By Jeff Burk

This is Part Two of our interview. If you missed Part One, check it out here.

: What about spec motors for Top Fuel? Evidently NHRA has tested a 413-cubic inch motor, using a lot less fuel flow and one mag.

Scooter Brothers: Again, it doesn’t make any difference what the rules are: the smartest guys are still going to find a way to be better than the guy next to them.

: In your opinion will mandating a “spec motor” save the racers money?

SB: No. It won’t make it cheaper, won’t change anything. But on the other hand, a spec motor might make it safer and  it might slow them down a bit. There’s a lot of confusion on what a spec motor actually is. If you mandate that all engines must have this manufacturer’s block and this manufacturer’s crankshaft and this particular camshaft and this head, then the engines are all going to be the same, other than what the tuner does. I think that’s a bad, bad, bad deal.

There’s just as much competition between engine builders and tuners as there is between drag race drivers. They compete, not just on the racetrack but in the pits too. And the people who make cylinder heads and crankshafts and blocks compete just as much as the drivers do when they get on the racetrack. Competition is, I think, what constitutes the soul of any kind of racing, and any time you take competition out at any point in the system, I think you fail the fundamental premise of racing, and that’s the competition.

: Do you still like to go to the drags to spectate?

SB: I still have to attend a whole lot of different events throughout the year. It’s different than it was, but I still like to go sit in the stands and just watch the cars go down the track. The rest of the stuff has kind of kind of gotten by me. I don’t want to be there at six in the morning and leave at ten at night like I used to, but it’s still fun. One of the guys here at work (Comp Cams), he and I sort of grew up together, went to the old Dallas (Texas) track, it must have been about 1967, we were down there. It was a hundred and something degrees, and it was as miserable as I’ve ever been in my entire life. I was sitting on a tanker truck full of gasoline, right at the quarter-mile mark, watching those fuel cars with iron blocks going down the track throwing parts, but I couldn’t have been any happier doing anything than I was then.