At 57, He Is Certainly Not Over the Hill : Drag racing: Eddie Hill, having already clinched the top-fuel title, will compete in Pomona this week.

Sometime last January, Ercie Hill decided that after 46 years of racing, her husband, Eddie, needed extra help if he was to accomplish their stated goal--winning the National Hot Rod Assn. top-fuel championship, the top prize in drag racing.

“I was back home in Wichita Falls (Tex.) and I sat down and asked the Lord if, in his good wisdom and will, he could help Eddie win the world championship,” Ercie said. “I didn’t ask anything for myself, or for the team or the sponsors or anybody, just for Eddie. I felt that after working so hard, for so long, he deserved it.

“I had never done anything like that before, but you know, little things kept happening during the year that must have been divine intervention. At first, we called them luck, but after a while, I think maybe the good Lord was truly looking after Eddie.”

Eddie Hill, at 57 the oldest driver--winner or loser--in the NHRA Winston Drag Racing Series, clinched his first championship and its $150,000 bonus Oct. 17 at the Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Tex.

He and Ercie, who acts as his team manager-appointment secretary-financial adviser-wife and head cheerleader, are in Pomona this week for the 29th annual Winston Finals, 18th and final event of the NHRA season. Eddie, with matching white beard and hair, and the blonde Ercie will be the most visible couple at the track.

In his 5,000-horsepower dragster, Hill will be trying to exorcise what he calls “the California curse,” the way he did it in his drag boat a decade ago.

“I had all kinds of bad luck out here with my boat, but once I won a race, it seemed like I won just about everything,” Hill said. “And, of course, the 229 (m.p.h.) we ran at Chowchilla in 1982 is still the all-time record for a propeller-driven boat.

“I thought I had the curse overcome last year at Pomona when I ran that (then-world record) 4.77 (seconds elapsed time) in the Winston Finals and had low ET of every round on Sunday before I gave it away when I red-lighted (jumped the starting light). I love those memories of the good things that happen. They overshadow ones like that blowover in ’89 and all the engine problems we’ve had.

“And don’t forget, I finally had my first win in California this summer at Sonoma. I feel all our problems are behind us.”

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Hill survived one of drag racing’s most spectacular accidents in the 1989 Winternationals at Pomona when his 25-foot-long dragster got airborne and did a cartwheel at 270 m.p.h. The car was demolished, but Hill was back the next day in a vehicle borrowed from Darrell Gwynn.

He and Ercie were in the announcers’ booth Oct. 17 in Texas when Mike Dunn defeated Scott Kalitta in the final round of the Chief Auto Parts Nationals, eliminating Hill’s closest competitor in the points race. Hill had lost in the first round to Kenny Bernstein, but points accumulated in his six victories at Phoenix, Gainesville, Fla.; Commerce, Ga.; Topeka, Kan.; Sonoma and Brainerd, Minn., had helped earn him the long-sought championship.

“It was such a long time coming, and it took so much work, I don’t know if I’ve really realized what it means,” he said. “I’ll probably be remembered longer for being the first in the fours than for being the 1993 NHRA champion, but to me, this is all we’ve thought about for a long time.”

Hill became the first top-fuel dragster driver to break the five-second barrier in April of 1988 when he had a 4.990-second run at the Texas Motorplex.

Hill has been drag racing, on land and water, since 1955, when he put a stock 1949 Oldsmobile V-8 engine into a Ford Model-T frame and took it to the Flying Fish Lodge in Karnack, Tex. The lodge had a landing strip that was used for drag races on Sunday afternoons.

He won that first race with a top speed of around 106 m.p.h.

In 1959 he won the American Hot Rod Assn. championship and in 1962 became the first to exceed 200 m.p.h. in a gasoline-fueled dragster. When funds ran low in 1965, he retired from drag racing and began to race motorcycles, winning the Texas state stock production road racing title in 1972.

Hill had a degree in engineering from Texas A&M; and the challenge of building big, fast engines was revived when he took up drag racing on water. In a short time, Hill became known as “The Thrill” and perhaps the most widely known drag boat racer of all time.

That career ended with a near-fatal crash at Firebird Lake, near Phoenix, in 1984. He had seven broken bones, a concussion and nearly lost his eyesight when his boat flipped over at 217 m.p.h. and catapulted across the water.

Once he recovered, Hill returned to racing on asphalt. He and Ercie were married on Valentine’s Day in 1984 and the Eddie-Ercie team has been inseparable since.

“I can’t tell you what made me ask the Lord for his help, but I felt in my heart so deeply about Eddie that it just came out,” Ercie said. “After Eddie won it, we laughed about the little prayer, but the more we thought about it, the more we saw clues to a divine intervention.”

Eddie explained:

“There were times when the car wouldn’t run down the track. It just seemed to refuse, for one reason or another. One time, we fixed it and it still wouldn’t run, so we fixed it again and the clutch wouldn’t release. I said to Ercie, ‘Maybe the man upstairs is trying to tell us something,’ so we tore the car apart and found a cracked wing. It had nothing to do with the original problem, but if we hadn’t found it, we’d probably have wrecked.

“Then at Gainesville, we were having magneto problems and we thought we’d hurt the engine so we tore it down. When they called us to the line, we weren’t even close to being ready. It looked like we were done for the day when a little rain shower came over. It gave us just enough time to finish the job and we went out and won.

“At Brainerd, another place where we won, I was late off the line in one round and looked like a sure loser when the guy in the other lane broke and we advanced. It seemed time and again that little things like that, things we had no control over, kept happening to us.”

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Winning the NHRA championship culminated a 10-year chase that began when Eddie and Ercie hocked everything they had to buy a top-fuel dragster and join the national circuit.

“We put it in writing that our stated goal was to win the world championship and have a good time doing it,” Eddie said. “We were really naive. We thought a man and his wife could go run top fuel by themselves and become a winner. For a long time, we didn’t even qualify at many of the races. There were times when, if we burned even one piston, we were out of business.

“From there to now, it’s been a long, long road with a giant bunch of turning and twisting. We--the four of us, Ercie and me and Fuzz (crew chief Carter) and (Carter’s wife) Jana--did it the old-fashioned way. The Carters live in Big Springs, about 250 miles from Wichita Falls, and we’re like a close family.

“We kept going early this year in a 5-year-old car that had over 500 runs in it, on tires that had 13 or 14 runs on them, until we won at Phoenix and the Pennzoil people decided we could use some extra funding. Dale Rush (of Pennzoil) told us to quit shorting ourselves on parts and if we needed something, to go buy it.

“Fuzz got some new parts for our clutch system and put a fantastic program together that turned the car around. It has made us a lot more consistent and it paid off with the championship.”

Hill says he is far from retiring, that after winning once, he wants to win again, and again, and maybe again.

“I’ve seen guys like (Joe) Amato and Kenny (Bernstein) win championships one after another, so why not me?”