On a brutally hot day in July 2010, Cliff Shipp got runner-up in a tough, big-money ($10,000-to-win) bracket race at Montgomery Motorsports Park in Alabama. Okay, so, cool, Cliff, and congrats. No big deal, right? People win and get runner-up in similar circumstances all the time.

Well, let’s see if you can do the same in the same condition and out of a similar dragster as Shipp’s. The heat most of us can stand. But when you have a bum leg, things aren’t so easy. Shipp has had this condition for several years. His left leg feels numb all the time. Hurts too. Refuses to raise right. So what did Shipp do to runner-up at Montgomery? He didn’t leave the confines of his car all day. Stayed right there in the seat the whole time. He had friends fuel him up, check tire air pressures and keep the car cool. All Cliff had to do was drive.

Dragster racer Cliff Shipp Drives To Victory

On a brutally hot day in July 2010, Cliff Shipp got runner-up in a tough, big-money ($10,000-to-win) bracket race at Montgomery Motorsports Park in Alabama. Okay, so, cool, Cliff, and congrats. No big deal, right? People win and get runner-up in similar circumstances all the time.

Well, let’s see if you can do the same in the same condition and out of a similar dragster as Shipp’s. The heat most of us can stand. But when you have a bum leg, things aren’t so easy. Shipp has had this condition for several years. His left leg feels numb all the time. Hurts too. Refuses to raise right. So what did Shipp do to runner-up at Montgomery? He didn’t leave the confines of his car all day. Stayed right there in the seat the whole time. He had friends fuel him up, check tire air pressures and keep the car cool. All Cliff had to do was drive.

“I raced the whole race and got runner-up with people helping me out and me sitting in the car the whole day. The only time I would get out is when I got back to the trailer, I’d get out and get in the a/c for a few minutes and then I’d get right back in the car and go back to the staging lanes,” Shipp, 56, said. “Helping me was Phil Owens’ son. He kept my air pressure checked and pushed me up in the staging lanes so I didn’t have to refire the car every time, and he was there if I needed help getting out of it back at the trailer, and he helped me fuel it up and charge the battery, just general maintenance. It really helped. You can’t believe how much it helps when somebody does that stuff for you.”

Especially if you need the help. Shipp, of Dallas, Georgia, is a retired man from Bell South. His ’03 Miller is just one owner old, and he has had it since 2004.

Shipp has, in his words, a messed up left leg. He can’t really get in and out of the car very well. So he has a method, if you will, he developed when racing. When he pulls away from his trailer, he usually just sits in the dragster until he gets back to the trailer, then gets back in the car, with help from his friends, and heads for staging. Racing for the past 20-plus years, he has his method down pat. Still, his injury limits.

Shipp had a “bleed” in his back in 2007,  the result of a blood thinner, and that bleed severed a nerve going to the quad muscle in his left leg, so now his leg is numb from his leg all the way down to his ankle on the front side. When the “sickness” hit, he eventually lost that quad muscle, and that quad muscle is the one that lets a person lift his leg up and down and helps your knee work properly. When that nerve quits feeding the muscle, it’s like being paralyzed, and with a man who is paralyzed, his muscles, Shipp says, just deteriorates away because nothing activates the muscle to work. Sort of like an atrophy.

He put his door car up for sale but kept the Miller dragster. He had a Harley.

“I thought my life was  over. I was on a walker for four months. My leg and knee were shot. It’s just like it’s not my leg. It’s like a stump. The back part of my leg is still okay, but the front part is like your arm being asleep. That’s the way my leg feels all the time. With this leg, it hurts all the time,” he says.

Cliff has been racing since 198, starting in a ’70 Nova racing local brackets at the now-defunct Southeastern Dragway near his home in Dallas and at Alabama Int’l Dragway in Steel, Alabama, plus at Montgomery Motorsports Park and at Beech Bend in Bowling Green, Kentucky, for the Tenn-Tuck Bracket Bash a few times. He got his first dragster from friends Phil Owens and Danny Butler, then followed that with a ’94 Beretta and a ’92 Lumina and finally the Miller dragster, his best race car.

Even though Shipp started racing brackets at a relatively older age, he has been “fooling around” with drag racing a long time. He worked at Southeastern and Green Valley Drag Strip in Alabama for years, working Fridays and Saturdays every weekend. “It was side money. I was raising a family,” he says. Daughters Crystal and Karla never really got into racing. Wife Sherry died in a car accident years ago.

In 1989, Phil Owens, of Lithia Springs, Georgia, started letting Cliff warm up his dragster at Southeastern before the race started. It got to the point where Shipp would even make passes down the track footbraking Owens’ dragster.  “It was like going fishing or playing golf. I got hooked. I was always a street racer when I was younger, but with this, I was hooked, line and sinker,” he says. So after that, Shipp would go to Atlanta Dragway trying to find a Thunderbird with a Ford engine in it, his favored form of a bracket car. “I was ready to buy. I was always a Ford guy, but I realized quickly that you should be racing Chevrolets because the parts were so available. I found that out right quick, so I ended up with a ’70 Nova,” Shipp says.

A ’66 Chevy II followed, and going to the outlaw track at Calhoun, Georgia, Cliff went only three times and won the delay box class first time out. He went back again and won the second time, then had it sold, but he told the guy who bought it that he wanted to go one more time. That time he got runner-up. “I never saw the car again. It was just an old backyard car, but it would run the number,” he says.

He likes dragsters better. “When you’re a heavy-set guy, like me, you can get in and out easy, and a dragster is a bit cooler than a door car. You don’t feel as hot. The wind is blowing in your face and you’re not as sweaty,” Shipp says.

Bracket racing is something he has to do, and it’s the only thing he has been doing all his adult life. “I don’t feel any pain as long as I’m in the car going down the track. It doesn’t hurt me to do anything in the race car. I just can’t do it without help and I just can’t go racing four or five races in a weekend. I can drive it about one time a weekend without hurting myself. Anything over that and I’m in pain,” Shipp says.

At that big race at Montgomery in July, when it was said and done, Shipp and Friday winner Peabody Harrell both agreed that they were just glad to be there “and beat some of those young whippersnappers,” Cliff said. “I looked over at him and said, ‘What do you want to do?’ We agreed to race for $100. It wasn’t winning the money, it was just being able to say, ‘We old timers got there.’ Anything you can win … this sport costs you an arm and a leg to do it, and any win is good.” They got $5,200 and $5,000 on a two-way split.

His “score” through Friday’s MMP race? Hang on. “I am so proud of them,” Cliff says. Three time runs yielded reaction times of .533, .506 and .516 .First round was a .540 and then he got on the tree with a Then .504, .a 516, .a 504, .a 505, .a 507 and a.504, then minus “7” red when Peabody put him in the right lane, a lane he hadn’t been down since the race began. It was probably the lane difference. Shipp rolled .002 in based on the numbers he had been hitting, but it didn’t help. Still, he was happy.

He will keep the race car for now and see what the economy does, plus see about his health. “If any one of those gets any worse, I guess I’ll be ready to get out of it,” Shipp says.