How would you characterize your approach to working on race cars?
Fulton: Well, there’s a lot of science behind racing, I realized that early, so there wasn’t a lot of trial and error. I studied the science of racing, you know, chemistry and physics and engineering; I studied all of that over the years and applied it to what I wanted to accomplish.
Were you a good student in school?
Fulton: Average. In high school I was a straight-A student in the stuff that I liked and a straight-C in all the rest. I actually started in college in the fall of ’71 on the GI Bill and stayed three semesters. Then I just looked around and they weren’t teaching the stuff I wanted to know. I mean, I wasn’t going to get an engineering degree and go off and work for some firm, I was racing! One of my friends, he had a little speed shop so I moved to Spartanburg and worked in the shop at night and went to college during the day and it eventually got to where I dropped out of college.
Who in drag racing impresses you the most?
Fulton: Well, in all the professional classes, there’s very few individuals left. It’s got too technical for an individual to do it all. I mean, look at our buddy, Warren Johnson. He’s always had control of everything, but now you just can’t do everything. These other guys have got engineers and the money behind them, a multitude of people helping them. It’s not that he ain’t still the smartest one in the crowd, it’s just that he can’t do it all, it’s Father Time catching up with him. I mean, Warren was always all of us hero because he was the man that did it all himself. He’s one of my favorite racers of all time because of that.
Back when I first started, naturally it was Bill Jenkins. He was the man; he’s still the man. Then Lee Shepherd he was a great one when he was alive and I go all the way back to Don Carlton. And another one that I really admired was ol’ Bob Glidden. I was around when he first started, working off a ramp truck, I heard all kinds of tales about him. He was really hardcore; he did it so long it about run him crazy. In the end I think it did.
Is there anyone among your current customers that you particularly enjoy working with?
Fulton: One of the best right now in Pro Mod is also one helluva’ human being and his name is Jim Halsey. He has a lot of qualities that I admire in a man. He’s a great racer, a great person and is just great to work with.
I’ve worked with a lot of racers over the years and I got a lot of them started in racing. Scotty Cannon, he was a street racer when he came to me and we started from the bottom and worked him all the way up until he was some big champion. There were a lot like that. Quain Stott and Mitch Stott, both of them would’ve never raced if it hadn’t been for me, and Todd Tutterow, he didn’t do this type stuff ‘til he got working with me. There was just a multitude of racers like that up in North Carolina.
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Has anyone influenced you in a similar way?
Fulton: I have this one guy that helps me now and he’s actually the smartest human being I’ve ever met—literally. His name is Pat Smith and he’s a retired engineer, retired at 42 years old and he’s got his act together. He really helps me just keeping my mind sharp and we do have a great time together.
In any facet of anything a human being fools with, he knows it. And if I ask him a question that he don’t know, he goes and finds the answer and it’s so in-depth and he has a real knack—he should’ve been a teacher—for explaining things from the first principle of how it works.
In racing, he just thought it was a bunch of kids playing at first, but when he got to seeing how technical it is he started hanging around with me and Quain (Stott) and eventually just started helping me. Some of the light that he’s shed on what’s actually happening in some racing stuff is just unbelievable. He takes it all the way back to how something actually works. He’s been helping me tremendously about the last three years, I guess, he comes by in the evening and we start working on all these projects and doing research and man, it’s just unbelievable.
When you look at what’s going on with these cars, when you take everything down to the first principle, everything looks simple. That’s how they teach engineers, they teach ‘em first principle and then apply it up the line. It’s all stuff that a racer needs to know—especially the chassis builders. The chassis builders have been doing stupid stuff for about 20 years and they’ve just recently got that fixed on some of these high-powered cars.
Anything that’s doing a big job is really based on a simple thing and once you understand that it suddenly gets a whole lot easier and a race car has a lot of facets like that. I mean, I had a handle on a lot of stuff, but I didn’t fully understand it back to the basics of what’s really going on. I’m talking about things like combustion in the engine, detonation in the engine, and when Pat explains it from the first principle it’s very illuminating.
You’re obviously a nitrous man and want to sell nitrous engines, but looking at it objectively, do you think the trend in NHRA/IHRA Pro Mod racing for domination by blower cars is hurting the class as a whole?
Fulton: Oh, it’s hurting it bad, real bad. I’ve been lucky that nitrous racing is so big, so broad, that I’ve been able to just move into other avenues. I’ve got all the work I can do, so it hasn’t really hurt me in that way, but it’s getting to a point now that nitrous racing is really an odd thing.
The thing that holds nitrous racing back so much is that it’s detrimental to the engine in that in no other kind of racing on the planet is the flame speed inside the motor constantly changing. It’s because the flame speed inside the engine is dependent on the amount of oxygen in the mixture, almost directly. Well, in every other kind of engine the oxygen level always stays the same, you’re burning the atmosphere so it’s always at 20.9 percent. It doesn’t matter if it’s a supercharger, it’s still compressing 20.9 percent oxygen. Now, if you’re putting nitrous in it the flame speed will go up, but you won’t know by how much and it’s constantly changing as it goes down the track. Nitrous racers have very rarely learned to deal with that because it’s changing so bad and so fast that they can’t hardly keep up with it.
So is the ADRL’s splitting of blower and nitrous cars a better idea?
Fulton: Sure it is, it’s the only way to be fair. What I don’t understand, though, is them having no rules. That don’t make sense. They throw all these cars in there and say no rules, but sooner or later this is gonna’ get ugly. I mean, I don’t know why there isn’t already a nitro car in there. They do say the driver’s got to sit on the left side, but hell, they can throw a Funny Car motor in a Pro Mod.
And they say any weight and that one boy from Texas (Doug Reisterer), he’s got it figured out, he’s smart, he’s a good racer and he’s proved it’s not about the motor, it’s all about the weight. If they say no rules just how far is this gonna’ go? If it were me racing there, by tomorrow I’d have a car lighter than his. It’s all about the car and the gearing in the eighth mile; it ain’t about the motor.
But the ADRL, they need to have some form of rules or I don’t see how they can survive. I think it’s going to jam up real fast where they’re going to get a couple of dominant blower cars and a couple of dominant nitrous cars. I mean, look at Jason Scruggs, there’s already no competition for him and what kind of racing is that? I say put them all on gas and let them bring any blower they want because they just couldn’t run the same on gas.