10 Things You Didn't Know... About Worsham Racing10. The Worsham Racing program was run out of Chuck Worsham's garage, in suburban Orange, Calif., until the team finally moved into a dedicated race shop in 2001. 9. The CSK team's current red transporter is the first "new" 8. Being "hands on" and independent has always been a Worsham trademark. Today, the team builds their own chassis, mounts their bodies, and does all fabrication work in-house. 7. The team landed the CSK sponsorship in 1997, when fellow Funny Car driver Jim Epler landed two deals at the same time. Epler took the larger deal, but recommended to CSK that they contact Del and Chuck Worsham if they still wanted to get into the sport. Eleven years later, the program is still going strong. 6. Fiercely loyal, the Worshams have granted "lifetime memberships" to many of the people who helped them in the pre-CSK days, when times were tough. Team members John Fink, Frank Gilchrist, and Nick Puglisi were sponsors in the early days, and are now permanent members of the program. 5. The Worshams bought their current headquarters shop as a definite "fixer upper," with Del, Chuck, and the entire crew pitching in on the elaborate restoration and upgrade project (including their now-famous bowling alley.) 4. Del Worsham took up golf in 2001, and scored his first hole-in-one less than a year later. 3. Team CSK continues to receive promotional products from Vans Shoes, more than 20 years after Vans spotted a teenage Del Worsham as an upcoming BMX rider. 2. Del Worsham remains the only professional drag racer to have a model of his car given away in McDonald's Happy Meals. Eight million Del Worsham Hot Wheels cars were distributed in Happy Meals in 1999. 1. Del Worsham had never driven any other type of car down the quarter mile when he got his license in a Nitro Funny Car, as a 20 year old. |
Aside from finding consistent funding to run a team of this size, what is the most difficult task you have to make a team successful?
Chuck: Keeping all the crew guys from squabbling at each other, personnel, personal babysitter kind of. We’ve got a lot of new guys this year, only two that aren’t new this year… everybody got old on us. One retired, one wanted to race less and one guy left to go to the Busch (NASCAR) series – he just wanted to do something different.
Del: It’s not just my Dad and myself and Mark Denner anymore, Dad’s got to try to keep everyone happy. I tell you we were spoiled for years having the team we had, they’d all been together and now, with this new team we’ve built, it’s coming around well. I think we are going to be OK.
How did the nitro-powered margarita blender come about?
Chuck: That was another one of Del’s ideas that I pretty much made physically happen.
Del: The motor I built! I’d been saving parts again for years, because we just wanted to build an engine just to start up, you know just put it on a stand and watch it run while we are all standing around drinking beer, fire it up and play with it and have a good time. And believe it or not, we are sitting in Bristol, Tennessee, I think in ’99 or 2000 and I woke up my wife in the middle of the night and I said we need to mix margaritas with this engine. She said what are you talking about, go back to bed. No, no the engine I want to build can mix margaritas. She said, You need to sleep more. I told my dad about it and he basically just made it happen.
You two seem to have a lot of fun together. If your dad wanted to retire could you conceive of driving for someone else as a hired driver?
Del: Well I don’t know. I did that back in ‘93 & ‘94 for Roger Primm and he was a great guy and great to drive for him, but I don’t know after owning and driving for your own team and racing with our own team if I could do that. I guess if I was hungry and needed to feed my family, but I’d always want to try to find a way to fund our own team and try to keep our own car racing. That’s my goal.
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On average, when you go to a race how many cars do you take? How many back-up cars?
Del: One for each team. Basically we each have a car and then we’ll bring one complete Funny Car that’s got all the computer, clutch management, cables for each of us for Jeff (Arend) or myself. Then there’s a chassis that just has cables and it would take overnight to get it ready that both of us could use to go rounds, the one if one of us happens to crash one. We take four chassis and four bodies.
Do you keep a third team in reserve and how do you staff it if you need it?
Del: (Laughing) Not intentionally. I don’t keep a reserve, but there’s stuff that I never seem to let go of either. I still have the other trailer for it over at my dad’s house. All the tools, it’s just sitting here, but we have no real aspirations to run a third team, that just seemed to be a little too much for us. Financially it would have to be really, really lucrative with enough money so that you could honestly say money is not an issue when it came time to run it. Like our cars here, it takes everything we have to keep these things alive and a third car would just have to overflow with money to do it again.