The Funny Cars were not an unknown quantity at Bakersfield. They first showed at the ’66 race and Gaspar “Gas” Ronda wowed even the hardest of the hardcore Top Fuel fans when he ran an 8.96 to beat Tom McEwen’s Hemi-Cuda, but the show was more of an afterthought given what was happening in Top Fuel.
Moreover, there would not be 64- and 32-car Top Fuel shows as in the past. Instead, it would be one qualified 32-car show on Sunday. While the Bakersfielders were busy preparing for their new format, things were really popping in 1967. The NHRA Winternationals had been a smashing success with somewhere between 60 and 70 Top Fuel dragsters trying to qualify for a 32-car show, A week earlier, a slightly smaller field tried for AHRA’s 32-car wingding in Scottsdale, Arizona, and to complicate matters further, NASCAR, which actually sanctioned drag races from 1965 through 1967, was setting up their own fuel show, a 16-car bracket in Florida.
There’s a lot of disagreement on any one reason why the 1967 edition of the Bakersfield show fell off so badly from the success of previous events, but the general consensus was the inclusion of the Funny Cars. The promoters definitely booked some class cars. The number one Funny Car act in the country, “Dyno Don” Nicholson’s flip-top Comet, Arnie Beswick’s blown Pontiac, Jack Chrisman’s blown fuel Comet, Bruce Larson’s superb “USA-1” Chevelle, Roger Wolford’s “Secret Weapon” blown fuel Jeep, and one of the event’s big winners and one of the most popular acts in drag racing, the Stone-Woods-Cook team out of Paramount, Calif., with their all-out blown fuel Mustang Funny Car. Lost in the hubbub was a guy who would later go on to be one of the Funny Car class’s greatest heroes, 21-year-old Russell James “Jungle Jim” Liberman in the blown “Gypsy” fuel Corvette.
Nothing wrong with a lineup like that, but in 1967, there were a lot of veteran race fans who were slow to warm up to the Funny Cars. Despite their over-the-edge wildness, a joyous marriage between Fuel Altereds and AA/Gas Supercharged, the attitude among many of the Bakersfield aficionados was “F*ck those things; Let ‘em have their own race.” The attitude was not unlike the Elvis generation’s difficulty in adapting to long hair and the Beatles: “They can’t sing and they look like chicks.”
Top Fuel? Overall, a very good show, but not even up to Bakersfield standards. In fact, influential and popular Drag Racing magazine bannered something along the lines of “Twilight for the March Meet” in their event coverage.
Heroes of past events Garlits, Kalitta, Art Malone, Chris Karamesines and even Burbank, Calif., superstar “TV Tommy” Ivo didn’t show. Some East Coast cars made it to the staging lanes --“Bub” Reese in Jim & Alison Lee’s “Great Expectations” entry out of Virginia, Pete Robinson, Texans Dan Rightsell and John Wilson aboard the Rowsey & Cox “Banzai” entry and even eventual ’68 Champion Ron Rivero wheeling the K&G Speed Shop dragster out of Pennsylvania put out great efforts -- but the race had lost a big chunk of its mystique. Most of the West Coast hitters were there, the Prudhommes, McEwens, et. al., and it was from their ranks that the final evolved.
Mike Snively won the event beating hands down the West Coast’s biggest 1966 winner, Dave Beebe in the Beebe Bros.-Vinson-Sixt dragster, and fans got to see a lower e.t. than was run at any of the other aforementioned ’67 events. In a trivial yet very historical run, Larry Faust ran a 7.10 for low e.t. in the Mooneyham-Faust-Ferguson-Jackson dragster and did it without smoking the tires. As far as this reporter can recall, a smokeless full-on super charge without tire smoke was unheard of until that run. Certainly, it was he first time a low e.t. was set with this profile.
Whatever, the ’67 event transformed the Bakersfield show for ever.
Don’t misunderstand. In the years from 1968 through 1986, the Bakersfield race was still one of the top dozen shows in the country and likely the best independent Top Fuel show.
Many historic and exciting happenings transpired at the race, but the difference was the loss of spontaneity or more particularly, its mystique. After the 1967 show, if you were a Top Fuel racer, you didn’t HAVE to go to Bakersfield. It wasn’t more than five years before the Miller Family, the patriarchs of the facility, started booking in talent, most noticeably Garlits. For me, it was like seeing the Rolling Stones back then and seeing them now. Still a terrific band, but not the greatest show on turf … not with current royalty Hannah Montana and Kelly Clarkson working the boards. (Whoops, acid flashback.)
