THE SNAKE STRIKES BACK : Prudhomme’s Career Is in High Gear Again After First Win in Nearly 4 1/2 Years

Don Prudhomme remembers Oct. 14, 1981, like it was yesterday.

Prudhomme was on fire. A face full of nitro-methane flames, it seems, makes an indelible impression on one’s memory. How many of you, for example, will ever forget the day that your car melted into a smoldering puddle as you drove it at 250 miles per hour?

Chris Martin of the National Hot Rod Assn., who viewed the fire from afar, described it this way: “It just blew up. It went off like a Claymore mine. It was one of the worst fires I’ve ever seen. It was running at full speed and it just exploded. I’ve yet to see a photo of it that framed the entire ball of fire. It was so big, all the photos have flames trailing off the edges of the paper.”

Prudhomme recalls it this way: “At 250 miles an hour, the car just turned into a ball of fire. When it happened, the lights just went out. My lights. I was blind from the fire and the smoke, but I was still going 250 miles an hour. It was . . . well, it was hot is what it was. And I just had to sit there and hold my breath to keep from breathing the flames. At 250 miles an hour, you don’t really want to get out of the car.”

Amazingly--and largely because he wore an asbestos fire suit he had designed--Prudhomme walked away from that accident with no serious injuries. As he was recalling the near-tragedy recently he was reminded that his 46th birthday would fall on the same day as the Marvin Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard fight in Las Vegas. Prudhomme, who has spent 30 years strapping himself into flame-belching vehicles that hurtle his body down a race track with enough G-force to distort his face, had this to say:

“Leonard is nuts to fight Hagler. He can get hurt in there.”

Does that remind you at all of an animal trainer who makes a living by sticking his face inside a lion’s mouth and then marvels at the courage of the clown juggling the three tennis balls?

But Prudhomme is a race-car driver. Specifically a funny-car driver. And the folks who do this on a fairly steady basis have never been considered absolutely, 100% normal.

Funny cars are the second-fastest race cars on this planet, and probably on several others. Long-nosed, top-fuel dragsters go faster, but only slightly. Funny cars are composed of a fiberglass body that weighs a next-to-nothing 250 pounds, a 500 cubic-inch engine that generates up to 2,500 horsepower, a tiny steering wheel and a crude plastic seat too small for Pee Wee Herman.

They are named funny cars because when they showed up in the sport of drag racing several decades ago, someone thought they looked funny. They don’t, really. They do look and sound fearsome. If you can look at, hear and feel the thunderous power these cars produce and still think of them as funny cars, your sides are probably still sore from laughing about that hysterical Hindenburg thing.

Prudhomme’s passion for this type of no-holds-barred racing began when he was 16 at the now-defunct San Fernando Drag Strip. Nicknamed The Snake because of his quick, explosive starts, Prudhomme pushed that passion to its peak in 1978 when he won his fourth straight NHRA world championship in the funny-car division. In 1976, the NHRA sanctioned eight races. Prudhomme won seven of them and was the runner-up in the other one. He was the first funny-car driver to hit 240 m.p.h. and the first to hit 250 m.p.h.

In 1982, Prudhomme won the Summernationals in English Township, N.J.

And then the well went dry.

He won nothing in 1983. It was the first year that had happened since 1964. He won nothing again in 1984. And 1985. He didn’t win a single event in 1986, either. That, of course, was due largely to the fact that he didn’t race in 1986, his corporate sponsorship having been yanked out from under him.

The most successful funny car driver in history, it seemed, was history.

He blames part of his downfall on bad luck. But he blames most of it on the pressure.

“You’ve got to realize something,” he said. “There are guys in this sport who have never won a national event, and they’ve been in it as long as I have. There are a lot of guys who have never won a world championship. But because I had done all that, people expect a lot out of me. And I expect a lot out of myself. Between them and me, it burned me out. The pressure was tremendous. Every race I had to run perfect. I had to get into the finals every time. It really tore me up.”

With one car costing upward of $80,000 and total preparation for a single race costing more than $200,000, corporate sponsorship is a must in drag racing. When Prudhomme lost his, he lost his ability to race.

“That wasn’t a real good time for me,” Prudhomme said. “You ever been fired? Well, I was fired. They called and told me to put down the tools and turn out the lights. I was done.”

So Prudhomme went home. Time to relax with his wife, Lynn, and their two daughters at their Granada Hills home. It was a welcome change. For a while.

“The first few months weren’t bad,” he said. “It was the first time in 25 years I had enough time with my family. I enjoyed it. I really did. But then I really started missing the track . . . missing it a lot.”

Prudhomme’s search for a sponsor ended late last year when Skoal, the tobacco company, stepped in. Prudhomme calls it his best sponsor deal ever. At a news conference announcing the deal, a reporter began a question with, “Now that you have to go out and win again . . . “ He was interrupted by a Skoal official who said, “No, no, no. We would like for Don to win, but he doesn’t have to win.”

Prudhomme felt the weight of a super-charged, nitro-burning, eight-cylinder engine lifted from his shoulders.

“No one had ever told me that before,” he said. “That was neat. That made such a big difference.”

