BEING FIRST BY BEING SECOND

DRO file photo

7/8/05

know I just wrote about something that happened at Southern California’s wonderful Ontario Motor Speedway, Ronnie Sox and “Butch” Leal’s Pro Stock twist at the 1971 NHRA Supernationals. We all have our prejudices when in the various items drag racing. When it comes to national event race sites, the greatest run of performances happened at Ontario between the years 1972 through 1975. The Sox-Leal deal was just a great race, but not what one could call traffic-stopping numbers.

If you’ve waded in the water here and other places where I’ve put my paw print, you know that the wobbly West Coast windbag has inundated you with Ontario opuses. However, I’m not sure about this one. Most of the focus has been on the incredible 1975 race where Garlits’ Top Fuel 5.63, 250.69 set the class standard for the next seven years, and Don Prudhomme’s 5.98 became the first run in that zone, but there were others and the one here is the 1972 race where the first five-second Top Fuel charge came on a losing run.

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To this point, Ontario had not given indications of what we would see at the 1972 Supernationals. Going into the event, the billard table smooth track had an elapsed time record of 6.53, all things considered, a good, middle of the pack score. When the event came to a dramatic close, the mark had peeled off a staggering .56 digits!

With the luxury of 20-20 historical hindsight, 1972 proved to be a bellweather year. On January 1 of that season, the best Top Fuel elapsed time was a 6.21 turned by Garlits at the ’71 Indy event. The new year was only a couple of weeks old when Don Prudhomme and John Wiebe produced side-by-side 6.17s at the Lions NHRA Grand Premiere. A few weeks later in tire tests also at Lions, Clayton Harris quickened the pace with a 6.16 in Jack McKay’s New Dimension dragster, and by mid-March Garlits clocked a 6.15 in winning the NHRA Gatornationals. With the bell ready to ring for the ’72 Supernationals, Jerry Ruth held the quickest elapsed times with 6.06 and 6.07 laps at Indianapolis.

Anybody with a sense of history knew what was coming, the five-second zone. Only issue was when. Frankly, as good as the ’72 season, the much-anticipated first five did not appear as a set deal. Ontario was professional in every detail and likely could produce 6.1s, but 6.0s only as an extreme longshot and 5.9s as a virtual impossibility. The only other race on the calendar was the NHRA World Finals at Amarillo Dragway, which had all the bite of Homer Simpson’s father. In other words, Ontario or bust.