I won’t go through those years event by event, but instead note some genuine highlights of the March Meet and, of course, this is bound to be subjective as hell.
For me, the 1967 event represented a three-year break from the groves of Famoso. I attended the Lions AHRA races and they were, in many cases, unforgettable. I was about 15 feet away alongside the chain link fence from Garlits and Richard Tharp in the Creitz and Donovan dragster during the 1970 Top Fuel finale when “Big Daddy’s” transmission exploded, severing the top half of his right foot and leading to one of the most dramatic mechanical changes in drag racing history.
Still, in Bakersfield events 1968 through 1970, good solid shows presented Top Fuel wins for transplanted Southern Californian Ron Rivero in the K&G car, Jim Dunn, and the father of bitchin’ stitchin’, Tony Nancy.
The ’71 race was very important in that Garlits’ revolutionary rear-engine dragster, which won Pomona, backed up that effort with a superb holeshot final-round win over Rick Ramsey in the Keeling & Clayton beauty. The ever-popular “Mongoose” totally dominated the ’72 show, and one of the very best, though least recognized West Coast Top Fuel chauffeurs, Dwight Salisbury, cleaned up the following year. The Salisbury win was especially interesting because, in my estimation, he hung the most outrageous holeshot on Garlits and won a 6.68 to 6.68 duel.
The picture of that race was the lead shot on page one of National DRAGSTER’s coverage issue and the starting line lead was so big that it appeared Salisbury had red-lighted. I think Garlits would tell you that little joust was about as bad as it got in the starting line dept., for him. I mean, let’s face it; Garlits in his prime didn’t get nailed very often.
Excellent shows of the late 1970s were probably highlighted by hometown boys James Warren and Roger Coburn’s three-event sweep in 1975-1977. At the first and last event, Warren, one of the truly great drivers in class history (Man, if those guys had a traveling budget back then, the record books would look a lot different than they do now)) personally knocked out Garlits, the biggest winner in the event history.
The 1980s? Two racers plus one amazing upset winner stand out. The incomparable Shirley Muldowney wiped out the field in 1981 and looked like she would do it again the two years later, except for one small factor … a guy taking place in his first set of asphalt eliminations, Danny Danell of Hanford, California. The Danell Bros., benefiting from tuning assists from the highly regarded Dan Olson and what looked like the Fresno Fuel Mafia from Eddie’s Speed Shop left on the Shirley and set low e.t in a stunning 5.66 upset.
The year earlier, Shirley was involved in one of her many historic moments when she and Lucille Lee with the Marc Danekas-owned TR-3 Resin Glaze Spl. made up the first all-female fuel final, a race where Lee nailed an upset win. Anytime Shirley lost in the early 1980s, it was an upset, but these two shows were indeed memorable.
The other top gun of the, well, actually mid-1980s, was Gary Beck. He and car owner Larry Minor tore up the fields in 1984 and 1985, but truthfully, the eliminators only had a few what could be called “top gun” types.
In 1986 and 1988, Garlits was again paid to show and made short work of admittedly light fields. At the ’86 race, his final-round victim was former NFL Houston Oiler quarterback Dan Pastorini, and a year later crowd and sentimental favorite (not to mention a Lions starter and one of very best in drag racing history) Larry Sutton aboard Greg Badger, Tommy Whitmore and Eric Reed-Dowd’s L.A. entry.
If Bakersfield experienced any other drop off as it had in 1967, it was at the event’s last gasp in 1988. The promoter was a good one, John Durbin, a guy whose roots went back to, if not the very late 1950s then the very early 1960s, but he fell victim to the mystique of a race that was long past its prime.
From what I’m told, no one was going to be paid appearance money in 1988. The attitude, as I was informed, was, “Hey, this is Bakersfield! The biggest fuel race in the world,” which sadly was not the case… not with Winston bankrolling the NHRA and IHRA series.
And no one of any clout showed. To their credit, the last finalists and unsponsored warriors, “Butch” Blair in the “Blair’s Fugowie” paired up with Bob Reehl in the Posey & Murdoch entry and put on a good race, winning the final Bakersfield Top Fuel show. Ironically, the only two really nationally known names were FUNNY CAR drivers not Top Fuel people. John Force and Dale Pulde were part of the Funny Car field at what was the swan song for what, for a while, was drag racing’s greatest show on Earth.