Married to Speed : Joe and Gere Amato Are Searching for a 300-M.P.H. Run

If trust is a key to successful marriage, Joe Amato must be one of the most happily married men in the world.

Amato, 47, drives a top-fuel dragster with mind-boggling acceleration. He goes from zero to 100 m.p.h. in one second. He’s at nearly 300 m.p.h. in less than five seconds, riding up front in a 4,000-horsepower vehicle that weighs only 1,950 pounds.

The only way to stop is with two parachutes--a primary one to slow the car and a second for an emergency.

Amato’s wife, Gere, packs the chutes.

“I wouldn’t want to trust anyone else with the job,” Amato said. “She’s been doing it ever since we started running fuelers in 1982.”

The chutes have failed only once. Amato and his top-fuel dragster ended up in a soybean field. Gere says it was a mechanical failure, not a packing one.

“Everyone is always kidding Joe, telling him that if he lets his wife pack his chutes, he’s taking his life in his own hands,” she said with a laugh.

When qualifying runs start Thursday at the Pomona Fairplex for the 32nd annual Chief Auto Parts Winternationals, Gere will be in front of Amato’s blue and white Valvoline dragster after he makes his tire-squealing burnout before each run. There are no rear-view mirrors on top-fuelers, so someone has to guide the driver back so he will be be able to start the run precisely on the tire marks he made on the burnout.

“Tim Richards (crew chief) is the one who really guides Joe,” Gere Amato said. “He is in the rear and knows exactly how he wants the car lined up. He signals me and I relay the signal to Joe, the way a manager does to a coach and the coach to a player in baseball.”

Gere has another crucial job with the team. She mixes the fuel, a potent 11 gallons of nearly 100% nitromethene, with just enough alcohol to prevent the nitro from blowing up the engine.

“The mixture is different for every run, depending on the weather, track surface, temperature, time of day, all kinds of things. Tim (Richards) makes the decision about the combination, and then I do the mixing. It gets very precise, right down to one drop at a time.

“I missed one day a few years ago when I was sick, and Joe had to do his own mixing and someone else the packing. When I came back the next day, Tim and Joe both told me not to let that happen again as long as he was racing.”

Even though Amato is a multimillion-dollar businessman who runs top-fuel dragsters for excitement, he and Gere live the lives of gypsies, crisscrossing the country from one drag strip to another.

They have one home in Old Forge, Pa., near where they grew up and met, and another in the Belcourt Hill section of Newport Beach, where they stay when racing brings them to the West Coast and during the off-season.

“I call us ‘Joe Amato’s Traveling Top Fuel Show,’ ” Amato said. “We hit about 20 races a year, enough so that we’re more at home on the road than we are when we’re at home, if you know what I mean. I have a business in Exeter, Pa., but I have good people taking care of it for me. Mostly, I’m a cheerleader, a motivator, when I’m back there. I don’t do much hands-on work. Mostly I keep in touch by phone.”

Keystone Automotive Warehouse, one of the largest distributors of automotive parts in the country, did $125 million in business a year ago. In addition to the wholesale business, Amato has 18 retail outlets, with close to 700 employees.

He dropped out of high school at 16 after his father suffered a heart attack. Amato built the business from a single auto parts store in Scranton, Pa.

For relaxation as a youth, he raced a ’32 Chevy coupe on weekends at local drag strips in the Poconos.

“I found out when I raced, I made a lot of contacts with other racers, and pretty soon they were buying all their high-performance stuff from me,” Amato said.

One of his competitors was a teen-ager named Tim Richards, who was getting a reputation as an engine builder.

“Tim was running Chryslers and had a little factory support when the well dried up,” Amato said. “I asked him to build my engines for a sportsman car I was driving. When we decided to try our luck at top-fuel dragsters, Tim closed his engine shop and became my crew chief full time. That was 1982 and we’ve been together ever since.”

The relationship produced National Hot Rod Assn. top-fuel championships in 1984, 1988, 1990 and 1991. Amato is the only driver to win four times, one more than Don Garlits and Shirley Muldowney.

He was the first driver to surpass 260 m.p.h. (March 18, 1984, at Gainesville, Fla.) and the first to surpass 280 m.p.h. (Sept. 5, 1987, at Indianapolis). He set the NHRA elapsed-time record of 4.897 seconds last March at Gainesville.

Now his goal is to reach 300 m.p.h. first.

“Three hundred, that’s the crown jewel in racing right now,” Amato said. “It would be quite a feather in my cap to be the first. That will be the last big landmark in drag racing. Everybody in top fuel has their eye on it.

“It could happen this year. The technology is there, and when Jim White went over 290 in Roland Leong’s Hawaiian Punch funny car last year, 300 definitely became a possibility for top-fuelers. Traditionally we run about five or six (m.p.h.) faster than funny cars. I expect fuelers to be running 296-297 regularly before the year is out, and when they do that, a breakthrough to 300 could come with a Star Wars run when conditions were perfect.”

The fastest top-fuel run is 296.05 m.p.h. by the late Gary Ormsby, made Sept. 29, 1990, at Topeka, Kan. The NHRA record is 294.88, also by Ormsby, in October of 1989 at Ennis, Tex. NHRA records require a backup run within 1% of the record during the course of the same event.

The Pomona Fairplex record is 291.54 by Connie Kalitta, set in the 1989 Winternationals.

“The Winternationals might be a bit soon to look for 300, but the race for it is definitely on,” Amato said. “I don’t know who’ll be first, but I hope it’s me.”

Wes Cerny, who was plant manager at Keith Black’s engine building shop in South Gate for 14 years before becoming crew chief on White’s funny car last year, is generally credited with the sudden breakthrough in speed. Before White pushed the record to 291.82, the fastest funny car was Mark Oswald’s 284.18.

“Crews have been concentrating on e.t. (elapsed time) since the NHRA de-emphasized top speed a few years ago,” Amato said. “Leong and Cerny were the first ones to start working on speed, and last year, after White ran 291, it raised a lot of eyebrows and speed became a goal again.

“The history of increased speed has been to find the weak link in a car, make it stronger and go on from there. That’s what Cerny and Leong did with new camshaft technology. Bernstein hired Cerny, but that only makes us work harder. Motivation helped us get ahead of the competition and it will help us to stay ahead of it.”

Besides motivation, it will take money. To get close to 300, a car must be on the ragged edge, and if it goes over, a blown engine can cost as much as $50,000.

Even without a blown engine, a quarter-mile run costs between $5,000 and $6,000. And if a team makes 200 runs a year, it’s upward of a $1 million for a season.

“And the million bucks is just for the season,” Amato said. “That’s after you’ve got all the equipment, like a new car, another one being built in the shop, a year-old backup car, an 18-wheel truck-transporter and a garage to work on everything.”

Amato, after a career of running in a straight line, is learning to turn corners so he can drive in the Toyota pro-celebrity race during Long Beach Grand Prix weekend.

“I’m looking forward to steering into those turns and seeing if I can come out,” Amato said. “My wife is betting that I don’t make it past the first turn, and the guys back at the shop have a pool on how many laps I’ll last.”

It will be different for Gere, too. There will be no fuel to mix and no chutes to pack.