There are multiple types of stories in drag racing. Those you can tell, and those you shouldn’t. Then there are those you tell to win a trophy.

For almost a decade, some of drag racing’s greatest storytellers came together for a good old-fashioned yarn-spinning competition where the first liar almost always took the prize. The scary part about it was that the stories were accurate with some embellishments.

Over the next couple of weeks, we plan to bring you the best of these stories, some in word and some in video. - Editor

READ AND WATCH PART 1
READ AND WATCH PART 2
READ AND WATCH: PART 3

CHIP WOODALL: YOU AIN’T LOOKING IN MY TRAILER - I’m really not a rude person. However, if someone demands I need to behave or believes I’m a cheat, I will go to the highest degree to ensure I get full payback.

Case in point, when Jackie Peebles, a guy I drove for – for many years, invited me to his wedding, it was under the stipulation I had to behave. I really believed his request was rude, even if he did experience life on the road with me many times.

To save another story for another day, I ended up showing up at the wedding in a Kermit the frog outfit [with green leotards] while an attorney friend showed up in a realistic gorilla suit. We would have gotten away with the charade if Peebles hadn’t recognized my walk.

The preacher ended up chasing us out of the church where we jumped into our waiting limo, changed and returned to the wedding as ourselves leaving no clue we had been Kermit and the Gorilla.

The gorilla suit was no cheap deal. It was high-dollar crafted, and we needed to get one more good “gig” out of it. Mary Heischler, the wife of Green Valley race City track owner Bill Heischler, inspired the return of the gorilla.

If I’m not afraid to prank the late great Buster Couch, I certainly wasn’t afraid of her.

So we're booked into Green Valley with the dragster and Funny Car and somehow or another Mary had it set in her head that we were smuggling people into the track.

We arrived and she greeted me with, “I’m checking your trailer.”

I responded, “No you’re not, there’s no reason for you to be in there.”

I had my window cracked about three or four inches when the rent-a-cop walked up and said, “We gotta look in the trailer.”

I told one of my crewmen to let him in the trailer, and when he got in, shut the door on him. Well, he did. Then we left the gate and headed to our parking spot in the pits. We parked and I told the kid working for me, John, to go open the trailer and let him out.

“No way, I ain’t opening that son-of-a-b**** for any reason. He’s plenty mad in there.”

John went ahead and opened the trailer and he was correct, Mr. Rent-a-Cop was mad. He called the cops and wanted us charged with kidnapping.

The cops came out and started asking questions to which I responded, “I had no idea he was in the trailer.” After all, I never saw John shut the door.

Eventually it all calmed down and sometime later they felt it would be a good idea to book us in again. Bygones were bygones.

Having successfully pulled off the gorilla thing once before we were prepared if she continued her witch hunt looking for stowaways.

We arrived at Green Valley and while they might have forgiven the last episode, they certainly hadn’t forgotten. They were still convinced we were sneaking people into the track via the trailer.

They played right into my hand.

“If you think I am sneaking people in, then you need to go check the trailer. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

It was all I could do to keep a straight face.

They went back there and opened the trailer. I heard all kinds of commotion as the door opened and my gorilla friend came flying out on top of the same security guard and even rubbed up again Mrs. Heischler. I guess you could say we scared the ape s*** out of them.

Ole Mr. Rent-a-Cop kept reaching for the gun he didn’t have and the gorilla got after him for a while, chasing him. He wasn’t fond of gorillas. I guess we were the only ones laughing.

They ended up booking us again and I guess Bill was responsible because Mary never really got over it. Mary was so mad, she wrote me a two-page letter which I still have.  Basically she told me what a piece of s*** I was.

Funny thing … they never asked to see in my trailer ever again.
 

GORDIE BONIN: ROLAND AND HIS TWO TINGS - My nitro driving career started in the fast lane. It all began with a great showing, I was told;  behind the wheel of a junior fuel dragster. The next thing I knew it was 1972 and I was behind the wheel of a Funny Car and getting my license at Lions in only my third pass.

