Fast From the Start : Ventura’s Krabill Got the Jump on Drag Racing at an Early Age

As his engine rattles loudly behind him, teen-age drag racer Kris Krabill focuses on the lights ahead, knowing that if he waits until he sees green to step on the gas, he probably has already lost.

When the three amber lights flash Krabill, a senior at Ventura High, has exactly four-tenths of a second before the green light flashes, just enough time for his 1,350-pound dragster to react after he jams his left foot on the gas.

Within a second, he will be going 60 m.p.h. A second later, 150 m.p.h.

With the seat of his pants about three inches above the hot, sticky track, Krabill--ideally--will cover the quarter-mile in 8.9 seconds. No more, no less.

Isn’t this how most high schoolers spend their weekends?

“You’re sitting there at idle and you can feel the engine rattling behind you,” said Krabill, who has been a professional drag racer since before he could drive legally. “Then you see the (light) tree, and it’s like, vrooooom, you’re gone. It’s such a rush.

“Every time I go down the track it gets more exciting.”

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Krabill, according to his mother, was always in a hurry. For starters, he was born seven weeks prematurely. As he grew up, only the mode transportation changed. Not the tempo.

“He had little cars, a Big Wheel,” Carol Krabill said. “He was always going fast on those things. He liked to do jumps too. Daredevil stuff. He always wanted to drive.”

Krabill, 18, fell in love with drag racing when he was about 14 and his uncle, who races Pontiacs, let him sit in the passenger seat during a race. He also went with his father, another former drag racer, to the Winternationals in Pomona.

“I thought it was the best thing,” Krabill said. “I was just overwhelmed with how exciting it was. After that, I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.”

When Krabill was 15, his parents bought him a 1970 Chevy Nova, “a pretty hopped-up street car,” as he described it. Soon thereafter, Krabill started entering races illegally--he didn’t have a driver’s license yet--with the Nova.

“I know it was not right,” Carol Krabill said, “but this was just with the Nova, so we’re talking about only 80 miles an hour. And it was just a few months.”

Krabill finally stopped racing illegally after he won an event at the Los Angeles County Raceway in Palmdale. He was afraid race officials would check for his license when he picked up his trophy. They didn’t, but Krabill quit anyway. Temporarily, that is.

After months of searching classified ads in drag racing magazines, Krabill and his father, Dick, a conveyor belt salesman, found the perfect dragster. In Houston.

No matter.

Krabill flew to Houston, and his father drove a trailer. They paid $10,000 for the car, and Krabill spent a day with the previous owner learning how to drive it. He and his father then towed it back to Ventura.

The next step was finding a sponsor. Krabill responded to an ad from a motor oil company that offered racers the opportunity to be trackside dealers for the motor oil in exchange for a few perks, such as the company painting the car.

At every race they enter, the Krabills set up a stand and actually sell motor oil, along with caps and T-shirts bearing the company’s logo. Besides keeping a portion of the revenue from sales of the merchandise, the Krabills are able to write off the racing expenses, starting with the car’s $10,000 price tag, as business deductions.

The family formed KDC Enterprises. The initials stand for Kris, Dick and Carol.

“Mom is the manager, dad is the crew chief and my uncle is the crew,” Krabill said.

While his father worries primarily about the mechanics of the car, his mother does a little of everything, from retrieving her son from the end of the track after a run to making sure he completes his homework between races.

Krabill plans to study business management at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo next year.

“I’m still going to be involved in racing when I have time, but I feel it’s important to get my education to fall back on,” he said, “because you never know what is going to happen.”

Krabill couldn’t make much of a living drag racing, anyway. The richest events in his division pay about only $1,500 to the winner. The most he has taken home is about $500.

Krabill said most events pay from the quarterfinals on, which means winning four races before you see a dime. About 120 drivers, most of them weekend warriors with other jobs, compete for a championship. They are paired off in a single-elimination tournament.

In super comp eliminator racing, the idea is not necessarily to floor it and go as fast as possible to beat the guy next to you, but to come closest to the index, which, in Krabill’s division, is 8.90 seconds.

In essence, the racer who finishes closest to 8.90 seconds, without going under, wins. If both racers are quicker than 8.90 seconds, the slower racer wins.

Krabill, who races primarily in California, Nevada and Arizona, has finished on top in five events in the three seasons he has been racing.

He finished 1993 in eighth place in the Southern California Econo Drag Racing Assn. points standings, and he didn’t even compete in two of the eight events from which the points are totaled.

Most of the events he competes in are regional, but he raced in his first national event in Pomona in October. He did so well, he was disqualified. Krabill anticipated the green light nearly perfectly, but he started one thousandth of a second before the green.

The frustrations come in many varieties. Last month, Krabill and his father drove eight hours in the dead of night to Phoenix for a race. After three practice runs, less than 30 seconds of driving, the dragster’s engine failed. They turned around and drove back to Ventura.

But, fortunately for Krabill, his racing problems have not caused him any injuries. The most serious trouble came when one of his crew members left the cap off the fuel cell and gasoline spilled onto the tires during the run, causing the car to lose traction.

“The car was all over the track,” Krabill said. But he was able to safely stop it.

His mother used to worry about his safety, but now she seems more comfortable.

“It’s really a safe sport,” she said. “With all the safety equipment, the five-way seat belt and the fire suit, it’s probably safer than him getting in his pickup and driving to school every day.”

Maybe so.

Krabill will be spending a day in traffic school sometime soon. He recently received his first moving violation.

A speeding ticket.