NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

A few years ago, my teenage grandson attended the funeral with us of his great-grandmother. He wasn’t particularly close to her, but he was in tears at the service. When I asked why he was so sad, what he said was both profound and heartbreaking: “She is the first person I knew who died, but I know there are going to be a lot more in my life.”

I know the feeling, kid.

The problem with getting older is that every year your circle of friends grows. You make new friends, some of whom will last your whole life. You create new partnerships in business or at home. You make acquaintances with more people, from your mechanic to your next-door neighbor. You find someone you admire, perhaps an athlete or a musician. And when any of them passes, it leaves a hole in your heart, sometimes in your soul.

The problem with this amazing job I have is that, over the last 40 years, my circle has become massive because I’ve met people whose lives intersect with mine through our shared passion of the sport, versus how my life might have looked had I chosen a career in, say, giraffe topiary art. I’ve been introduced to and befriended by so many of my early drag heroes that they’re like family, and then the thousands of racers who have followed them that I have met and befriended. I feel a kindred spirit even with the ones I never met.

It's no secret that many of those early pioneers are well into the late 1970s or early '80s or beyond, and the attrition has become almost unbearable. We mourn them, remember them, eulogize them, and never forget them.

When NHRA National Dragster was still a weekly publication, we’d print a short list in each issue of those we’d lost, and because it was a weekly list, it was never overwhelming. Today, we’re a monthly magazine, and if I printed the names of everyone we lost in a month, I’d be out of pages, so beginning in 2021, I took it online and opened it up to every passing I heard about, regardless of stature or level of success. If you drag raced, you mattered. You can find the 2025 In Memoriam page here, and if you change the year in the URL, you can go back to look at past years. The toll is shocking.

Looking at this year, the losses are so monumental, and while I can't go through everyone, here’s a quick recounting of some of the major figures and some of the ones who really resonated with me.

No loss is more measurable than the next, especially to any family of those who have passed, but the losses this year of Forrest Lucas and Ken Black shook the foundation of our sport. Lucas, of course, was the greatest thing that ever happened to NHRA Sportsman racing through his continuing sponsorship of these racers, while without Black we might not have a successful Greg Anderson, Jason Line, Dallas Glenn, or any of the other racers who benefited from KB Racing.

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Ditto for nitro team owner Larry Minor. If you go back and read the story I wrote after his passing, so many of today’s recent stars have him to thank: Gary Beck, Dick LaHaie, Cruz Pedregon, Ed McCulloch, Shirley Muldowney, Frank Hawley, Larry Dixon Sr. and Jr., Tony Pedregon, Cory McClenathan, and Mike Neff to name a few. I attended his memorial service in Hemet, Calif., at the softball fields he built for the community, and the sheer number, scope, and reach of the people who attended spoke volumes about his life.

We also had a double-whammy on drag racing Hall of Fame engine builders in the April loss of “the Old Master,” Ed Pink, and the very recent passing of Sid Waterman. As a kid reading the drag mags, I knew both of their names — who could forget “Think Pink”? — but Pink was mostly out of the full-time game by the time I started working at NHRA in the early 1980s, but Waterman was still doing it and was making waves with his Big Red pump that propelled nitro cars to unthinkable performances. I’ll never forget his patience in helping me understand nitro fuel systems for one of my first tech pieces in Dragster in diagramming what each of the lines did.

Earlier in the year, we lost Bill Shrewsberry, who was one of the first handful of racers I wrote about in this column, way back in 2008. I idolized him because I’d seen him so many times as a young fan at Orange County International Raceway or Irwindale Raceway with the L.A. Dart or the Knott’s Berry Wagon wheelstanders.

Late this summer, we lost Chic Cannon, who was the last surviving member of the main core of the NHRA Drag Safari that caravanned across the United States in the mid-1950s to help sow the seeds of our sport at tracks far and wide. I’d stayed in touch with Chic over the years, and it was like touching history.

One of the stars of that 1950s era, Melvin Heath, who won the second NHRA National Championship Drags in Kansas City, Mo., in 1956, also passed away earlier this year, nearly 70 years after winning the race. He was the longest lived of those early heroes. The first champ, Calvin Rice, died way back in 1974. It would have been great to have had Heath as a guest during next year’s 75th anniversary season.