After that I had my first booked-in match race thanks to Bill Doner.

Long before I earned the nickname “240 Gordie”, I was just an aspiring drag racer looking for his big break. And, when you’re starting out, you take what you can get hoping that someday they lead to something big.

Big was the word that I used to describe the two car owners who I rode with in a duallie truck traveling to that first match race in Seattle. Gordon Jenner, who had called me to license in the Funny Car, and Mike Lykar, two big heavy f******, and me were all in a half-ton Chevy pick-up driving across the country. There wasn’t even a camper on the truck.

What did we get paid? We got four free tickets. It’s paying your dues I told myself.

We’re going through the mountains in April, not the warmest time of the year for this region, and I finally put on my firesuit and laid down in the bed of the truck with the car in tow.

I was suited up with gloves, helmet and boots. We got to Seattle and ended up finishing runner-up to Jerry Ruth.

That one showing was enough to inspire the owners to go to Indy where we finished runner-up in 1972.

I’m still looking for my big break and I didn’t know that it would come right after that race. After Indy, and the World Finals in Amarillo; Roland asked us to stay with him while we  built a new Don Long car while he was also building a new one.

We got the new car finished and were headed to Englishtown, and on the way stopped in Cincinnati to run a match race. Meanwhile Roland was in Gary, Ind., running a race with his brand new Revell Hawaiian; and I’m not going to say Freddie Denane stole the car, but Roland’s new Buttera car ended up missing from the Holiday Inn in Gary, IN.

Roland went back to Los Angeles and bought Ray Alley’s old Charger Funny Car operation, the one that Kenny Bernstein drove.

Roland calls me after I have two races with this new Don Long car and says, “Hey Boy, wanna drive my hot rod?”

I knew I had to pay my dues, but one year into the game and he’s calling me to drive? Holy Crap!

I accepted, paid my own way back to his shop and we worked on the replacement car to get it ready for action.

The first race was in Minnesota, “Minninapolis”, as Roland called it.

We made it to the final and Tom Hoover beat us, and here comes Roland, first words he speaks, “Boy… you were late.”

I figured, here we go.

The next race I met Tommy Ivo and all of the other hotshot drivers. I ended up meeting Ivo in the third round, and I’m wrestling this car, tire shake and one wheel on the track and the other off. I’m pedaling the car and it ends up going on the roof.

I went to the hospital for eight hours and they tell me I have a pulled muscle. They didn’t even x-ray me and it turns out I should have been in a body cast, but I will get to that later in the story.

So I’m two races into the gig, I’ve gotten beat on the tree and crashed the car another time and he still hasn’t fired me.

We missed Indy but built another car and were back onto the match race scene. Our first match race is against Dale Pulde, a racer who would guard his match race money with a sawed off shotgun. He drove for Mickey Thompson.

Now we head down into the Carolinas to match race for this guy who owns three tracks, one eighth-mile, one 1,000-foot and another quarter. Now you want to talk treacherous, one of those tracks we had to back off at 1,000 feet because the track went into a one-lane bridge at the 1320 foot mark.

The promoter warned us that whoever was behind at half track; had might as well give up.

So I’m running strong, trucking on down there and thinking I had the race won and all of a sudden, just before the bridge, this yellow blur thunders by me going 250. That would have been Pulde and no he didn’t listen to the promoter.

I was just glad I didn’t crash another car and so was Roland, who informs me, “Boy … we gotta go back to “Minninapolis”. So we’re driving and I can’t remember whether I was trying to sleep or get laid, but there he is up there driving through the Smokey Mountains and listening to tape after tape of Don Ho. That f****** Don Ho. He played them all the time.

He finally called for me to drive. And I did, and waited for him to fall asleep, and my first major action as driver was to toss every one of those Don Ho tapes out the window.

Eventually he woke up and when he noticed his Don Ho tapes were gone, he nearly killed me. I almost got fired over that.

“Boy … there's TWO tings, you can crash my cars; but you don’t throw my f****** Don Ho tapes out of the car.”

I remember him saying. “You understand that boy?”

