Any racer will tell you there’s a lot to love about racing. For some, the most intriguing part is the competition – testing ourselves and our equipment against the best fellow racers. For others, it’s the camaraderie – the fact that as much as we want to tear each other apart on the race track, for the most part we’re all friends off the track (at the very least, we can typically respect that we share this common bond). For others yet, it’s the challenge – racing provides that in spades; mechanically, mentally, physically. There’s a lot to love, and on some level I think it’s fair to say we all enjoy each of these aspects and many more that both drive us to the sport and keep us engaged year over year.
If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that there are also aspects of racing that aren’t as appealing. The most obvious? It’s a lot of work! Whether you’re a part of a professional team or a weekend warrior, there is a high level of commitment that is required to simply field a competitive race car, get it to the race track, and compete. And for the vast majority of us, the workload (and the investment) don’t really make much sense. I constantly joke that if I had chosen to pour my heart and soul into an endeavor other than racing, and really committed my life to it the way that I have to racing, and gotten as good at it as I am at racing… Well, I’d either be rich, famous, or both. And I’m neither. That’s not unique to me, and yet, like many of you nodding your heads, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I LOVE this sport – as much today as I did when I was introduced to it 40+ years ago.
I bring up the challenge of the workload, because it’s heavy on my mind here early in the season. I don’t know about you, but preparing for my first trip to the track after the offseason is always a monumental task. Whether I built a completely new race car, or had to only perform minor maintenance in the offseason, getting everything ready and loaded up for the first time ALWAYS seems to require more time and patience than I allow for. No matter how much or little I have to do, no matter how prepared (or unprepared) I feel, that week is always a thrash.
You’d think that after doing this for three decades, I’d learn, but apparently I don’t. This past winter, I bit off far more than I was prepared to chew! In addition to maintaining and updating our fleet of Moser Engineering backed machines, I decided to add a new (to us) car to the mix (a new Top Dragster entry that I’ll be playing with here in 2026). As if that weren’t enough, I volunteered to rewire my sister-in-law’s race truck. You know what, it’s probably time to replace the axles underneath our trailer too (in addition to another laundry list of updates)! So for me, it didn’t feel like a weeklong thrash to get back to the track as much as a 2-month long thrash. And although we’ve made our first trip to the track of the season, it doesn’t feel like I’m done yet!
And yet it was in the midst of this thrash that I felt a bit of an uncanny peace. And this is the part that, while counterintuitive, I think most of us can relate to. I think I’ve come to love the thrash. I don’t always love the days when nothing falls into place (although I think I’ve come to accept that those days are inevitable), but I love the work. And I don’t think I’m alone. I think most of us actually love the work – if we didn’t, why do it?
When I think back, some of my fondest memories are of the thrash. I remember late nights with my Dad and some of the guys that I grew up racing with 30+ years ago – back when I couldn’t do it by myself. They taught me the ins and outs and got me on the track. And it’s not just the pre-race thrash. I’ve witnessed and been a part of some at-track thrash’s that I’ll never forget.
Maybe it spills back to watching the old Diamond P “Decade of Thrills” VHS cassettes as a kid, where Steve Evans helped me romanticize the moment when Billy Meyer blew the body of his Funny Car to smithereens, and then with the help of seemingly the entire pro pit area returned for the next round dawning the body of Kenny Bernstein’s Budweiser King atop his car.
I remember watching Gary Scelzi’s crew as a kid in Topeka. After back-to-back qualifying crashes destroyed their two chassis, they thrashed overnight to make one competitive car out of two relics – and succeeded!
I was at the World Super Pro Challenge years ago when Tim Archer hurt a motor in round 3 of the $50 grander. After a crew of at least 20 racers swapped the motor, and Kenny Underwood set the timing by ear (within 1* of optimal, by the way!), he missed the end of round 4 by about 15 seconds.
I still laugh about heading up the charge for Jeff Adkinson’s final Top Dragster qualifying session in Bradenton years ago. By the time he made the run, we had half of the car laying in his pit area, and as little oil and fluid as we thought his little SBC could operate on. After a memorable wheelie, he picked up more than two tenths and made the field!
I once made back-to-back rounds in a Tenn-Tuck event at Beech Bend, late in the race swapping fuel. I think round 5 was on gas, and round 6 I was burning alcohol. And won!
Another time at Tenn-Tuck, I spit the driveshaft out of my dragster in route to a round 1 victory. Jason Lynch and I had made a 4-link adjustment the night prior, but neither of us were sharp enough to realize that we’d extended the wheelbase, rendering the yoke too short. So we just made do and shoved another driveshaft in (that I robbed from Jeff Strickland’s car after I stopped him as he was literally pulling out of the gate). The vibration was so bad I couldn’t see straight going down the track (because, again, we didn’t actually fix the PROBLEM). Jason and I theorized that the hardest thing on the driveshaft had to be the burnout… So I stopped doing one and drove around the water – in a 4.60 dragster! I won the race that day, and we worked on that thing every single round. Was it stupid? Yea. Was it crazy? Yea. Was it awesome? YEA! And it’s one of many stories I’ll never forget.
Because that’s what passion does. It’s not always sensical. It’s not always logical. The truth is that, as racers, we don’t do this because it’s easy… We work at it, at least in part because it is difficult. Because there is reward in doing something challenging. And that reward isn’t necessarily the trophy or the big check at the end of the day. The reward IS the process of showing up, as ready as we can be, over and over and over again (and knowing that to do so you’ve worked in a way that often doesn’t make a ton of sense, and that a lot of others wouldn’t be willing to endure in order to enjoy it).
