NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

The 1988 NHRA U.S. Nationals was a memorable race for me. It was the first year we came up with the insane pre-internet idea of producing overnight magazines, the Daily Dragster, for fans and racers to catch up on the previous day’s action. We had a lot to write about, especially in the Sportsman classes. Gary Southern drove Dale Smart’s Top Alcohol Dragster to a dominating victory after installing the then-new PSI screw-type supercharger on their Arias powerplant. Pat Austin won Top Alcohol Funny Car for the fourth straight victory that season, defeating Frank Manzo in the quickest side-by-side race in class history, 6.11 to 6.13. And three Ford engineers from Michigan stunned the Comp field, which is how I first met Steve Ambrose, Bob Huettman, and Reynold Argenta.

They had qualified their Ambrose-Argenta-Huettman E/Dragster No. 2 in the Comp field — No. 1 was another Michigan-based Ford-powered machine, Jerry Arnold’s A/EA Bantam — and when I dropped by their pit to ask about the car, they welcomed me like an old friend, and we remained friends for years. Argenta, he of the famous bushy mustache, died in the fall of 2006, and round-faced and perpetually smiling Huettman just last August, at age 80, and the final one of the Three Musketeers, Ambrose, reunited with them a week ago last Monday, July 20, three days after his 78th birthday.

Ambrose never drove a nitro-fueled dragster or Funny Car, and you may not even know his name or care, but he was as true a racer as anyone who did. Racing with lifelong friends on a team that continued to innovate and experiment and have fun, he personified to me what a racer is.

Back when I joined the NHRA National Dragster staff in the early 1980s, Comp was not only my reportorial “beat” on the team, but it was also my favorite class. The sheer variety of machines — four, six, or eight cylinders. Carbureted, turbocharged, fuel injected, or supercharged. Door cars, dragsters, and altereds — was food for my young hot rod soul.

The A-A-H team won Indy that year, then two weeks later won the NHRA Keystone Nationals, the first two of 10 eventual Wallys that Ambrose would hoist in victory, and ended up on the cover of National Dragster.

Their little 310-cid straight-six Ford powerplant — inspired by the success of Joe Williamson’s similarly motivated roadster — was built around a truck engine and capped with a cylinder head fabricated from six individual combustion chambers from 351 Ford V-8 NASCAR heads that had been sawed apart and the pieces welded back together. I thought that was cool as hell.

I loved Comp people. I really did. Anyone who has been around this column knows of my deep ties to the Mazi family and their supercharged BB/A Opel, but I also became fast friends with people like Bill Maropulos, David and Robert Nickens, Danny Townsend, Coleman Roddy, Vinny Barone, Amy Faulk, Larry Kopp, Larry Tores, John Lingenfelter, Todd Patterson, and David Rampy, mostly from interviewing them after multiple wins. In these people, I found not just inquisitive automotive Einsteins but genuine people who had 9-to-5 jobs and an insatiable desire to tinker and go faster.

The A-A-H guys were lifelong buddies who all ended up working at Ford. At the time, Ambrose was into chassis components research, and Huettman was a dyno engineer. Can you think of two better professions for racers? Ambrose and Argenta had met as kids in their shared Allen Park, Mich., neighborhood, not far from Detroit Dragway. Ambrose met Huettman a few years later at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., where they were both studying to become auto shop teachers. Together the three amigos would travel life’s highways and dragstrips and end up together in the Michigan Motorsports Hall of Fame.

“We've been working on his project for 10 years, but we like it because it’s different,” Ambrose told me of their engine, also sharing that they had run door cars and Super Stock before advancing to Comp. “We do it ourselves, and we’re always trying something — usually something futile. Bob will bring an idea to our machinist, and usually he laughs at us; he gets this big grin every time we walk into his shop. You should see the stuff in my garage that didn’t work — manifolds, heads, rods, short blocks; you name it.”

That’s the great thing about racers, not just in Comp, but throughout the sport: the circle of life that is imagine, dream, design, build, test, and sometimes cast off. Good ideas and theory don’t always pan out. Innovative ones usually don’t at first.

But they stuck with it and even switched from the dragster to a J/AA ’23-T roadster. As they got better and smarter, they stopped welding combustion chambers together and enlisted famed nitro tuner and cylinder head manufacturer Alan Johnson to carve them a CNC-machined head out of billet aluminum. Their old Ford rival Jerry Arnold then did the final porting work.

They won with fair regularity the next decade or so, with win No. 9 coming in Columbus in 2000. It was the last winner’s circle they’d share with Argenta and, for a while, it seemed like the last winner’s circle ever until more than a dozen years and four runner-ups later when they won the 2014 NHRA Gatornationals. They had won a handful of divisional races in the meantime, but this was their first national event Wally in what seemed like forever, but you wouldn’t know it from their reaction.

“We’re still having such a good time [that] we don’t even realize how old we’re getting,” said Ambrose, who was 65 then and retired from Ford for more than a decade. “My old friend, Mel Wallace, who used to be the Ford Motorsports guy, called me and told me there’s only two Ford guys he can still count on to win when they’re 65, me and John Force. Not having won for almost 14 years can get you down, but we go for the fun first and the winning second.

“We’ve been working on this same engine combination since 1976, and we’re still trying to get it right,” he added. “The competition is so tough out there now, and we’re trying not to let them out-buck us. We’ve still got our little trailer, we don’t stay at swanky hotels, and we don’t have names on our crew shirts. We don’t have a lot of money, but we have a lot of fun.”

I’m not exactly sure when they parked the race car, but Steve would call me from time to time just to say “Hey” and reminisce about those good ol’ times. When the phone rang last August, he told me, his voice choking with emotion, that Huettman had died. I could tell he was gutted, and I could relate, having lost my lifelong best friend and car buddy, Van Tune, the year before. I was touched that he thought enough to call me to share the news and mourn together.

It made me think back to 2012, when Super Stock racer D.G. Gilliam had called me to tell me that his dear old friend and racing partner Lloyd Bray had died. I had only met them once, back in early 1986 when I was the newly minted editor of National Dragster and took a trip to see them and their cool 428-powered Ford Super Stocker at their humble little shop in Bartlesville, Okla., and to check out Kip Martin’s rare Ford Super Stocker. I palled around with them all for a few days, came home, and wrote a nice story about them, as I have done many times over the decades, but D.G. and Lloyd never forgot about how this raw California kid had come to visit and share their story.

The friends you make in this sport often become lifelong friends, bonded in an appreciation of speed and mechanical artistry and the camaraderie built around late-night pit-area beers and barbecues, where a fella might lean back and stare at the stars and dream up the next big thing that may or may not work, and love every second of it.

Steve Ambrose was one of those guys. And I’m gonna miss him.

Phil Burgess can be reached at pburgess@nhra.com

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