 |
|
|
Remembering Shelly Howard
It’s not hard to find drag racing fans and fellow racers who remember exactly what they were doing on April 2, 2005. In a way that’s similar to the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated or the day the space shuttle Columbia exploded, fans remember how they heard the news that Shelly Howard and her son, Brian, had died.
“I got a call from someone who was at the track in Tulsa and he told me what happened,” Millican said. “For the life of me, I can’t even remember who it was who called. It was one of those calls where your first thought is ‘I don’t want to believe it.’” Sadly, the news Millican heard was true. During a test session for her new A/Fuel dragster, Howard had a blowover at the end of the quarter-mile track at Tulsa Raceway Park in Oklahoma. The car landed upright with the engine still running, the car pointed back toward the starting line and an apparently unconscious Howard behind the wheel. The dragster began accelerating back up the drag strip toward the starting line, where it hit the team’s chase vehicle. Brian Howard was sitting inside the chase vehicle when it was hit.
NHRA and ESPN announcer Bob Frey said that in addition to Howard’s friendships with other racers and fans, the circumstances of Howard’s crash made the event more memorable than other incidents with other drivers. “It was not only what happened, it was the way it happened and the degree of severity,” Frey said. “It was so unexpected. She was a conservative driver. She never drove over her heard. When she pulled up to the line, you knew the car was going to go straight down the track. It wasn’t one of those cases where you can look back and say you could see it coming.” Like many fans who knew Shelly Howard, Fackler first met her online in the Chat room on the old CompuServe Motorsports Forum and later on other drag racing chat rooms available on the Internet. Howard was one of the first drag racers to spend time on the Internet and could often be found in the evenings chatting with fans and fellow racers in chat rooms. Fackler said that one evening in a chat room he told Howard that he and his son were planning to go to the Mile High Nationals. “Shelly said to stop by and see her,” Fackler said of the first time he met Howard in person. “When we got there, she said ‘We’re short on people this weekend. Can you help us out?’” a
d v e r t i s e m e n t
“We were at one race and my son was not feeling too well,” said Fackler. “When Shelly found out, she took him into her motorhome and took care of him,” Fackler said. “From then on, every time I talked to her she asked how my son was doing.” In addition to being a racer, Howard was also a registered nurse who worked at her husband’s medical practice. Tom Conway, who later became the tuner on Howard’s racing team, is another person who first encountered Shelly Howard the nurse at the race track. “I met her when I burned my hands in Tulsa,” Conway said. “Everyone told me to go see Shelly Howard.” That meeting led to a long-lasting association between the two, with Conway helping Howard get started in the alcohol classes. “I was racing against her the year I quit racing,” Conway said. “I was helping her at the same time I was racing her. Her first five-second run was against me.” Their association continued even after her death, when Conway bought Howard’s dragster and together with driver Steve Torrence, won the NHRA 2005 Top Alcohol Dragster world championship. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t
“I had another one built before the end of the year, but we didn’t want to use it,” he explained. “We wanted to finish the year in her car.” Conway said that with his friend gone, he was disappointed with the recent dissolution of the Top Alcohol Racers Association (TARA), an association Howard helped to found. “She spent an enormous amount of time and energy on it,” he said. “It made me sad to see it disbanded. She wanted a unified voice for safety, pitting and other things.” Bruce Bowler, a fellow racer and co-founder of the association, said that Howard’s death played a significant role in the decision to shut down TARA. “I think it had a fair amount to do with her,” Bowler said. “It is difficult to pull people together and to keep an association together. Shelly never, ever would give up. That wasn’t in her mind. “ In the months following her death, he said, the board members talked and decided to disband the association. “It bothered a lot of us,” Bowler said. “A lot of that had to do with Shelly. She was the driving force behind the creation of it.”
“She loved the blown cars and wanted to work with NHRA to make sure they had parity,” said Stalba, who also drives a blown dragster. Frey said that though Howard preferred blown dragsters to A/Fuel dragsters, both she and her husband were realistic about what it took to be competitive. “She loved the blown cars but she and Paul saw the way things were and got the fuel car,” Frey said. Howard was a very competitive driver who did not often show that side of her personality in public, Frey said. “I’d interview her for a television show and people would say that she was not all that animated or excited,” Frey said. “Well, that’s just the way she was.” Bowler agreed. “She was a very driven person. It was all an internal drive. She didn’t have any letup,” he said. “If she made a mistake, she’d go into her motorhome and beat herself up.” He said that one of his experiences of his drag racing career was match racing against Howard. “She didn’t match race a lot because she was so competitive and went to so many races,” Bowler said. “We went to one on the Fourth of July in 2004, at an eighth-mile track in Idaho. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t “It’s a family outing for us,” Bowler said. “My son is a filmmaker. He came out with his camera and made a documentary of that event. He did more than just show the racing. He captured what drag racing is all about. It was a great experience I had with Shelly and Paul. Every time I view that, tears come to my eyes.” For Fackler, one of the hardest times of the last year came when he tried to attend the Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series event at Bandimere Speedway in Denver, Colorado. “My son and I went and stayed through the first round of qualifying but I couldn’t take it and had to go home,” he said, adding that he has not been back at a drag strip since. The days leading up to the 2005 U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis were also hard for Fackler because he always looked forward to talking with Howard as she drove the team transporter to Indianapolis. “They always got a late start and Shelly would call me when she was driving at night to help stay awake,” he said. While the reaction from fans and other racers in the days immediately following Howard’s death was a clear indication of her place in the drag racing world, both Conway and Bowler said Howard had no idea that she had touched so many lives. “She didn’t have any realization about how great a lady and how great a racer she was,” Bowler said. “I think about her all the time. I miss her.” Conway said that while Howard enjoyed helping others, she was not aware how much people appreciated her efforts. “She was always trying to help anyone who needed help,” he said. “She never really thought she was doing that much and didn’t know if anyone appreciated what she was doing.”
Got a comment? Drop us a line at comppluseditor@aol.com.
a
d v e r t i s e m e n t |
|
Top Fuel driver Clay Millican remembers exactly what he was doing when he heard about the fatal crash that killed Howard and her son. Millican had just finished his final qualifying attempt during the IHRA national event at San Antonio Raceway in San Antonio, Texas, when his cell phone rang.
Dale Fackler, of Aurora, Colorado, was a friend of Howard and remains so with her husband, Paul. He also served as a crew member on several occasions. Fackler said he had gone to bed Saturday night without hearing the news of Howard’s crash. “I got up on Sunday morning and went to Drag Race Central to check for results and I saw the news,” said Fackler. “I just sat there for 15 minutes.”
That weekend, both Fackler and his son helped out Howard’s team, a role they filled several times during the next few years. While Fackler was happy to help Howard out at the track, it was in her role as a registered nurse that Howard repaid the favor. 
“It was the best year of my life but it was also the worst year,” Conway said of the championship season and the loss of a good friend. He added that he decided to finish the 2005 season with Howard’s old car even though he had a new car ready to go.
Karen Stalba (Benkovich), a Top Alcohol Dragster driver in NHRA’s Northeast Division, said that it was Howard’s passion for blown, alcohol-fueled dragsters that gave her the determination to push TARA forward.
© Competitionplus 2006
|
|