- RACING OUTLAWS RACE DEMING DRIVERS
- RACING OUTLAWS RACE DEMING DRIVER
- RACING OUTLAWS RACE DEMING PLUS
"Take a good look at the waitresses, guys," Wolter said during a brief lunch stop at the California/Arizona border. I hopped into the cab of the DePasse tractor with the DePasse boys and Minor crewmember Willie Wolter (who after Minor would go on to have a nice - and still ongoing - career with Don Prudhomme), and off we went on our little 48-hour cross-country jaunt.
RACING OUTLAWS RACE DEMING DRIVERS
Both made the grueling trip with us - no hero drivers taking first-class flights here. Another hall of famer, Ed "the Ace" McCulloch, was wheeling the team's Olds flopper. Reigning world champ Gary Beck drove the team's number-one Miller Lite car, which was tuned by future hall of famer Bernie Fedderly, whom you obviously know and love as Austin Coil's sidekick with John Force. The Minor team at the time was anything but minor. Shirley and Missy picked me up from my unspacious North Hollywood bachelor pad the night before our departure, and I spent the night on their couch (after a raucous good-luck/going-away party hosted by Broos, who actually wasn't going with us), and we assembled the next morning at Minor's shop, where the cars were all loaded and ready to hit the road.Ĭurrent John Force Racing brain-trust member Bernie Fedderly, left, was part of Team Minor back then and shared some of his sage advice with DePasse. (Well, that and a rare chance for a local hero to make the national tour …) Though DePasse would have to pay his own expenses, the carrot was a state-of-the-art Minor-built engine for DePasse's hot rod. That year, Minor, himself a former sand racer, enlisted DePasse to carry his personal Top Fueler along with DePasse's new Corvette Alcohol Funny Car in DePasse's new 18-wheeler on a nationwide tour. The DePasses – Jim and wife Shirley and kids Jimmy and Missy - lived in Hemet, which any drag racing fan worth his salt knows also was the home base for Larry Minor's mega operation in the 1980s.
RACING OUTLAWS RACE DEMING PLUS
I was young and single, and my biggest life quandary was "You want fries with that?" How could I say no? Plus it sounded like a helluva first-person story for ND. Jim and his son Jimmy, who was about my age (early 20s), and crew chief Richard Broos always welcomed me into their pit, and when the unexpected and unprecedented chance came for them to travel to the Gatornationals came, they invited me along. They were regulars at Orange County, former sand drag racers trying their luck on the asphalt, and they did quite well for themselves.
RACING OUTLAWS RACE DEMING DRIVER
In my first 18 months on the job, I had become good friends with several racers, among them Alcohol Funny Car driver Jim DePasse and his family. No, I made my first Florida foray not as a reporter but as a stowaway of sorts, a young cub reporter eager to experience life on the road as a traveling member of a race team, to see what this whole circus life was all about. Still, the skills we learned in those days served us well and probably continue to do so in some ways. There were no cell phones or e-mail to reach racers still on the road home to ask them these questions nor PR people to write press releases, so we winged it based on the photos and the sketchy memories of the shutterbugs.
"I don't remember I think he might have hurt something," might be the reply, which we translated into reporting as "Garlits ran into trouble on his pass" or something similar. "Why did Garlits only run 8.70 in the second round? Did he smoke the tires or break something?" we might ask. For some races, only a photographer went and brought home just his film and best recollections of what transpired, and we reporters wrote the stories based on the ladder sheets and the observations of the photographers. My first Gatornationals was 25 years ago, at the historic 1984 event, where Joe Amato became the first Top Fuel driver to exceed 260 mph and was followed into that twilight zone about 90 minutes later by Kenny Bernstein in his Budweiser King Funny Car, but I wasn't there as a race reporter for National DRAGSTER in the strictest sense of the word.īack then, travel to national events was tightly controlled for the DRAGSTER staff.
In a little more than two weeks, I'll be winging my way east to once again attend one of the grandest races on the NHRA schedule, the ACDelco NHRA Gatornationals in Gainesville. sacked out in the sleeper, somewhere in the middle of New Mexico. That's me at left, Willie Wolter driving, and Jim DePasse Sr. My first trip to the Gatornationals as part of the ND staff was in the cab of a race car hauler in 1984 as part of Jim DePasse's Alcohol Funny Car team.
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