In November, Prudhomme put a mechanical crew together, turned the lights back on inside his Northridge shop and set about the task of building a funny car. And his career. On his first step up the comeback ladder, the rung broke and Prudhomme fell on his face. It was the Winternationals in Pomona, and Prudhomme was soundly beaten in the first qualifying race.

“We just packed up and came home and I thought, ‘Here we go again,’ ” he said. “But there was something different about it this time. We didn’t keep that negative attitude very long. We came back to the shop and huddled and said, ‘OK. Let’s get to work.’ ”

Every weekend, Prudhomme and his crew would haul the car to a small drag strip in Bakersfield. Prudhomme didn’t use the word “haul” to describe the trips.

“We’d sneak up to Bakersfield,” he said. “We tested the car and tested it and tested it. No one knew we were there. We were way out in the desert. We hired an ambulance to hang around in case there was an accident. Some weekends we brought the car to another track near San Francisco for more testing. One day, we took the car out and it ran the quarter-mile in 5.77 seconds. That time at the Winternationals would have put us right near the top. We stopped and said, ‘OK. Now we’ve got something.’

“But then we had trouble again. We blew up an engine and had a fire. No one knew about any of this, but we had a helluva fire. That was in February. So we came back and rebuilt the car. It ran real well again in the next test, so we packed it up and headed for Florida.”

Gainesville, to be specific. For the 1987 Gatornationals, one of the premier events on the NHRA calendar.

Prudhomme won.

It was his 35th NHRA victory, putting him second on the all-time list behind pro stock driver Bob Glidden. But it was more than a victory. It was an announcement:

The Snake Was Back.

The return was greeted with mixed feelings by some of his competitors, people who have known Prudhomme since his San Fernando Drag Strip days, people who offer some insight into what makes him tick.

“No one wrote The Snake off,” said funny car driver Tom McEwen of Fountain Valley. “He had such a fantastic 20 years and won so much that when all of a sudden he wasn’t winning everyone thought he was done. But those of us who know Don knew there was too much burning inside of him to quit. We knew he’d come back and come back strong. He’s good for the sport. We need him out there.”

Sometimes, according to McEwen, the fire burning inside Prudhomme became a general alarm blaze. At those times, he said, Prudhomme was about as popular around the track as heavy rain.

“There’s just such a drive to win . . . there’s just something different about The Snake,” McEwen said. “He’s hungrier than anyone else. I’ve known him since we were 18. He’s very competitive and he’s a real loner type of guy. He’s really into his own deal. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. He and I formed a corporation for marketing, but he doesn’t work real well with partnership stuff. He’s pretty much into Don Prudhomme. He felt he was better than everyone else. Winners are like that, I guess.

“I like to win, too, but Prudhomme carried it way too far. We used to be real friendly. He was like my brother. I even lived at his house for a while. But the competition between us got so bad he wasn’t any fun to be around anymore. He drove me away from him. We’re not social friends anymore. We don’t hang around together anymore.

“He’s just too much into Don Prudhomme. There’s no room for anyone else.”

McEwen said the hard-line, win-at-all-cost attitude that brought Prudhomme to the top of the drag racing world also contributed heavily to his hard tumble.

“I think he got his feet put back on the ground a little bit in the last few years,” he said. “I think his failures brought him back to earth. When things went bad, he found out that he didn’t have that many friends out there. When he was the world champion every year he got away with treating people any way he wanted and it didn’t matter.

“But as soon as he started losing, he started passing the same people on the way down that he had passed on the way up. And they remembered. No one helped him. I think those bad years have humbled him.”

Don Garlits, the king of top-fuel dragsters, has also known Prudhomme for more than 20 years. He agrees with McEwen’s assessment of The Snake.

And he says it’s the only way to be.

“The Snake doesn’t have too many real friends out here. Maybe no real friends,” Garlits said. “But I’m like that, too. As soon as you develop close friendships, guys start asking you for tools and for your time and for your advice. At this level, you just can’t do that.

“If someone says Don Prudhomme is only concerned with Don Prudhomme, I’d have to agree with that. But I’m just the same way. And The Snake and I haven’t done too bad out here, have we?”

Sometimes, the hard years make a person harder. But the hard years of 1983 and 1984 and 1985 and 1986 have, perhaps, softened Prudhomme a bit.

“Having to sit out a year really hurt me,” he said. “But it might be the best thing that ever happened to me. It changed me. I don’t approach things like I used to. I enjoy racing, but now I find time for other people.”

The people who once again have to race against The Snake are smart enough to know, however, that once that massive roar escapes from Prudhomme’s engine, once his car is pushed to the starting line and he focuses his eyes on the quarter-mile strip of asphalt ahead of him, all the time Prudhomme will have for them will be about 5 1/2 seconds.

“I almost decided to come back in top fuel dragsters,” he said. “But I knew I had some unfinished business with some of these guys in the funny cars. I don’t want to sound cocky, but there are some things that I have to settle. I left on a sour note and I left feeling pretty down. I don’t think some people treated me right during my tough years.

“I wanted to come back and race against that same group of people again. You know what I mean?”