​ Do you have the desire to go NHRA nitro racing again?

 

JR: Nope, been there done that. I’m 78 years old. I just want to enjoy myself. I enjoy the people at the races, I like the controversies. When they got the cars to slow down in 2014 they got Beard to work on it. Beard came right to me and he said you are my go-to guy. He knows I know what I am doing. I named the Project 1320 in ‘15. By the time we got there it couldn’t be done. The cars are too fast. You start slowing them down, it isn’t going to work very well. Now the cars are knocking on 325-330. They can do that and still be fairly safe.

 

Let’s just market the sport better and make the personalities involved more popular. Wally’s plan was not to make one driver the focal point of the sport. It’s common for quarter-mile racers to retire and no one knows it. Even Shirley didn’t get a lot of fanfare when she retired, or Prudhomme either. They were never hailed like, say, Richard Petty, and Prudhomme’s career was on parallel with Petty’s, as was Garlits. But they kinda slipped off ’cause to the NHRA if they leave they make a big dent in your pocketbook, and the bigger the fanfare of them leaving the bigger the dent will be in NHRA’ s pocketbook. And they don’t want that. But that could be handled differently too. The NHRA might be learning.

 

​ You seem to feel like you have your finger on the pulse of the sport, you know what is going on. I presume you speak with Beard along with a host of others. Who do you see as the future of the sport?

 

JR: Of fuel car racing? Oh Jesus, I hope Schumacher continues. Because he loves it and he can afford to do it. So can Kalitta. But it all comes down to marketing it better. I think Peter Clifford is doing that. I saw Leah Pruett (Pritchett) the other day was doing a bunch of stuff, with displays and stuff on some main street. The kind of stuff NASCAR would do. Bigger banquets and stuff. They need to make all the drivers more like heroes. Tony Schumacher is a natural. He says the right stuff, and even looks like a sergeant; he has had a tremendous career. He had the right kind of publicity. And the girls… Leah is damn good at that. Wilkerson is a real down home kind of guy who would be a great spokesperson.

 

But the damn NHRA won’t spend much on marketing. When the show comes to town the only place you see anything about it is on Velocity or something like that. I know it is expensive, but there has to be ways of doing it better. Take some money from the salaries of the higher ups and buy some advertising with it. So the damn sport will still be there. Man, I saw where Tom Compton made 960,000 dollars a year or something like that. Is that really necessary? He hardly went to the damn races. He maybe went to one out of three, if that, glad-handing a few people. I do not think he loved the sport, he was just making a living at it. A damn good one, but I feel that is way out of line.

 

​ Back in the day drivers had nicknames that emulated their personalities. Jerry “The King” Ruth, Ed “The Ace” McCullough, Don “The Snake” Prudhomme, Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen, etc. Getting back to your marketing point, and I am not asking to go to WWE or Monster Truck racing, but is the NHRA missing the boat by not working with drivers’ personalities and using nicknames that the fans could connect with?

 

JR: Oh hell yes! Absolutely they are. They have always tried to in some extent squelch the personalities, but seem to be getting better. Let these guys be. I saw Prudhomme at this high-dollar car show and he was up there speaking and he was great. I feel the NHRA has a great product. You see when they interview a new person who has never seen the sport before live, how impressed they are with the sport. The competition seems to be fairly even. Is it inexpensive? No, it isn’t.

 

I like how they do the live stuff, especially for just a few rounds, but I do not think they can do a whole race, ’cause by nature we blow stuff up, and when we do that, we go back and fix it. That’s how we got where we are. So you want to eliminate that, but I don’t think you can. Plus the guys won’t let you, they will keep working at it.

 

​ Back when you were still racing Division races were big deals, now most Division races get almost no spectators and the only nitro cars are the A Fuel Dragsters. What is your opinion of Division racing today?

 

JR: There are six of those races a year in each of the seven divisions of NHRA. That’s OK because that was Wally’s original direction. Right now the Divisional events are the kiss of death; there is nobody there except for relatives and they leave when their son or grandson loses. If NHRA would have let the injected fuelers run, let’s just think about this for a second. They ran right about six-oh when they first came out. Fuel injectors with hemispherical engine, no superchargers, you know, with a 2.90 gear. Ran about 270 miles per hour. The blown alcohol guys couldn’t run with them, ’cause the alcohol guys were in the 6.20 at 228, and it was a drubbing. So NHRA started to load weight on the cars (injected nitro) in an attempt to get them slowed down. And when that didn’t work they started taking fuel away from them. Now they have it to where there is parity in the class. It’s pretty evenly balanced right now. I think the injected cars have won the most championships in the past five or six years.