It was a silent trip until we got to “Minninapolis”. Then we headed up to Winnipeg to do a match race. Outside of listening to his Don Ho tapes, Roland loved to raid the hotels of pillow cases and towels.

“Boy … we need them to clean up after we work on the car,” he always said.

That came back to haunt us after we were in a hotel in Winnipeg and were sitting in the restaurant eating out breakfast. We had already checked out. Over the hotel PA system came the announcement, “Would Mr. Bonin and Mr. Leong please return to the front desk and return the pillow cases and towels from the room?” So we took those we stole from the last hotel, neatly laundered and folded.

So our next stop is in Carson City, Nev., and we are going to do a display and burnout for the folks at Mallory Ignition. On the way, I made a stop at home and ended up visiting the doctor who told me my early racing injury was a compression fracture of my C-5 and I needed to be in a body cast.

Well, since you can’t race in a body cast, I passed on the doctor’s advice and headed down to Carson City. So we get there and do the parade.

Then Roland comes over and asks for a little more.

“Boy … uh, uh, can you do a burnout down the road beside the Mallory shop?”

I figured how tough can it be. Well, pretty tough for me, because the f***** hooked up pretty good. We did one of those Bonzaii – Chi-Town Hustler type burnouts and then I realized, the car was going a lot faster than it should have been. I’m on the brakes, this thing is bouncing and I even pull the parachutes.

I almost put the car in the fence when I got it stopped.

Leong gets down there to me, “Boy … you don’t f*** around when it comes to tearing up my s***; do you?” Again - he's got his foot on the front tire, cigarette in one hand and says "Boy, there's two tings...blah, blah, blah. I find over the next 20 years from a multitude of his drivers, Johnny West being the most vocal." He ALWAYS would do the Boy, there's two tings routine, and NEVER get to the second ting.

That’s just a few of the war stories associated with a man I have come to love dearly. I’m the only one he’s ever asked to come back and drive one of his cars.

And I promise, I never threw away any Don Ho tapes the second time around.
 

 

​

PAUL CANDIES: THE DAY A MAN NAMED Q-BALL TAUGHT ME MY ROLE - It was Q-ball Wales who set me straight. He taught me my role in drag racing.

Destiny wasn’t the reason I became a championship nitro team owner and successful businessman. I credit this to Q-ball.

Back in 1959, Q-ball and I built our first rail dragster. It was a pretty good dragster and by winning a few races as a driver in local competition, we felt we were pretty tough to beat.

After all, when you look at how well I did in Opelousas, La., how could you doubt my driving talents? We had a blown Chrysler in a Scotty Finch chassis. The cars back then had a mechanical gas linkage and were pretty hard to keep under fire.

So as we did the push start in Opelousas, I pulled up to the flagman and staged for my run. I let the clutch out and figured there wasn’t much to this driving thing. I stepped on the throttle and instead of feathering into it, I went full throttle and the front end snapped straight up into the air. I figured then, “This is probably not what I am supposed to be doing.”

I stepped off of the throttle and the front end bounced around.

I got on the throttle again, and eased it to the floor and realized I had been driving for a while and was getting close to running out of track. I reached over and grabbed the brakes and they were pretty good, even better than Q-ball said they were.

I looked up and I was just making it to the finish line. And for you whippersnappers not around in ’59, the Chrondek timers would not record a speed under 60 mph. For my pride, the track manager was gracious enough to say there was a malfunction in the clocks. He just couldn’t bring himself to tell me I was going too slow to get a time.

In my mind, I was pretty talented. After all, you have to have some talent to get a mean dragster down the track with the front wheels in the air and rapidly cover the quarter-mile in the manner I did.

This confidence provided the inspiration to branch out in an attempt to conquer the rest of the world. Our first trip was a race at a track in Texas called Green Valley Raceway where they were paying $50 for low elapsed time and $50 for top time.

We battled it out with a driver named Vance Hunt for a total of 13 runs to decide the quickest run and top time. I took the $50 for low ET and he got $50 for top time. My confidence couldn’t have gotten any stronger.

