Snake Comes Full Circle : Drag Racer Prudhomme Returns to His Roots in Southern California For Final NHRA Event

A year ago, in an emotional gathering on the starting line of the Pomona Fairplex drag strip, where he had won his first National Hot Rod Assn. race 28 years ago, Don Prudhomme announced that he was retiring after one more season.

Most people thought the Snake should have retired then. He was winding up his worst year in racing and, to make matters worse, two days later he failed to even qualify for the season-ending Winston Finals.

The Snake’s Final Strike, as his 1994 tour was labeled, was expected by many to be a whiff.

“I heard all the talk, and I’ll admit, I was close to quitting right then,” Prudhomme said as he sat among a lifetime’s collection of trophies in his garage-office in Northridge. “But I had to have one more shot. I felt in my heart that I could still do it.

“Lucky for me, the Skoal Bandit people gave me the chance. They gave me one more year to prove the Snake could still strike.”

Prudhomme’s first move was to hire Wes Cerny, one of drag racing’s premier engine tuners. Cerny had been instrumental in helping Jim

White crack the 290-m.p.h. mark for funny cars and Kenny Bernstein to become the first top-fuel driver to exceed 300 m.p.h.

It took only three NHRA events before the Snake struck. He won at Houston, defeating Scott Kalitta in the finals. It ended a 27-event losing streak dating to 1992.

“I’ve had some great thrills over the years, but Houston was special, knowing it was my last year and all that,” Prudhomme said. “I knew I was in the groove as a driver, but being in the groove has a lot to do with the people around you. I owe that one to Wes. He turned things around for me and gave me the confidence a driver has to have.”

The Snake’s Final Strike will end Sunday in the Winston Select Finals at the Fairplex in Pomona, where it all began, and Prudhomme, 53, is positioned to go out in style.

Last Sunday, he defeated young Cory McClenathan in the finals of the rain-postponed Chief Nationals in Dallas. It was his fourth victory this year, along with the Winston Select Invitational, a non-points event, and the Champion Nationals at Brainerd, Minn.

He will finish second in the NHRA standings, his highest finish since switching from funny cars back to top-fuel dragsters in 1990.

Does he have second thoughts about retiring, now that he’s back on the winning track? He says no. John Force, the funny car champion who idolized the Snake as a youngster and has since broken many of Prudhomme’s funny car records, says he’ll be back.

“Force says I’ll be just like (Don) Garlits and Shirley (Muldowney) and the Mongoose (Tom McEwen) and in a year or so I’ll be back in the car, but I don’t think so,” Prudhomme said.

“I always thought I’d drive until I was 60-something, that I’d be the oldest drag racer alive, but I’ve changed my thinking. That happens when you’re driving 300 m.p.h., and it’s dark on a Friday night and you have to put your prescription glasses on to see where you’re going.

“There was a minute or two in Topeka (the Sears Nationals) three weeks ago when I had second thoughts, though when we had an absolutely perfect 300 run that felt so good. When I hit the chutes and I was cruising along at about 100, I thought, ‘God, this is a lot fun.’ But the next day, the car got a little squirrelly and I got back to reality.

“You can stick a fork in me. I’m done.”

Besides qualifying and racing this weekend, Prudhomme will be a busy man. On Wednesday night, the NHRA and the U.S. Tobacco Co. are throwing a black-tie farewell party for him at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills.

On Thursday, he will announce plans to be a car owner next season. Larry Dixon Jr., a rookie whose father won the Winternationals top-fuel title in 1970, will be his driver and the Miller Brewing Co. will be his sponsor. Wynn’s, which has been a Prudhomme sponsor since 1969, will come along as an associate.

“I’m real proud of my association with Wynn’s,” he said. “I think it may be the longest continuous sponsorship in drag racing.”

The new dragster, in the black and gold colors made familiar by Bobby Rahal’s Indy car, will be on display at Pomona.

“When I made the announcement that I was retiring, I wasn’t thinking about becoming a car owner,” Prudhomme said. “I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable in that setting without the right crew chief, crew, sponsor and driver. I knew Skoal Bandit was in its last year, so I had nothing to build on, but things have changed and I can’t wait to get Larry to testing.”

Dixon, 27, has never raced a top fueler, although he spent 1992 driving a top-alcohol car. He has worked for Prudhomme off and on since he was a teen-ager who fetched lunch for the crew and cleaned out the oil pans.

Young Dixon went through Frank Hawley’s drag racing school in Gainesville, Fla., after which Hawley, a former world funny car champion, proclaimed him “a natural.”

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The saga of the Snake began in the junkyards of the San Fernando Valley nearly four decades ago.

“When I was a kid, about 14 or 15, a friend of mine had a ’46 Ford that we used to race out between the orange groves. There were streets then, but no houses. I didn’t even have a license, but I used to drive that old Ford up and down the street.

“I show people where we used to race and they don’t believe it. It’s all built up now, but back then it was a wilderness out around Granada Hills.

“I decided I’d build myself a car, so I started scrounging around junkyards for parts. There was one out on Oxnard Street in Van Nuys that had a lot of good stuff, and another one on Roscoe that I remember. You know, there were no speed shops back then where you could buy trick stuff. You had to go find what you needed.”

By the time he was 19, Prudhomme had put together a B gas dragster--a stock Buick engine sitting on a rail. He drove his first race, as did most youngsters of that era, on the street.