 

But the deal is they had nitro cars at the races! They would have nitro cars and they wouldn’t break at all ’cause they all run blown fuel car parts in them, and they make a couple thousand horses and a fueler makes ten. So the parts are there to run those cars and be reliable. Did they miss that opening? Yeah, I think so. Why did they do that? [long pause] I don’t know. The NHRA seems to want to make the racer pay for everything.

 

​ From personal experience, I have seen two Divisional event locations that seem to do well with spectators and that is Bandimere and Firebird in Idaho.

 

JR: Yes, that is right. You know why? The New boys [the New family at Firebird] do a hell of a job. You know Scott and those guys. That was their dad’s place and they took it over, and they WORK at it, so they do a lot of marketing. That place supports three or four families while most tracks lose money for one family. Those boys work hard. Bandimere is the same way. That family works hard. They have water running underneath the track to keep it cooler! You think they care about the racers, damn right they do. They are on it.

 

Then there is Bruton Smith, and that four wide, it is junk. Nobody likes it, racers don’t like it, I DON’T LIKE IT. But Bruton likes it, so let him watch it by himself. It looks like a traffic jam. Trying to watch four cars and two guys are racing and then one of the other ones is blowing the body off of something. The drivers hate it, trust me. If you ask the drivers, would you like to keep doing this or wouldn’t ya? They’re all so chicken shit that they are afraid to say no. They are all going “Well, if Bruton likes it then I like it.”  When they first went there all the drivers were dead against it, remember that? Then Bruton says “I’ll take my tracks and go home.” Well shit, the next day the drivers were like, “It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

 

It’s all bullshit. I’m an educated spectator now, and it is shitty, it’s junk. Guys who lose actually win and it is confusing as hell. A while back they had dragsters racing funny cars, hell it was like bracket racing fuel cars. So if you run too fast and you’re out? That bracket racing is bad enough without doing that shit.

 

​ A lot of drag racing folks say bracket racing is the backbone of the sport. Where a lot of people get their start in the sport.

 

JR: I know it is, that is very true. I see these kids in Junior Dragsters and see where they are now. Lots of second and third generation racers are making their way into the sport like Shawn Langdon and Leah Pritchett. So I can’t argue with that. I hate to watch those bracket cars leave the starting line, with their stutter starts and shit like that, but if it keeps people drag racing then I will deal with it. I feel that NHRA is trying to keep from driving everybody out of the sport. From being too expensive to being too competitive. Not much into dial-in racing, I like heads up racing ’cause, hell, I’m old fashioned.

 

​ You have mentioned Leah Pritchett quite a few times. Why?

 

JR: She is very marketable.

 

​ Leah also knows which end of a wrench to hold. She can do the clutch, she can work on the motor, she isn’t afraid to get dirty.

 

JR: You’re right, she reminds me of Kim LaHaie (Richards). Kim was kinda a tomboy. I think she carried a knife on her, but she was smart and was very good doing the clutch on cars. But I don’t think gender is all that important. I think that NHRA over-did the woman deal “THE YEAR OF THE WOMAN”. Are those ladies good? Yeah, they’re good. Do they deserve the attention they are getting? Yeah, sure. But let’s not forget there are a lot of guys out there as well. Are women drivers better than men? NO. They are about the same.

 

​ Is there another driver you like?

 

JR: Antron Brown is the best pure driver on the tour right now. Leah is right behind Antron. But Antron is the complete package, as far as driving and marketing, and overall. He is just a wonderful person.

 

​ The NHRA used to have nitro pro classes as part of their Divisional meets. Now Divisional events are for only the sportsman cars. Do you think they should bring the pro classes back to the Division races?

 

JR: I keep hearing about Funny Cars being faster than the Top Fuelers. Why don’t the dragsters go as fast as Funny Cars? Cause the dragsters have a damned rev limiter on them. So the rev limiter starts knocking cylinders out 7900 RPM. The funny cars don’t do it till around 8100 RPM. If they made the rev limiter rule the same for both cars, the dragster will run off and leave them. And the announcers say the funny cars are faster due to aerodynamics. I haven’t heard one announcer even use the term rev limiter, maybe one guy. Am I missing anything?

 

​ Nope, that about covers it. Thanks for your time.