THANKS TO HER FIANCE . . . : Shirley Muldowney Is Back Behind the Wheel

The last thing Rawn Tobler wanted in life was to see Shirley Muldowney get back into a racing car.

Tobler had been her crew chief--and more important, her husband-to-be--when the former world champion’s top fuel dragster swerved into a muddy ditch in Canada at 247 m.p.h. and exploded.

Muldowney’s legs and feet were mangled beyond recognition.

Tobler recalled: “For the first two or three months after the accident, I wanted nothing to do with racing--for the rest of my life. I was young enough (30 at that time) to start a new career. I wouldn’t have worked on anyone else’s car and I certainly didn’t expect to see Shirley ever driving again. I think it was a natural reaction, seeing someone you love hurt the way she was.”

This week, Tobler and his crew, which includes Muldowney’s son, John, are putting the finishing touches on a new electric pink top-fuel dragster that Shirley will drive in the Chief Auto Parts Winternationals, starting Thursday at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona.

A week ago, in what amounted to a dry-run shakedown of her latest Dodge-powered state-of-the-art machine, Muldowney came back after a 19-month layoff and made a 5.58-second run in the quarter-mile from a standing start at Firebird Raceway in Phoenix. That is the same time she recorded two years ago on the same track in beating Big Daddy Don Garlits.

“It was like she’d never been gone,” Tobler said. “It was all so natural that I never gave a thought to the accident, or anything like that. We had been so involved in getting the car ready, it was more like business as usual.”

What brought about Tobler’s change of heart?

“After six months of being in and out of hospitals and not having a goal to keep her going, Shirley’s attitude toward her recovery was getting worse,” he said. “She had been a race car driver all her life, and now there was no light at the end of the tunnel. She had nothing to look forward to.

“I wouldn’t say she was giving up, but it gradually became apparent to me that her only real motivation would be to return to racing.”

One afternoon in December, 1984, Shirley and Rawn were sitting in the Somerset Mall in Detroit. She had just undergone more painful therapy and was discouraged at the prospect of months, maybe years, more of it.

“Rawn could see how unhappy I was,” Muldowney said. “Then he said, ‘OK, if you want to go back to racing, let’s do it.’ I was so thrilled, I threw my arms out to him and said, ‘Where do you want me to walk?’ ” At the time, she couldn’t even hobble.

It took another year of rehabilitation, which included five operations, numerous skin and bone grafts as well as therapy seven days a week, but today she is walking without a cane, and if last week’s Phoenix race is any indication, has returned to the top echelon of drag racing.

“Today, the way I feel, I could race forever,” said Muldowney, who is 45.

There are certain ground rules, however. This year, at least, she plans to race only in the 14 National Hot Rod Assn. national championship events, of which the Winternationals is No. 1.

Said Tobler: “Once we made our commitment to go back to racing--or maybe it should be my commitment because I know that’s what she always wanted--we sat down and set our goals,” Tobler said. “We would do no match races, we would not run without adequate financial backing from a sponsor, and we would run only NHRA events where paramedics were on hand.”

The remains of Muldowney’s old dragster that had been scavenged from the crash site were in a box in the garage of her West Coast home in Northridge, just across the street from the Cal State University campus.

The car was beyond repairing, so she ordered a new ’86 chassis from Al Swindahl, one with all of the innovations that had been developed in her absence. Her new car has a higher wing and is a foot longer than the old, which gives it better traction and stability, and it has new tubeless one-piece front tires.

“I would not have come back if Goodyear hadn’t developed a new wheel-tire combination,” Muldowney said. “I wouldn’t even have considered it.”

It was an escaping rubber inner tube from a two-piece tire that caused her accident during Muldowney’s qualifying run June 29, 1984, at St. Pie, Quebec. The inner tube wrapped itself around the left front wheel, causing the dragster to pull to the left into a deep culvert. The front of the car smashed into the embankment with all the impact of a head-on collision.

“It was the most violent accident I have ever seen,” Tobler said. He and the crew of John Muldowney, Dickie Venable and Francis Gray were watching from the starting line, waiting to pick her up in the team truck.

“Most times, in a really bad accident, the car will sort of roll up in a ball, or become a tangled mess. But when Shirley hit, it was like the car was a glass bottle. It shattered.

“We knew she was in trouble when we heard the noise. First, it sounded like the throttle had stuck wide open when the car jerked to the left, and then we heard the explosion. When we got to the end of the track all we saw was a hole in the fence where she’d gone through. We were looking for what was left of the car because we figured she would be in it. But there wasn’t any car around.

