The lone exception to this Sominex®-driven mediocrity is ultra-popular Funny Car veteran John Force. His interviews always amuse and often startle viewers, race officials and everyone except the sponsors Force somehow manages to mention. Amid Force’s adrenalin-spiked, sponsor plugs comes a machine-gun dialog of off the cuff remarks that remain a refreshing and sorely needed spark of individualism in today’s race broadcasts.
Prime suspects in launching the matching uniform craze are the down-South cousins in NASCAR, even though their most famous early racers and mechanics were themselves often found dressed in all-white. Legendary mechanic, engine builder, and crew chief, Henry “Smokey” Yunick, always wore white work uniforms as his daily attire, his name stitched above the pocket and on the back, “Best Damn Garage In Town”. Soon after the NASCAR teams began sporting matching sponsor uniforms, the professional drag racers quickly mimicked them. The wearing of all-white uniforms by drivers and crewmen in both forms of racing soon fell into disfavor.
Buster Couch gets a ride from crew members. (DRO file photo)
Sanctioning body officials may have been the last all-white hold outs until they fell victim to sponsor pressures to squeeze that last drop of exposure corpuscles from the racing turnip. Among the last to sport white trousers in on-camera exposure was NHRA’s legendary chief starter, the late Eddie H. “Buster” Couch. During his final starter years, Buster launched cars wearing his favored white pants, even if they were topped off with whatever the NHRA official uniform of the day may have been.
Car clubs and the car club culture were certainly the greatest casualties in the onward march of professionalism and big-time sponsors in drag racing. This decline and fall came as drag racing evolved from events held mostly on abandoned airport runways to purpose-built, modern drag racing plants. With that, the need for volunteer car club drag strip labor also evaporated. Suddenly there was no demand for club members to man time slip shacks or staging lanes, or to operate the timing clocks. Computerization eliminated most of the jobs that loyal car club members performed as volunteers, their only reward coming from being a part of the racing.
By the 1970’s the popularity and existence of car clubs and their safety-first mission quickly fell into oblivion. Today there are few hot rod car clubs that remain active. Their membership is generally populated by gray-beard racers who gather for bench racing discussions of how fast they were, rather than planning the design, construction and tuning of the next world conquering, fire-breathing, asphalt-eating acceleration monster.
Those white car club shirts, white trousers and the symbolic innocence of a hot rodding paradise -- lost now -- largely exists only in memories and a few old black and white photos. Some would say that when the car club guys and their auxiliary gals left, they took with them the pure, simple love of cars and drag racing in a far less complex time.