“I just about had it finished and I was down at Bob’s Drive-In in Van Nuys one night when a guy started hassling me,” he said. “I was just a little squirt then and the guy wanted to choose me. He had a hot Olds. Before I knew it, we were over on Oxnard, about 2 o’clock in the morning, with the road blocked off. I had open headers and I just smoked his . . . off. That was my first real serious racing.”

Before long, he was racing the junkyard Buick at the old San Fernando Dragstrip--and winning.

“When I look back, I realize how lucky I’ve been to grow up in the sport, to have been a pioneer and still be around for the big business it is now.

“Things really changed in 1975, when R.J. Reynolds came into the sport and the winner of the Winston World Championship got a big diamond ring and a cash bonus. Before that, we raced pretty much just for trophies.

“It gave the sport a big lift . . . a legitimacy to the sport. The NHRA stood shoulder to shoulder in racing with the Winston Cup and Indy cars after that. Other sponsors saw what Winston was doing and they came in, big corporate names like Budweiser, Skoal, Fruit of the Loom and McDonald’s.

“Then the tracks began to clean up their act. The NHRA made drag racing a sport for the families. . . . Years ago, the amenities were a little rough around drag strips.

“Then the uniforms, the driving suits, began to change. When I started out, my uniform of the day was a helmet, leather jacket, blue jeans and tennis shoes. No fire suits back then.

“It didn’t slow us down, though. Every waking moment we were out at the strip. Back then, kids used to play pickup (baseball) in the streets and football on vacant lots--there were plenty of them then--in their spare time, but all my buddies and I wanted to do was work on our cars and run them at San Fernando.”

With his winning record at San Fernando, Prudhomme joined the Road Kings, a hot rod club in Burbank. Two friends, Kent Fuller and Dave Zuchel, built a car they called the Zuchel-Fuller-Prudhomme Dragster and towed it to Bakersfield for the 1962 Smokers Meet at the Famoso strip. Prudhomme drove it and won.

“They picked me to drive because they said I was the only one crazy enough,” Prudhomme said. “When we won Smokers, it put me on the map. No one had ever heard about me until then, but people back East, like Garlits and the Greek (Chris Karamesines), knew about the Smokers and when I won it, they knew about me.”

Prudhomme was 21. They called him “the Kid.” That was before he became known as the Snake. One night, an announcer likened Prudhomme’s remarkable quickness off the starting line to a snake striking and called him “Snake.” It stuck.

“At first, I hated it,” recalled Prudhomme. “It wasn’t until years later, when Mattel set up the Snake and the Mongoose rivalry with me and Tom McEwen in the Hot Wheels cars that I began to realize how much it could help me.”

In 1965, driving for Roland Leong in the Hawaiian, the Snake won the first national event he entered, the Winternationals at Pomona. Later that year he became the first driver to win both the Winternationals and the U.S. Nationals--still the sport’s two premier events--in the same year.

In the Winternationals, he defeated Bill Alexander with an elapsed time of 7.76 seconds at a top speed of 201.34 m.p.h. Last Aug. 19, at Brainerd, he hit 302.72 m.p.h.

“Two hundred?” he said with an amused grin. “We run that in second gear now, but I’d rather run 300 in today’s car than 200 back then. It’s so much safer today, especially the tracks. You’d be shocked at what a lack of safety facilities we had 30 years ago. It wasn’t that anyone was skimping on safety, it was just that nobody knew any different.

“So much has changed. Really, the only thing the same today as it was when I started 30 years ago is that we still run 1,320 feet.”

In those 30 years, Prudhomme has won 49 national events in top-fuel dragsters and funny cars, more than any other driver in the nitro-fuel classes. Bernstein and Force are next with 41 each.

Bernstein, a longtime rival of Prudhomme in funny cars before both returned to top fuel in 1990, had this to say about the Snake:

“I just think the time he spent in the sport and what he gave to the sport is his legacy. He’s had so many wins, that’s all important and everything. But the thing you have to look at is the fact he’s done it for 30 years.

“He was a pioneer in it, and he stayed with it in the middle of the career and right to the end, where it is today. That legacy, of him going from basically a nothing program in the beginning when we were all just having fun, to a business that it is today and that he has been able to sustain that through those years, in some good times and some bad times, I think that’s what I remember the most.

“That he was there when it was all said and done.”

Prudhomme says it is all but impossible to pinpoint one race, or one meet, as his most memorable.

“Look at those trophies, those drag-racing Oscars I call them, over there in the case,” he said. “If I said one of them meant more to me, the others would fall over and break. Every one, in its own way, meant something special.”

He thought for a few minutes, silently recalling some of his great moments of racing.

“I’d have to say I was probably at my best in 1989, my last year in funny cars. On one weekend at Indianapolis, we won the Big Bud Shootout and the U.S. Nationals and took home more than $100,000. We just blew everybody off. Times like that, you never forget.

“In ‘65, it was a pretty stout moment when we won the first Winternationals we ran and then came back and won our first U.S. Nationals. And I’ll never forget 1975 at Ontario when we were the first funny car in the ‘fives’ (5.98 seconds) with all my friends in the stands.”

All his friends, plus wife Lynn and daughter Donna, will be in the stands at Pomona on Sunday.

“I’m going out there with one thing in mind, to win my final race,” Prudhomme said. “Then, when it’s over, there’ll probably be a tear or two.”