Sunday came around for eliminations and there was no denying I was the driver to beat.

I crossed paths with a young guy with a Chevrolet named Smiling Jimmy Nix from Oklahoma City in the first round. He strapped quite a holeshot on me and the more I tried to play catch up, the more I smoked the tires. Jimmy’s old Chevrolet went right down the track to the win.

We loaded up and headed for home. I was hopping mad at the whole experience. Winning had come so easy back home in Louisiana but on the road, we were handed our butts in Texas. The faster car wasn’t supposed to lose.

Q-ball  was a working man and I’m a school boy. I was driving home so he could rest and go to work on Monday morning. We were about an hour outside of Fort Worth, Texas, when he popped up out of the back seat and asked, “Are you still mad we got beat?”

“D*** right I am,” I responded in a defiant tone. “The Chevrolet beat us.”

Q-ball laid back down and about somewhere between Shreveport and Texas, he popped up again.

“Are you still mad we got beat?” He asked.

Never changing my tone as I stewed the whole way home, “D*** right, Chevrolet beat us.”

Back to sleep he went and when we reached the south side of Shreveport, he popped up out of the back and said, “Look … are you still mad?”

“Yep, I sure am,” I responded.

“Let me give you a piece of advice,” Q-ball offered. “I’ve watched you and what we’ve been doing. You’re not a very good mechanic. You’re not a really good driver either. My suggestion to you is to go home and learn how to make money so you can afford to hire people like me to do your business for you.”

That was the greatest piece of advice I have ever received. Now you know why you’ve never seen me behind the wheel of anything.
 

 

JOHN "TARZAN" AUSTIN: JIM NICOLL, THE SILVER TONGUED BRUISER - During the winter months some years back, and we called these days just “break” days, Jim Nicoll and I shared an apartment outside of Dallas.

On one particular winter day, there was a big boat drag race down in Waco, so we decided to go down and take in some wet drag racing. As luck would have it, the winds were blowing at a pretty high rate and the race officials canceled the event.

Having plenty of spare time on our hands, we decided to visit the bar at the nearby Holiday Inn. There was three of us; me, Nicoll and one of my drag boat buddies, Jerry Hanks, who used to drive a supercharged flat-bottom boat.

Hanks wasn’t racing this weekend, largely because he had a cast on his leg from his hip to the bottom of his ankle. His leg was pretty messed up to say the least. Nicoll had also brought along his girlfriend.

The first thing we did is start ordering Tequila, which is usually a recipe for disaster.

Drinking tequila was an art form for us.

We’d drink a shot and toss the glass into the wall, breaking it. This, to us, was proper tequila etiquette. The bartender wasn’t keen on our form and made a beeline over to us and said, “You guys have to stop this, right now!”

Now anyone who knows us, understands how dedicated to following the rules we were. We ordered up a few more shots and just like we were supposed to do, we slammed the glasses into the wall. Never … never … makes good sense to break up a tradition.

Mr. Bartender wasn’t a real traditional kind of guy. He summoned the bar’s rent-a-cop over to tell us we had to leave the premises immediately. Well, we didn’t.

The rent-a-cop left and we stayed.

The next moment I happened to look up and there were two real, honest-to-goodness Texas state troopers standing behind Nicoll.

Nicoll, unaware of the real cops standing behind him asked without looking, “Tarzan, is that little rent-a-a-cop back again to throw us out?”

“He’s not even a real cop and if he doesn’t leave us alone, I’m gonna hit him,” Nicoll said.

Looking at these guys who hadn’t said a word, I said, “Nicoll, this is a real cop.”

“No he ain’t,” Nicoll argued without looking back. ‘I’m gonna hit him,” he contended.

There was no changing Nicoll’s mind, and he immediately stood up without looking back and struck the one cop squarely on the jaw. Then it was clearly obvious this wasn’t a fake cop.

Minutes later, it seemed as if the whole police force pulled up in the parking lot. Police car after police car, sirens wailing and lights flashing pulled up in front of the Holiday Inn. They all had their guns drawn.

