National Sprint Car Hall of Fame inductee Gordon Woolley’s first motorsports involvement was rolling jalopies for 10 bucks at the “Suicide Bowl” in his Waco, Texas, hometown.
That improbable initiation led to legitimate racing in 1945. Soon, he was the driver to beat at his hometown track, wheeling off 17 consecutive feature wins with his ’34 Oldsmobile jalopy. He moved to modifieds at Thunderbird Speedway in Crandall, Texas, and continued winning.
Content with his racing involvement, he’d settled into working as a mechanic and racing as a weekend warrior. Then a 1959 trip to Houston’s Meyer Speedway for a sprint car race transformed his life.
He told the buddy he traveled with, “Man, that’s exactly what I want to do.”
His pursuit of that goal met with little luck. “I asked everybody for a ride,” Woolley said, “but they’d all tell me, ‘Boy, I never heard of you. Where the hell is Wack-o?’”
He didn’t give up.
“I had a friend in Florida named ‘Flip’ Fritch,” recalled Woolley. “I asked him to help me find a ride. I was desperate to race sprint cars.”
“Flip” found a car for sale in Pennsylvania and loaned him $2,500 to buy it. Woolley hauled to Pennsylvania in his ’58 Chevy, purchased the car and headed home with only a tank full of gas and $20. By the time he hit Iowa, he was flat broke. While in Des Moines, he spotted a flyer promoting a sprint car race. He entered it, finished sixth and pocketed $50.
He knew then sprint cars were his destiny. He raced them at Devil’s Bowl Speedway and other dusty, rutty tracks throughout Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, before moving to the IMCA in 1960, along with buddies Jim McElreath and Johnny Rutherford.
Woolley captured the 1963 IMCA championship, and as a result USAC car owners started calling.
He answered their call only once.
“At the track, I got out of the car to get a drink of water,” quipped Woolley, explaining why he didn’t race USAC more, “and when I got back, the owner had another driver sitting in it.”
George Walther tested him at Indianapolis in 1964. But, in reality, Woolley fit any racing organization like a round peg in a square hole. He was a true outlaw racer before outlaws were the thing, racking up 60,000 miles a year crisscrossing the country, catching the big-paying races while pursuing his passion.
In that time, he switched cars as often as he did race tracks. He admitted he’d never worked with a single car owner for an entire season except in 1964 when he drove Hector Honore’s “Black Deuce.”
His 1963 IMCA championship year represented a telling example of his car-hopping ways.
He launched the season in Chet Wilson’s Chevy and won in Tampa. He then jumped into Jack Colvin’s former K.E.Y. car and took a series of CRA race wins against Bobby Unser, Johnny Wood and other CRA regulars.
“I really wanted to beat those CRA guys,” he said. “They thought they were better than the rest of us.”
When Johnny White departed the IMCA for USAC in mid-season, Woolley acquired White’s ride, the Weinberger Home car. With it, he won seven IMCA features, enough to take the title despite not running the entire season.
That he managed seven wins in the car speaks volumes about his uncanny talent. Built by Johnny White, the Weinberger sprinter was lightweight and overpowered. It required a gifted touch. Eventually, it killed two drivers and maimed two others, including White. Woolley tamed the baneful machine.
The number of sprint car features Woolley won is lost with the records of defunct tracks and now nonexistent racing organizations. His 37 IMCA feature wins are well documented, however.
Woolley took his last feature sprint car win in 1972 at Devils Bowl Speedway and retired from sprint cars later that year.
But he wasn’t finished with racing.
He returned to the cars and tracks where he launched his career, and in 1982 the 60-year-old won the stock car championship at Waco’s Heart-of-Texas Speedway. He continued racing well into the1990s.
Wooley was inducted into the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 1997 and five other Halls of Fame have recognized his accomplishments.
Looking back on his career, Woolley surmised, “I raced every kind of car there was. I’d get a ride anywhere if there was a chance to make money. I loved it. I wouldn’t have done anything different.”