“She was about 100 yards beyond where we were looking. A man who had seen her tumbling pointed her out to us. Everything, Shirley, the pieces of the car, everything was the same color, muddy brown. The biggest piece of the entire car was the seat she was sitting in and it wasn’t more than three feet wide.

“All I could feel was sheer panic, the way anyone would seeing your wife or your loved one and not knowing if they were dead or alive. When she came to and started talking, I can’t tell you how relieved I was.

“Shirley and I had flown to Montreal two days before, after spending three weeks at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio, with Doug Kerhulas, holding his wife’s hand while he was in a coma after a crash. Then to see this happen, it was almost too much.”

Kerhulas, who lives in Bakersfield, had suffered severe head injuries in an accident during the Springnationals in Columbus. After regaining consciousness, he had to undergo extensive rehabilitation to learn how to talk and walk again. He is also making his return to national competition in a top-fuel dragster in this week’s Winternationals.

From the moment Tobler found his driver-fiancee in the muddy field, he has been her constant companion. He rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital in St. Hyacinthe, then to a larger hospital in Montreal, and he and John sat with her for more than six weeks while the doctors attempted to piece her feet and legs back together. Then came three weeks in a Detroit hospital before she was stabilized sufficiently to move into her Midwestern home in Mount Clemens, Mich.

At Mount Clemens, Tobler was cook, housekeeper, nurse, chauffeur and psychiatrist.

“I sure learned to appreciate what a housewife goes through,” Tobler said. “Shirley’s mother showed me how to cook, but I had to do all the grocery shopping, keep the house clean, do the washing and look after Shirley. I found out it was a full-time job. I realize now it was good for me. I learned what the other side of home life is about.”

Shirley said his cooking was so good that she gained 20 pounds.

The most difficult problem Tobler had was moving Shirley from one spot to another when she was virtually immobile. Her right leg was in a cast up to her hip and her left foot could not touch anything.

“I rigged up a harness to help get her out of a chair or wherever she was sitting. I would get her up, get her on her right foot, and pivot her until she could drop into the wheelchair or wherever she wanted to sit. I had to sort of spin her around on the bottom of the cast.”

A year later, Muldowney can smile as she recalls the difficult period.

“Rawn was so wonderful, so kind, no matter how grumpy I got. The first time he got me in a bath tub, he had the water ready and wheeled me into the bathroom and lowered me into the tub with his harness. When I was all settled, he handed me a glass of champagne. Can you imagine anyone as thoughtful as that? I’m sure I would never had made it back without him.”

Tobler met Shirley in 1976, when he was a crewman for Marvin Graham’s top-fuel dragster and Shirley was traveling the NHRA circuit with Connie Kalitta. He had become involved in drag racing when he was 15, shortly after his family had moved from Inglewood to Houston.

“I’d been a drag race nut when I was a kid,” he said. “I’d read all the stuff I could find about Garlits and Snake (Don Prudhomme) and all the hotshots, and I’d gone to Lions (in Long Beach) to watch the races.

“One day not long after we moved to Houston, I noticed a garage in my neighborhood with a top-fuel dragster in it. I went in and asked if I could hang around. It was the Stephens and Venables car. They invited me to one of the races and from then on I was with them for five years, sweeping out the garage, doing all kinds of odd jobs and finally helping with the car.

“We’d go racing nearly every weekend, somewhere in Texas or Louisiana, and a couple of times we got out to Pomona for the Winternationals.”

Tobler got his license as a top-fuel driver in 1975, but he preferred the mechanical end of the job.

At the end of the 1976 season, Tobler quit Graham’s team and went to Florida for the winter series.

“Shirley and Connie were down there with two cars and they talked about keeping one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, so I figured they’d need a mechanic,” Tobler said. “Shirley hired me in January, 1977, so I’m starting my 10th year with her.”

When Muldowney and Kalitta split in 1978, a parting so explosive that it led to the making of a movie, “Heart Like a Wheel,” Tobler became crew chief for Muldowney’s car. In his first year as boss, Shirley won her first world top-fuel championship. The team won two more, in 1980 and 1982, and along the way she and Rawn fell in love.

Tobler gave her a diamond engagement ring for Christmas a year ago and they had planned to get married last Valentine’s Day. But Shirley demurred, saying, “I don’t want to be married until I can walk to the altar by myself.”

She’s walking now, but the marriage is still on hold.

“When we get married, we want to do it right,” Tobler said. “We want a nice, long honeymoon. We want to have plenty of time. Right now, it’s business as usual. I guess we’re having the world’s longest courtship.”

He said it with a smile, though, because his fiancee is back in her race car, doing what she loves to do most.