They drug us out into the lobby and slammed us up against the wall, even my buddy Jerry who could hardly stand up with the cast on his leg. They had their guns drawn and dared us, “to make their day.”

We pleaded our case to the officers and believe it or not, none of us ended up going to jail.

Somehow or another Nicoll, who hasn’t always had a silver tongue of persuasion, talked us out of going to the slammer.

I hear now, because Nicoll can’t handle his tequila, there’s legislation in the works preventing him from consumption in Texas.

 

 

 

BILLY GLIDDEN: THE STORY OF: YOUR CHEATING HEART - When you do extremely well, get all the breaks and win a lot, you are always going to have your skeptics. You’ll have those who swear up and down that you are cheating.

I heard the whispering and the mumblings that Dad was cheating and in all my years, I don’t think it had ever been as bad as it was in the mid 1980s. We struggled with the first part of the introduction to 500-inch racing but a few years into it, we were starting to make steam big time.

After a while, it didn’t matter where we went or what sanctioning body we raced under, whether it was NHRA or IHRA, we won lots of races.

Few races went by that we didn’t fall under the scrutiny of the technical departments or racers trying to find fault with our winning ways.

We took our share of engines, transmissions and rear-ends apart. This became a tradition for us.

“Oh you won? We need to check you out,” they would say. We’d tear down and the end result was always the same.

I would say the 1986 championship caused us the most grief. We fell behind early in the points and on top of that crashed in Atlanta after beating Butch Leal.
Butch swore that dad won that race because he pulled his parachutes early to dip the nose of the car because dad was ahead of him. That just wasn’t the case.

The fact we were very secretive about what we did – did little to stop the speculation. But we were no different from Warren Johnson or some of the leading professional teams. We didn’t share our performance secrets with anyone.

After the crash, we were about 2,000 points behind or something like that by mid-season. I don’t even think we qualified in Columbus. We lost a lot with that crash.

We lost our computer, and I don’t think we ever recovered any more than a wire that was sticking out of the ground.

We didn’t have another one and dad didn’t think much about replacing the lost one.

But, it didn’t matter because we were dead-set on making up the ground we had lost with the crash. Race by race, we won races, just racing by feel.

The competition didn’t buy into the feel thing.

In fact, when we erased the point deficit and replaced it with an overwhelming lead with a few races remaining, the talk was worse than it had ever been. The tear downs were too. They were checking doors, batteries and various parts.

Dad had a tendency to drive really well, with good reaction times, when things were going good.

That proved to be the icing on the cake for the oddest accusation I’d ever heard. They said we were remote controlling the car.

That’s right, dad wasn’t driving the car; one of us on the outside with a remote control was the secret to our success.

Sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire. I planned to give them something really good to talk about.

So, I decided to take one of my Mickey Mouse beanies and remove the ears. Instead I attached a set of antennas to the beanie. I also got one of those remote control airplane control boxes.

When I think back to then, I am convinced that I couldn’t have pulled off anything better.

I walked through the staging lanes with this box in my hand and wearing that beanie. This was back in the time that we used to drive the Pro Stockers to the lanes, so here comes dad driving up. I’m working the buttons, I move them to the left and he steers to the left. I go right and he does the same. I pushed the on/off button on the box and he turned the car off and coasted.

The next morning, Graham Light called Mel Wallace, Lee Hampton, Mom, Dad and myself in for a meeting. We went to a conference room in one of the towers and there in a meeting I was told that I couldn’t go past the water box.

Since I couldn’t go up there, Mel Wallace started going up to the starting line. He got put on watch too. He may have carried the box up to the line.

By the end of the year, we were jacking with them pretty bad.

We put a television antenna on the car to mess with them even worse.

Regardless of what they thought, we raced hard and raced legal and in the end, we raced to win. And, when it came to getting the best of those who falsely accused us, we tried just as hard to get the best of them at their own game as we did in beating them on the track.
 

FRANK HAWLEY: THE IMMIGRANT SONG - You have some stories which leak out into the industry and after a while you wonder if it really happened or was the figment of one’s imagination. I’m here to let everyone know, a story which made its way around the industry, was true.

