photo by Jeff Burk

MY TOP 10 RACES

I think most fans have a pretty good idea of what their favorite drag races were. In a lot of cases, mine included, some of these events are on our Billboard Top 10 for personal reasons. Considerations like, "It was my first race" or "It was where I saw my first Funny Car" or "my first four-second run" place high in the memory bank.

I've been going to the races for 38 years, and it's been my privilege to see a lot of great events. And my fandom, bordering on the fanatical for the majority of those years, has put me in contact with a lot of events that I was unable to attend personally.

To me, a "great race" accomplishes a number of important things. For one, I am a numbers freak: I care what the cars run. Of all the major auto sports, drag racing's rep has been built mostly by the elapsed times and MPHs these incredible machines register. That's what separates us from the others. So, naturally, a few of my top tens are going to fall back on whether or not records were revealed on the scoreboard.

However, that's not the only criteria. The historical impact of an event figures in this, too. A driver's comeback, an event that changes the face of the sport, spectacular occurrences, crowds, and the like, are poured into this mix as well.

I hesitate doing articles like this sometimes because it's hard to separate the personal from the impersonal and it also virtually forces the writer to rank the events. The last part of that is tricky for me: I don't like taking things and placing them, historical context alongside historical context.

For example, when Jack Dempsey won the Heavyweight Championship of the world in 1919, he put pro boxing on the map. Twenty years earlier, John L. Sullivan got the sport its first American recognition, but it remained for Dempsey to put the heavyweight boxing champ on a par with Babe Ruth. Yet, great as Dempsey was, he wouldn't have lasted two rounds with Mike Tyson. Dempsey weighed between 185 and 190 pounds; Tyson does his best damage at about 220 and is twice as fast and hits harder than the old "Manassa Mauler." But does that mean Tyson's greatness overshadows Dempsey's? No.

So with these qualifiers, let me give you an idea of what I think were this sport's greatest races. In chronological order, they are ...

1955 NHRA NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP
DRAG RACES

As a race, it wasn't that hot. As any drag racing first grader knows, Calvin Rice won Top Eliminator and ran low e.t. at 10.30, and Lloyd Scott's twin-engine "Bustle Bomb" logged the sport's second 150-mph run. But the event itself got rained out on its Labor Day Weekend debut and wasn't run off until Nov. 19-20 in Perryville, Arizona. There were only seven cars in Top Eliminator and a couple hundred altered roadsters, coupes, and sedans, and stock cars.

However, again, this one falls into history-making. Wally Parks and NHRA successfully brought the nation's hot rodders together for the first national drag racing confab, and for that alone the event's greatness is established.

1959 BAKERSFIELD MARCH MEET

This is the race that established Top Fuel firmly on the drag racing map. Again, so much has been written on this that some of the following is redundant. Don Garlits had won a big East vs. West race in Houston, Texas in 1958, and the westerners, clannish and guilty as hell of regional chauvinism, invited him and anyone else who thought they had a fast car to come out and race them. Art Chrisman in the Chrisman Bros. & Cannon dragster won the event in the wee hours of Monday morning on March 1, before 31,000 booze-sodden race fanatics. The Bakersfield event went on to become the biggest independent Top Fuel show in history and gave all drag race fans a glimpse of the future.

1965 SUPER STOCK NATIONALS

Remember the last two months of DRO? We did an article on this great event and the Super Stock Magazine Nationals races that followed. In a sentence: 21,000 fans showed at York U.S. 30 Dragway in York, Pennsylvania in August of 1965 to take in the first big "national-type" event for Funny Cars. It took on Woodstock proportions, as did the above two events and forever changed the face of drag racing. The Funny Car was here to stay.

1967 ORANGE COUNTY MANUFACTURERS FUNNY CAR CHAMPIONSHIPS

The West Coast was not as quick to catch on to the Funny Car as were their Eastern counterparts. The left coast had the Top Fuelers; the East Coast was the crib for the altered wheelbase, injector-stacked, resin-busting factory experimentals which became Funny Cars. The race that put the slow-to-be-won-over West Coast camp into the fold was the first Orange County (Int'l Raceway) Manufacturers race.

The OCIR management came up with a theme that consisted of four eight-car factory (Ford, Chevy, Chrysler, and Pontiac) teams battling it out for three 32-car rounds, with the two quickest elapsed times coming back for the final. In this case, it was Eddie Schartman's Air-Lift Rattler Mercury Comet beating Don Gay's Firebird in the final round.

However, the "who won" was more overshadowed by the real winners: the overflow crowd, estimated at nearly 20,000, that packed OCIR and completed the takeover of the country by the burgeoning Funny Car class.

1972 DON GARLITS PRA NATIONAL CHALLENGE

Until just recently, NHRA was a lean, mean fighting machine, but there was one time when they were as out of gas and soft as they are now. That was in 1972. NHRA had been on a fabulous run from its inaugural national event of 1955 through 16 years. Crowds grew, performance grew, name recognition grew, and so did ... I hate to say it, but ... NHRA's perceived arrogance. The sport's quickest and fastest racers, Top Fuel, were making $5,000 to win at Indy (the U.S. Nationals), and sometimes less at the other seven events.

The dilemma? The racers' cost to participate were badly outrunning the purses, so as to make said purse nothing more than an unfunny joke. It remained for Don Garlits to challenge this (hence the name) with a national event on the very same Labor Day Weekend of 1972, an event that featured only the top three pro categories. Most important was the fact that Garlits and the Professional Racers Association and AHRA (American Hot Rod Association) offered $35,000 to win for the two nitro classes and $25,000 for Pro Stock.

NHRA, confident that it had tradition on its side, downplayed the Tulsa, Oklahoma event, and went on with business as usual. It was not a business as usual thing. Garlits' Tulsa event drew a capacity crowd and took all the big names away from Indianapolis save for Don Prudhomme, Tom McEwen (who commuted back and forth between Indy and Tulsa, running both Top Fuel and Funny at the events), Jerry Ruth, Tony Nancy, and a handful of other NHRA loyalists. Tulsa had everyone else.

It developed that the Tulsa promoters didn't make money, but they did make their point. In 1973, NHRA's Top Fuel purse went up from $5,000 of 1972 to around $18,000 for 1973.

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