So many great names from the earliest days of the sport passed away this year: 1965 Top Fuel world champ Maynard Rupp; Rich Guasco of “Pure Hell” Fuel Altered fame; Top Gas ace Earl Binns; national event-winning Top Fuel racer Stan Shiroma; Texas Top Fuel legend Buddy Cortines; early Pro Stock racer Don Grotheer; George Reese, of George's Corvette Funny Car fame; wheelstander driver and occasional Insider friend Gary Watson; engine builder Don Ratican (Ratican, Jackson, and Stearns Fiat); Top Fuel racer Roger Gates; Studebaker king Ted Harbit; and former Feight Train pilot John Rasmussen.

There were plenty more: Roger Wolford, who went from Chassis Research engineer to driver of wild machines like the “Secret Weapon” Jeep early Funny Car and the “Mako Shark” Corvette. Of the more modern racers we lost, there are former Pro Stock racers Ray Franks and Steve Schmidt, electric dragster pioneer Steve Huff, Top Fuel team owner Helen Leverich, and nitro crew chief Andy Nering, and a heartbreaking collection of longtime NHRA Sportsman racers, including Don Kennedy, Tom Kasch, Dennis Ferrera, Abe Loewen, Don McElroy, Dwight Cox, Joe Welch, and Dave Heitzman.

Then there was Jerry Ruth, “the King,” someone with whom I got to spend some quality time at the recent Seattle national events, reliving his great nitro career.

So many more: nitro and jet-car racer Al Hanna; 1970s Pro Stock racer Shelby Jester; Midwest Alcohol Funny Car legends Fred Mandoline and Bob Gottschalk; and Michael Bartone. Bartone passed away after seeing his brother, Tony, well on his way to a fifth championship as team owner for the Sean Bellemeur “Killer Bs” team. The loss of Robert Nickens midyear was a personal kick in the gut as I really enjoyed being around the gravel-voiced brother of David Nickens, who this year tuned Jeff Taylor to the Comp world championship. I know Robert was watching.

I try not to make a bigger deal of the closer friends I had in the sport, but Bernie Fedderly was one of them, the gentle giant was always so kind, and when Austin Coil or John Force were too busy to talk to me after a run, Bernie always made time. Speaking of Coil, who always still charitably answers when I call to ask him some random question about Force or the Chi-Town Hustler, we mourned the death of his wife, Lisa, who we first met when he tuned Force to his first win in Montreal in 1987. Vicki Gasparrelli, the wife of the late Alcohol Funny Car racer Lou (who passed in 2011), was always a sweetheart, too. In my first year here at ND, the Gasparrellis were one of the Alcohol Funny Car teams who took the rookie writer under their wing and showed him kindness and answered his many questions.

When time and space allowed me to cover Comp eliminator more closely back in the 1980s, I was befriended by Steve Ambrose, Reynald Argenta, and Bob Huettman, three Ford engineers who raced a dominant little roadster. Reynald, far right, died some years ago, but Bob, far left, passed in August, and the choking in Steve’s voice as he kindly shared the news with me of Bob's passing left a lump in my throat. They were lifelong best friends. Ditto for losing Bob Lambeck in April. He was always unfailingly open and kind to the ND staff when I came on board. His shop was not far from the NHRA Headquarters in North Hollywood, so we saw him often, and he was an open book. I was happy to follow the success of his son, Doug, in the years after, and Bob was always there to answer the phone. Good people. Ditto for Darren Davis, “the California Kid,” whom I also befriended during his Comp days in the 1980s.

We also lost Jacques Guertin, the owner of Sanair International Raceway, former home of the NHRA Grandnational, who was best remembered for building a 10-story cylindrical tower as his house at the end of the track, and Woodburn Dragstrip’s Jim Livingston and Coles County Dragway’s Nick Agresta, and industry leader Chris Raschke of ARP.

The closer NHRA family also took some tough hits. Danny Gracia, a bastion of NHRA’s Tech Department, passed away in April. Lynwood Dupuy, NHRA’s popular former competition director, preceded Danny in February and was joined not long after by his wife, his and our beloved “Miss Mary.” We also lost longtime NHRA event worker and tech expert Dale Schafer, and Judy Bear, who worked with the staff of the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, helping to provide logistics and hospitality for Hot Rod Junction displays.

So many great people, so many incalculable losses. Those we lost will always be a part of the fabric of our sport, remembered for their contributions and passion for drag racing, and will remain forever in our hearts.

Phil Burgess can be reached at pburgess@nhra.com

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