To be the best, it helps to learn from the best.

And in drag racing, no one is better at teaching the little intricacies of piloting a Top Fuel Dragster, a nitro Funny Car, or a Pro Stock hot rod down the quarter-mile than Frank Hawley. The Canadian native's resume includes winning the 1982 and '83 NHRA Funny Car championships, and nine national events. For the past 22 years, Hawley has been the proprietor of the most elite drag racing school in the country.

Frank Hawley's Drag Racing School, with training facilities based in Gainesville, Fla. and Pomona, Calif., has given instruction to more than 15,000 students, and the graduates include roughly 75 percent of the regulars on the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series tour. They include four-time champions Tony Schumacher and Gary Scelzi, 2006 Auto Club Road to the Future award winner Robert Hight, Pro Stock champions Greg Anderson and Jason Line, and 2003 Funny Car champion Tony Pedregon, to just name a few.

From World Champion to drag racing instructor - Hawley's High Speed Curriculum

To be the best, it helps to learn from the best.

And in drag racing, no one is better at teaching the little intricacies of piloting a Top Fuel Dragster, a nitro Funny Car, or a Pro Stock hot rod down the quarter-mile than Frank Hawley. The Canadian native's resume includes winning the 1982 and '83 NHRA Funny Car championships, and nine national events. For the past 22 years, Hawley has been the proprietor of the most elite drag racing school in the country.

Frank Hawley's Drag Racing School, with training facilities based in Gainesville, Fla. and Pomona, Calif., has given instruction to more than 15,000 students, and the graduates include roughly 75 percent of the regulars on the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series tour. They include four-time champions Tony Schumacher and Gary Scelzi, 2006 Auto Club Road to the Future award winner Robert Hight, Pro Stock champions Greg Anderson and Jason Line, and 2003 Funny Car champion Tony Pedregon, to just name a few.

And while the main focus of the school is to provide instruction to novice competitors, Hawley has more recently provided private instruction for some of the top competitors in the sport, including Anderson, Line, Top Fuel driver Rod Fuller, and Funny Car shoe Mike Ashley. He also has helped fine-tune the abilities of several of his graduates, who might feel they’re in need of a refresher course, similar to what a baseball player might need while experiencing a batting slump.

"What we do can range from whether or not if (he/she) is a former student," Hawley said. "Sometimes, we may just talk on the telephone. Other times, I may get out to the races and spend some time with them there.

"I want them to see the time we spend together as productive. It sounds almost wrong, even if they don't turn the win light on more often, but if they just enjoy the things we talk about, and that allows them to enjoy their racing program more...all of that helps. There's more than just win lights."

And he believes the formula for what makes a good driver is not as easy as 1, 2, and 3.

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

Click to visit our sponsor's website 

"I can tell you what I think makes a good driver, and a lot of people will come back and say that John Force is the polar opposite, and he's obviously a pretty good driver," Hawley said. "But for myself, it's somebody who is pretty calm, very aware of their environment, knows what's going on, and doesn't get overly excited. There are a lot of facets to a driver. It can range from whether he can give good interviews, work well with the crew, save a run from smoking the tires, gets good reaction times...a lot of things. But if I had driver I would want someone who has a good time being at the races and feels blessed to be able to do what he's doing."

Hawley's main goal in his private instruction sessions is to help these experienced professionals maintain their performance, and he accomplishes it through a variety of methods, some of which may go beyond just driving a race car. Those include psychology, human behavior, physiology and neurophysiology.

"Frank may be the most intelligent individual I know," said Funny Car driver Jack Beckman, who has served as an instructor at Hawley's Pomona training facility for close to a decade. "I finally figured it out: Frank is a Vulcan and they whacked his ear tips off.

"He is the most logical person I've ever met in my life. His assessment of anything, from mutual funds to driving a nitro Funny Car is just a down-to-earth, common-sense approach to help someone get better."

If anyone knows, it's Beckman. Not only is he Hawley's chief instructor on the West Coast, but he was also one of Hawley's key protégés last season when the 2003 Super Comp champion took over for Whit Bazemore in a Don Schumacher-owned Dodge Funny Car for the final five races of the season. The Southern California resident, who hadn't competed since leaving a Top Fuel ride the previous November, sought the teacher's advice often last fall. The result was Beckman's first professional win, which he scored at the ACDelco Nationals in Las Vegas. He then concluded the season by advancing to the finals of the Auto Club of Southern California Finals at Pomona.

He credits some of that success to his teacher.

"Frank was smart enough to recognize that I wasn't ready for the advanced course," Beckman said. He just spoon-fed some information to allow me to digest it."

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

Click to visit our sponsor's website

Hawley said he just gave Beckman exactly what he needed to know.

"I think you can over-talk something, you can feed too much information, you can get people confused," Hawley said. "What I didn't want to do and didn't think would be productive was to drill him for three or four hours. So I said, 'Just listen (to your team) and I'll be there in a few races if you want to talk over some stuff.'

"Jack didn't need a makeover. He went in there probably not too bad. I think (the situation) with me and Jack is that he knows it's somebody who is a friend who he could bounce some things off of."

Which is what Hawley, who hasn't competed in the sport since 1991, does to stay abreast of the on-going evolution of the sport, which has seen speeds rise from 300-mph runs in the early 1990s to the more than 330-mph passes of today.

"I just hang out with the (crews), talking and listening," Hawley said. "I clearly don't know everything that Austin Coil knows to make his car run as fast as it runs. But most of the people I know will answer the questions I've got. From the car technology standpoint, I've been a friend with Murf McKinney for some time and he keeps abreast of stuff they are doing. But my main attention is dealing with the people, rather than the cars."

Hawley is also pleased with the way the sport has changed from the early days of 'run what you brung' to the intensely corporate environment of today.

"I think NHRA is doing a pretty good job of bringing drag-racing entertainment to the race fans," Hawley said. "They are continuing to put money in their facilities. The racers are hanging in there and producing a good show.

"It would be nice if there were more people involved. I'm not going back 10 or 20 years, but 30 or 40 when there used to be 70-80 Top Fuel cars at Lions Dragstrip. There was something kind of cool about that. But there's good and bad about everything. But as far as driving the cars, the cars are faster now and they are driving on better tracks than there were a long time ago. But it's still drag racing."