Back in 1982, as the driver of the Chi-Town Hustler, we rolled into Indy as the point leader in our first full year on the NHRA tour. Our pit area is set up and we are ready to go. We had the pits roped off with those little flag deals.

I was working on the car when Wayne Minick walked over to me and pointed out, “There’s two guys over there in suits wanting to talk to you.”

I look at [Austin] Coil and we both draw the conclusion they have to be sponsors because no one wears a suit to the drag strip. Knowing how starved we were for sponsorship, I promptly wiped my hands off and headed over there to talk to the “suits”.

They introduced themselves as Mr. Agent So and So and Mr. Agent So and So. These clearly were not sponsors.

They were from the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services. They flashed their badges and guess what? I’m a Canadian.

I had been racing in the States for years, off and on. The laws are a bit ambiguous as to what you can and can’t do. I had always tried to follow the rules but I have to tell you, having the INS agents there made me nervous.

“I … I … I’m really busy now,” I stuttered.

Mr. Agent looks at me, “We really think you need to answer some questions right now.”

I agreed and then they threw me another curve.

“We’d really like you to come with us,” Mr. Agent said.

Being a naive kid from Canada, I wasn’t really sure of my rights. I didn’t know what I could and couldn’t do. What I do know is they are Federal agents and it is in my best interests to cooperate.

I walked over to Austin and said, “They are federal agents and they want to take me downtown.”

Austin had a tough time understanding his domain didn’t extend over federal agents.

“What the hell … we have to run,” Coil responded.

I told him I would try to be back. The agents put me in the back of the car and away we went. Not a word was spoken on the way to the office.

Thoughts ran through my mind as six months earlier I had gotten married and I was sure I had applied for my green card. I knew I had in fact, but without it in my hand I felt like a sitting duck. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to drive the car or not. I searched my pockets for any receipts which might incriminate me and when they weren’t looking, might have eaten them. I just knew I was going to die.

We arrived at the downtown Indianapolis bureau where they put me in a little room to sweat it out for a little while. It occurred to me I was in an interrogation room.

The questions begin to fly.

“Why are you here in the States?”

“Are you driving the car?”

“Do you have a contract?”

“Does NHRA pay you?”

My head was spinning.

I sheepishly responded, “No, the NHRA doesn’t pay me.”

Technically I wasn’t lying because they paid Austin. They then pointed out I needed paperwork to do this stuff. I was absolutely terrified.

I stayed there for an hour fielding these questions.

Finally, they told me I could go.

“Can I get a ride back?” I asked.

“Nope, we don’t care what you do. Call a friend, hitchhike or call a cab,” Mr. Agent responded.

Nice.

I caught a cab and arrived at the track just in time to make a qualifying pass. After the run, I met someone who remains a close friend to this day named Ross Deane. Ross is a very well-connected attorney.

Ross then filled my head with talk of how they couldn’t do what they do.

I could do nothing but worry, despite the assurances of Ross I would be fine, because these guys had told me I needed to get out of town. What about the next race? Would they really throw the book at me?

I almost went back to Canada and forfeited my point lead.

Ross assured me we were on private property and they’d have to buy a ticket if they wanted to see me. They’d need a warrant and if they didn’t have one, and were harassing me, they’d escort them off of the property.

Still, I wasn’t convinced.

And I guess if there’s a punch-line to the whole deal, we went out and won the inaugural Big Bud Shootout. Splashed on the front page of the Indianapolis Star was a picture of me and the crew holding this fake 4-foot-wide check made payable to the order of Frank Hawley for $25,000.

We waited for the feds to come, which they never did.

Ross and the NHRA took care of me.
Now the word quickly made its way around the pits as to how federal agents ended up at such an obscure place.

Of course, the rumor was a fellow competitor turned the INS onto us as a means of knocking the team out of the point lead. I never believed this.

But to this day, I cannot help but wonder, why me? Why then? Most of all, why there?

I guess some things are better left unknown.