Top Fuel national-event debutante Gary Beck upset Jerry Ruth in the Indy Top Fuel final, and both of them were great drivers. However, overall, the field was greatly watered down from the Tulsa exodus with less than a dozen or so of the 32 first-round combatants having any real chance at winning.

The Tulsa purses definitely were higher. On the cover of AHRA’s Sept. 15, 1972 Tulsa results issue, the headlines read “$111,096 For Winners at National Challenge,” and the subhead read “McEwen - $38,196; Jenkins - $35,550, Moody - $37,350.” The paper could’ve also bannered without fear of contradiction, “1972 Tulsa PRA show whips the NHRA U.S. Nationals,” because it in fact did. Beck made a little more than $5,000 for his win at Indy.

“I really thought we should have run the race on the same date in 1973,” Garlits said. “However, Tice and others felt that the point had been made, so the Tulsa race was run a weekend before the Indy Labor Day dates.”

The point had been made, while Carbone may have only won $3,000 at the ‘71 event, Gary Beck came away with a little over $18,000 by winning the Nationals in 1973.

The 1973 race at Tulsa was successful, too. Garlits, Prudhomme, and Jenkins won that year’s titles, collected big money, and did so in front of capacity crowds. However, Indy recovered nicely a week later, drawing the Tulsa racers, and hosting one of the best meets in event history. In fact, a harbinger of the future could be seen in the outcome of a particular first-round race at the Nationals. Beck, the previous year’s Indy champ, defeated Garlits in round one, symbolic in a way of the comeback NHRA and a new kid on the block, the International Hot Rod Association (IHRA), would make a few years later.

Georgia Miller, who began working with AHRA in 1960 and later became one of the contract negotiators as well as everything from driver scheduling to financial bookwork, spoke to that situation by saying, “When NHRA [and IHRA] got Winston, that allowed them to take off. We still offered a good show and made money at the races, but Winston’s involvement changed everything. For instance, if one of our dates conflicted with an NHRA or IHRA event, the racer’s sponsor said to skip over our race and go with one of the other two. They figured that the exposure was better there and that’s what they wanted.”

In April of 1975, R.J. Reynolds company and its Winston brand of cigarettes did indeed announce that they would back the NHRA and IHRA race schedules that year. Their involvement with the two involved a $100,000 year-end payout with about 80-percent going to the pros. The Top Fuel winner in NHRA competition received a $20,000 check at the end of the season, a little less than the Grand American payout, but the event check paid a handsome $5,000 to both Top Fuel and Funny Car while AHRA could muster just $3,000 to its two nitro winners.

AHRA’s competition got stiffer in 1976. At that year’s NHRA Gatornationals, NHRA produced its first in-house television production with its Diamond P coverage. AHRA was in no position to match that, and the gap between the two widened.

Not only that and the control if not monopolization of talent, but NHRA’s tracks in general were better than the AHRA emporiums. In the Bicentennial year, AHRA held national events at Tucson Dragway, Kansas City Int’l Raceway, Tulsa Int’l Dragway, two stops at Detroit Dragway and St. Louis Int’l Raceway, Green Valley Race City in Smithfield, Texas, New York National Speedway, and finishing up at Spokane Raceway Park. To be blunt, Tucson was a desert rat hole, producing blah times and sandy surfaces, Kansas City (b. 1960) Tulsa (b. 1958), and Detroit (b. 1959) were old and worn out, St. Louis was a host site when it was always hot and muggy, leaving New York and Spokane as the only race courses that could produce anything approaching, decent, on-the-up-and-up times.

NHRA, in contrast, constantly updated and cleaned up its race sites. It was non-profit and dumped large sums of money back into its race courses. Magical once-a-year Pomona Raceway, Gainesville Raceway, Raceway Park in Englishtown, N.J., Indianapolis Raceway Park, Seattle Int’l Raceway, and auto racing’s Taj Mahal, Ontario Motor Speedway were among the very best race courses in the world and far outstripped their AHRA rivals, and for that matter, their much younger IHRA rivals. Fans could go there expecting incredible performances and races.

In 1975, Garlits, an AHRA evergreen, made the greatest run in Top Fuel history at that year’s NHRA Winston Supernationals / World Finals at Ontario with a 5.63, 250.69. That 5.63 would last as the sport’s lowest e.t. until 1981 when Jeb Allen ran a 5.62 at the Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla. At the same race, Don Prudhomme clocked the first Funny Car 5-second run with a 5.98, along with the sport’s first class 240, a 240.00. The next year, Prudhomme ran a 5.97 at Indy.

Jim Nicoll in the Speed Equipment World Vega. Photo by Bob Martin.

AHRA didn’t produce numbers close to those. A year later in 1976, John Wiebe’s 5.89 at Green Valley was the best Top Fuel elapsed time and the Texas track had a reputation for having hot clocks back then. AHRA’s best Funny Car elapsed time was a 6.08 by Tom Prock in Phil Castronovo’s Custom Body Enterprises Dodge Sport also at Green Valley, again another number that was pooh-poohed by drag racing insiders. Why? On March 7 of that year, Prock received a 5.97 time slip from the Green Valley timers. The best non-Green Valley time by the good-running New York car was a one-time 6.1-second pass, a 6.16 at Indianapolis, with the next best being occasional mid-6.2-second shots.

The simple fact of the matter was that NHRA through having a better mouse trap, and IHRA through better political connections (IHRA founder Larry Carrier was tight with Tennessee State Senator Carl Moore, who reportedly helped spring their Winston deal) were outrunning AHRA in much the same fashion as the race cars.

Next issue: THE DEATH OF JIM TICE AND AHRA

page 6 of 6

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