NHRA nitro-class team owner Don Schumacher wasn’t as goofy and free-wheeling as his seven drivers were when they got their chance at the microphones. But he shared some insight into his career and his career beginnings on the match-race circuit Thursday morning to help kick off the three-day Performance Racing Industry trade show at Indianapolis.

“You were a gypsy, wandered the United States from place to place,” he said of his day on the road that are a massive contrast to what racers do today. “There weren’t freeways and toll roads. It was two-lane highways, and you were blessed once in a while with a four-lane road. And you took Route 66 out to California. It was a very different United States back then, a different way of traveling, a different way of getting around. But it was really a wonderful way for young people to learn business and to step out and create their own world.”

Emcee Ralph Sheheen, announcer and co-owner of Speed Sport News Magazine/Turn 3 Media, asked Schumacher about the “sketchy” tracks on which the drag racers competed in those early days of the sport. 

Schumacher said, “There were times that they’d start drums of stuff on fire in the lights so you knew where to shut off at. They would pull cars up to the guard rail and turn the headlights on so you could think you could see a little bit. But none of that bothered you then. As a young person, you really don’t concern yourself with injury or death or crashing. You just wanted to compete and have a great time and then go on to the next race.

“It was really a learning experience mechanically, safety-wise, racing-wise. I mean, you pulled into Cayuga [Ontario, Canada] and it was an airfield. It wasn’t a dragstrip. Yeah, they’d have some stands and there’d be a lot people standing around. A lot of times after the lights, there weren’t even guard rails. So it was really a different era,” Schumacher said. “NHRA, of course, was involved at that time but not in all of these facilities. The safety features and the things that NHRA and the Safety Safari and Wally Parks have brought forward to this sport today are amazing.”

Sheheen reminded the full Sagamore Ballroom at the Indiana Convention Center (about 3,000 attendees) that Schumacher introduced the escape hatch and the fire-bottle trigger on the brake lever back in his own racing days and worked on bringing the Top Fuel canopy onto the current scene.

“Well,” Schumacher said wryly, “it started, really, from getting my own tail burned. When you’re a driver, you very quickly get tired of getting burned. Back in the ’60s and  ’70s, these cars caught on fire all the time. You had to have a quick way to get out of ’em.

“Mickey Thompson was the first one who brought the fire system on board onto the Funny Cars. Once that came on board, it was ‘OK – now we have to activate this thing.’ We’re in the lights, blew it up, the car caught on fire, we’re on the brake handle but now we’ve got to take our hand off the brake handle to hit the fire bottles. That was a no-brainer: ‘Let’s put it on the brake handle and activate it right there.’ So it was just simple things like that that came about as much as anything for my own safety, and the canopy came about for my son’s safety and my other Top Fuel drivers’ safety,” he said.

As for the canopy, Schumacher said, “It’s the right thing to do. Numerous people have tested it. There’s more and more cars running the canopy every year. And it’s the right way to go. We have to make this sport as safe as we can for the spectators and for the drivers.”

Sheheen was particularly enamored of Schumacher’s iconic “Wonder Wagon” entry, one which brought the former driver notoriety but headaches, as well. One iteration of it Schumacher likened to a shoebox that lacked the aerodynamic bells and whistles that – in his words – “us amateurs” couldn’t figure out how to fashion and employ.

But Sheheen said he dug the various paint schemes on the Wonder Wagon throughout the years.

Schumacher said, “It was just to look different than everybody else out there. I was amazed by what John Mazmanian did out there with his car in California. He had a remarkably good-looking race car there in California. That impressed me. Yes, we had a lot of great paint jobs on it, but the reason we had a lot of different paint jobs on it was we hurt the body a lot of times and had to take it off and get it painted the next week. It changed all of the time.”

But Schumacher said, “Getting Wonder Bread to come aboard was a unique experience. It was really to motivate their truck drivers, because the truck drivers were the ones that went into the grocery stores and talked the managers into putting the bread at the eye level versus up high or down low. You had to find the marketing reason then, and you have to find the marketing reason today. And today it’s more business to business than marketing.”

He got to revel a bit in his 1970 U.S. Nationals and beating the Ram Chargers team in the final.

“Leroy Goldstein was driving the car at that time,” he said. “Went there with two Funny Cars. One was the brand-new John Butera car that won the Nationals that year, independent front-suspension car. Only went there hoping to qualify – which I tell all my drivers at every race: ‘All we want to do is qualify, then we’ll worry about the first round.’ Ram Candies & Hughes the first round. It was a different ladder at that time: No. 1 ran No. 9. Went on and in the final blew up the car in the lights. Would have taken us days to put it back together, so fortunately that was on the last run of the day.”

One of the highlights, he said, was “meeting [NHRA founder] Wally Parks in the winners circle and all of the classical things that went on at those events at those times. It was very different than it was today. You do all of the winners circle stuff, and then you go back to the pits – and there’s nobody in the pits. Everybody had left already. It was an amazing, amazing day, which has created what we have built here in Indianapolis today.”