4/10/2007
For over three decades Chuck Worsham has been racing Funny Cars and with his son, Del, has built one of the stronger and competitive independent NHRA nitro teams with their own in-house chassis shop, blower dyno, paint booth and regulation bowling alley all contained in their Orange, California, shop where they often hold evening tournaments on the lanes.
The father and son team-leaders have a close group of crewmembers with Del and now Jeff Arend piloting the Checker, Schuck’s and Kragen-sponsored red and blue funny cars on the NHRA POWERade circuit. While readying for the SummitRacing.com Nationals at Las Vegas, Del and Chuck took some time at the shop to talk with DRO’s Darr Hawthorne about their lives and times.
Chuck can you give us a chronological history of your Funny Car career from the Worsham & Day single car team to where you are today with a multi-car, fully funded team?
Chuck: Richard Day and I were partners. He used to go to an auto parts store in San Juan Capistrano that my cousin owned, I was standing there one day and he needed help putting a big Dana rear end in his ‘Cuda -- it was an alcohol car -- and I helped him do that and that’s how I got started. A couple of years later I kind of owned the team. I was making OK money at the time in my own concrete business.
Were you tuning the car for Richard Day?
Chuck: I didn’t know anything at the time – I was learning at the time. So several years into it I started learning, and learned a few things -- it takes time to learn things -- but Richard tuned in the 1970’s. I tuned it more in the ‘80s with him. Like I said, it takes time to learn how to tune an injected engine.
How did that experience relate to where you are at today as a tuner and team owner?
Chuck: Well, one day Art Hendy came by -- at that time we couldn’t afford to run the national events -- we had like a dead block in our “Screamer” car. Hendy was a friend of (crank
manufacturer) Sonny Bryant, he had a prospering water meter business and he offered me a deal to run our car with him driving it. So we really had no choice but to do that. We were getting passed by. Racing alcohol cars was kind of a rich man’s game. So we got with Art and raced an alcohol car for a couple of years then he (Hendy) decided he wanted to go nitro racing and he asked, “What do you think?” I said, “Let’s go!” So right at the end of the 1988 NHRA season we decided to go nitro (Funny Car racing) and came home and switched everything over - and never looked back.
