For Don Garlits, the thrill of drag racing was in innovation, finding a smarter, safer way to beat his competition. He’d rise above the “Don Garbage” catcalls, this man who grew up far from the cradle of drag racing, pooh-poohed by the West Coast elite for his Tampa origins.
For John Force, the goal was to be the best the sport had ever seen, to be the undisputed champion. With 16 NHRA Funny Car titles and 154 victories (and a team with five additional crowns and a total of 286 race trophies), he indeed is the best. His motivation, he said, “was the pain of growing up in poverty.”
Josh Hart hasn’t risen to the stature of Garlits and Force, but in one short season, the Top Fuel owner-driver sent a message that he’s going to be a power on the race track and in the boardroom.
He caught everyone’s attention last March by winning his first professional event, the season-opening Gatornationals at Florida’s Gainesville Raceway. With that, he became the first in 20 years (since Darrell Russell in 2001) and only the fourth to earn the distinction, following Top Fueler Gary Scelzi (1997) and Funny Car’s K.C. Spurlock (1990). Hart also won at zMAX Dragway in September.
More impressively, Hart brought to the Camping World Drag Racing Series a handful of new sponsors, leveraged through his Burnyzz American Classic Horsepower facility in Ocala, Fla. His expanded business there — which he calls a “Hot Rod Heaven” — already takes up a city block, with its classic-car showroom, state-of-the-art service department and two climate-controlled vehicle storage facilities.
Midway through 2021, he acquired shop space in Brownsburg, Ind., and moved his Top Fuel operation there.
“Burnyzz is super-busy, anyway. Car sales are off the charts and we’re having a hard time keeping the inventory,” Hart noted. “The service department right now, if you want to build a car, a six-figure car, from the ground-up with Burnyzz’s, you would be on a waiting list for nine months before we could even start. Then, you’re looking at another six to eight months for a ground-up car. It’s pretty crazy right now.”
But Hart’s success was born of pain, just like Garlits’ and Force’s.
He grew up in northeastern Indiana, his family, by admission, “extremely poor — like, got to figure out how to get food. That starts a fire in your soul that maybe won’t ever go out. You just keep going.”
Hart, 38, knows he has an almost-insatiable urge to keep acquiring and accumulating — one to which his wife and business partner, Brittanie, would just as soon he apply the brakes.
He already has purchased a new Factory Stock Showdown operation and plans to compete in that class this season in addition to Top Fuel. He also purchased a second Top Fuel car and hasn’t announced plans for that yet.
“She sat me down and said, ‘I love you more than anything else in the world, but when is enough enough?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I never stopped to think about it.’ I just kept on going,” Hart said. “She wants to enjoy life and I’m still plugging away. She’s probably right. I told her the truth: ‘I never stopped to look around.’ That’s the first roadblock she has ever presented to me. It’s probably time to cool a little bit and get settled in.”
He couldn’t help himself, though. He said it’s “full steam ahead. This is something that I’ve been planning for a while. After this, I might yield to my wife’s advice. There’s just a lot of moving pieces: the race team in Indianapolis and the multiple businesses that we own in Ocala. It’s just time to get this last one bought and settle in and start enjoying life a little bit. This is something I thought would double our sales revenue. I feel like I’m extremely methodical in my chess game. You’re playing Monopoly, but you’re playing Monopoly in real life,” he explained.
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