (Long pause) You should be brutally honest, right? I’m not sure. I think that as a sport, as an entertainment value for the fans, as competition, I think everything is great. Do I think that we could do better, as far as the promotional part of things—and let me qualify this right now, I think our TV program is way better than it’s ever been, but I think it still can improve—but as far as NHRA as an organization doing better in trying to bring new blood and new sponsors into the sport? Darn well I think they could (do better).