MESA, Ariz. — Already this season, NHRA drivers have dispensed home remedies, recipes for success, fatherly and grandfatherly advice and insight into the difference between racing a Top Fuel dragster and a Funny Car.
Nose-Hair Solution
Five-time NHRA Pro Stock champion Greg Anderson said, “I have to do whatever I can do to get myself jump-started. Sometimes you have to slap yourself in the face. Sometimes you have to yank a nose hair out of your nose. And as crazy as it sounds, it was a trick I learned driving the truck for all those years with (six-time champ) Warren Johnson. If you’re falling asleep in the middle of the night, you yank a nose hair and it crosses your eyes and you shake your head like you just drank a whole bottle of horseradish.”
Secret to Success
Funny Car driver Buddy Hull claims he has discovered the secret to success: “Success follows success. So I’ve always looked at my life and said, ‘OK – who can I pick out in this crowd that’s doing better at this than I’m doing it? And how can I model my life to become somewhat a shadow of their life?’
“If you want to have the biggest arms in the gym, you follow the guy’s workout that currently has the biggest arms in the gym. And once you get yours to be his size, then you figure out a way to surpass him. If you want your business to be the best business that it can be, you mimic the best in the industry. And then once you get there, you do something to surpass them. If you want to be the best race car driver you can be, you mimic what the best person does. And once you get there, you do something to surpass them.
“You never reinvent the wheel. That wheel has been a circle since it was created. We live in a world that, I believe, there’s not too much left. The technology’s left. But the keys to success as an individual, they’ve already all been uncovered. They’ve been unleashed.”
Grandfatherly Love
Krista Baldwin had a mock-ultimatum from her grandfather, drag-racing pioneer Chris Karamesines, for the May 17-19 Route 66 Nationals in Joliet, Ill. He told her, “If you don’t run well on Friday, I’m going home.” She said, “That’s the way he says, ‘I love you.’ I told him, ‘I hope you do. Well, you live there. I hope you go home.’”
Thanks Dad
Dan Wilkerson has switched from driver to tuner and back to driver of retired father Tim Wilkerson’s Mustang Funny Car. And he told FOX reporter Bruno Massel, “I’m like 50-50, honestly. I love doing both. Just about the time I thought I was over driving, Tim gave me a little taste, gave me another hit, and I was sucked in again.
“I’ve never done drugs,” the younger Wilkerson added, “but this is more addicting than anything I can imagine.”
Gary Densham has raced since 1979, and says, “I don’t want to quit racing.” But he might have to sell his well-used Funny Car and equipment because “the cost has gotten to be astronomical and non-sustainable to a normal person.”
His son Steven has been driving the car lately and, in his father’s humorously twisted opinion, doing a commendable job.
As for the car, the typically self-deprecating comic said, “There’s probably nobody stupid enough to buy it.”
However, he called it “a good car” and the “best driving car out here.”
He said, “It’s a Parallax-Plueger chassis. There are only two of them left in existence out here, Jason Rupert’s and ours, and they’re just very forgiving. They’re very easy to work around. It’d be a great car for anybody. If somebody puts some money in the thing, it’d be as fast as anything out here. But when you’re running parts 10, 15, 20 years old and two or three generations behind, it’s still going pretty good right off the trailer.”
As for son Steven Densham, who qualified 13th on the 16-car grid at Las Vegas in April, dad said, “Well, that, in my opinion, is pretty darn good for a bunch of derelicts. If my dumb ol’ kid with very few runs can drive it right down the center or an old guy like me drive it right down the center, it must be a good driving car.”
Suave vs. Savage
During drag racing’s 70-year history, fewer than 20 drivers have won in both nitro classes. Austin Prock is one of them. The Funny Car rookie shared the differences between the two 11,000-horsepower race cars: “The dragster is a lot more elegant, I would call it. (With) the longer wheelbase, you’re accelerating quicker, but the car is moving left to right, slower. I would call it the Cadillac of NHRA drag racing. The way it moves around is a lot more slow and lazy. You can be a lot smoother on the wheel, where the Funny Car, when it takes off it, it really wants to hunt. It wants to go in whatever direction it wants to go. It’s going there in a hurry, and you’d better be two steps ahead of it.”
THIS ARTICLE IS REPOSTED FROM THE MAY 29 EDITION OF SPEED SPORT INSIDER
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