These Seniors Enjoy Life in Fast Lane : Winternationals: Led by 52-year-old Gene Snow, 12 of top 16 drivers who qualified for today’s top fuel finals are 45 or older.

The two key words in National Hot Rod Assn. tend to conjure up visions of speed-crazed youngsters hopping up their cars to squeeze the last ounce of speed out of them. Demographics of motor racing’s fastest moving sport show that 64% of its fans are under 34.

It doesn’t apply to the racers, however. What once may have been a young man’s sport has turned into one for senior citizens--or ones about to be.

Twelve of the 16 drivers who qualified Saturday for today’s NHRA Winternationals top fuel dragster finals are 45 or older.

Gene Snow, the No. 1 qualifier, is 52.

Chris (The Greek) Karamesines, is 61. Eddie Hill is 53, Connie Kalitta 52, Jimmy Nix 51 and if she will pardon divulging a woman’s age, Shirley Muldowney will be 50 on June 19.

Only two are in their 20s. Darrell Gwynn is 28, and Lori Johns, the baby of drag racing, is 24.

The average age for the 16 is 45.4 years.

Snow, who won competition eliminator--forerunner of funny cars--in the 1968 Winternationals in a Dodge Dart, streaked through the quarter-mile on the L. A. County Fairplex strip in 4.983 seconds in his top fuel dragster to wrest pole position honors from Gwynn, whose best was 5.019.

“I really don’t know why so many of us are up there (in age),” Snow said. “Maybe it’s true what they say about getting better with age.”

It was Snow’s first run in the fours since 1988, when he became the first driver in an NHRA event to break the five-second barrier. Hill had done it earlier in an International Hot Rod Assn. event.

“I had such a slump last year that it was 50-50 if I’d even race this year,” the Ft. Worth, Tex., veteran said. “Conditions were ideal for a quick run. The track had been warm and then cooled off. That’s what we like.”

Other old-timers were mixed in their reasons why age prevails.

“Experience, that’s it,” said former two-time national champion Joe Amato, 45, who had the fastest speed at 282.39 m.p.h. “It takes years to get the know-how, the feel, to do what we have to do.”

Karamesines, 10th quickest at 5.113 seconds, is the oldest licensed top fuel drag racer in the NHRA. He was winning match races on the Fairgrounds parking lot at Pomona before the first Winternationals were held in 1965.

“You have to love what you’re doing to keep at it this long,” he said. “Kids nowadays come along, go fast for a while and then lose interest if they don’t get a big sponsor to pay the bills. It takes a special kind of love to keep at it the way Big Daddy (Don Garlits) and I kept going, doing all the work as well as the driving.”

Karamesines, known since the 1950s as The Chisler from Chicago, was mixing his nitro, checking fuel lines, twisting wrenches and polishing his red dragster as he was being interviewed.

“I go back about as far as you can go in this sport,” he said. “When I started racing old slingshot dragsters, they were 140 inches long. This one here is 300 inches.”

Nix is the most surprising of the old-timers. He won top gas eliminator in the 1965 Winternationals, retired in 1971 and after a career selling commercial real estate around Oklahoma City, is returning to the drag strip for the first time this week.

“A couple of years ago, I went to the races for the first time in years and saw the Greek (Karamesines) out there still running strong,” Nix said. “The more I hung around him, the more I knew coming back was something I couldn’t resist.”

Nix bought a fueler in November, made a couple of runs to get his top fuel license, and took the new car to Bradenton, Fla., to check it out.

“After what happened down there, maybe I should have quit right then. We blew the clutch off and cut the rear end in half, but I was stubborn. We repaired it and came to Pomona.

“Our first run since the accident was the 5.07 (eighth quickest). On Friday’s run, I had a new helmet and it got loose and I pulled up. I guess I’d been away too long.”

In the 1965 Winternationals, on the day Nix won top gas, Don (Snake) Prudhomme won top fuel at 201.34 m.p.h. Saturday, 25 years later, they pulled to the staging lanes side by side. Prudhomme, 48, ran a 5.171 to Nix’s 5.298 in a match race for the ages.

Meanwhile, John Force of Yorba Linda, in an ’88 Olds Cutlass funny car, and Jerry Eckman of Ventura, in an ’89 Pontiac Trans Am pro stocker, retained their No. 1 positions for today’s eliminations, which will start at 11 a.m.

Eckman, improving to a 7.294, became the first Pontiac driver to win the pole in an NHRA pro stock event since Butch Leal in the 1984 Winternationals--a stretch of 87 races.

Force retained No. 1 in funny car when no one could better his 5.288 clocking from Friday.