Buster’s Last Stand : Thirty-One Years and Half a Million Starts Later, NHRA’s Couch Hits the Button One Final Time Sunday

Buster Couch has spent most of a lifetime standing tall between snarling 5,500-horsepower engines fueled with volatile nitromethane, revved to the breaking point and straining to launch dragsters down a quarter-mile strip in five seconds or less.

Or explode like a hand grenade.

Couch, 60, has been the official starter for National Hot Rod Assn. events for 31 years. More than half a million times, he has pressed the button to start side-by-side racing at drag strips across the country. And each time the funny car and top-fuel machines take off, he is engulfed with nitro fumes and rubber dust from spinning 17-inch rear tires.

Couch’s arms are speckled with scars from flying shrapnel--bolts, belts, jagged pieces of metal--the result of engines disintegrating.

Yet he has never missed a start because of a track injury.

But he’s afraid of flying.

Sunday, in the NHRA’s Winston Select Finals on the historic Pomona Fairgrounds strip, Couch will send drivers and cars down the 1,320-foot track for the last time. He is leaving the starter’s job and “moving upstairs” into the race control tower.

To get to Pomona from his home in Conyers, Ga., a 2,300-mile trip, he drove. He left last Saturday afternoon and arrived at the NHRA offices in Glendora on Monday afternoon.

“I put in between 44,000 and 50,000 miles a year,” Couch said. “I go through two or three company cars a year, but anything beats flying. To tell the truth, flying scares the hell out of me. I’m scared before I get in one, and after we land, I’m still a nervous wreck.”

Couch, 6 feet 2 and 255 pounds, looks like a retired NFL tight end. He was a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth and that was significant when he became a starter in drag racing’s pioneering days.

“Fighting was as much a part of racing as going fast back 30, 35 years ago,” he said. When Couch began, he used a flag. There were no electric starting lights.

“Guys used to get mad at everything,” he said. “Drag racing wasn’t so organized then and the way to settle arguments was usually to start a fight. I liked that. I kind of miss it. I always loved to fight.”

The development of the Christmas-tree starting-line procedure hastened the evolution of the NHRA into a multimillion-dollar organization that now features the Winston Drag Racing series of 20 national events--and Couch was there at its beginning.

The Christmas tree consists of a standard with two side-by-side lights at the top, indicating when cars on either side of the starter are pre-staged and staged, and three vertical amber lights that blink half a second apart, followed by a green light signaling the start. A red light at the base comes on if a car moves before the green light shows.

“We started experimenting with the Christmas tree idea in 1963 and decided we would introduce it at the 1964 Winternationals in Pomona,” Couch said.

“Bernie Partridge [then an NHRA district director] decided we needed a dry run, so we took the system out to Fontana for a fuel meet the week before. It was really a scramble. We had wires connected everywhere, and it seemed just when we were about to get it working right, a wire would go haywire.

“Fontana was Mickey Thompson’s track then, and we found out he and some of his buddies kept pulling the wires out as soon as we got them hooked up. Drivers hate change, and Mickey and a lot of the other guys wanted to stick with the flag-waving starts. They felt more comfortable with it. But we persisted and it worked pretty good at the Winternationals.”

For professional classes, the amber lights were eliminated in 1971 and only a single green light signals the start after the cars are staged.

“The main effect of the Christmas Tree was that it kept drivers from reading the starter, trying to sneak an advantage by studying his habits,” Couch said. “Of course, they’re still trying to read me and get a jump on the green light.

“One guy had a reputation as a quick starter and I heard he was bragging about how he knew when I was going to press the button because my thumb moved first. Well, one day he was on the line, and I twitched my thumb, and he was halfway down the track before the green light came on. I doubt if he ever checked my thumb after that.

“You never know, though. There are only two kinds of race drivers--the caught and the uncaught.”

Like officials in most sports, Couch started as a competitor. He ran a modified ’34 Ford at tiny oval tracks in Georgia as a teen-ager and piqued his interest in drag racing when he took a flathead roadster to Daytona Beach and raced it on the sand.

“I was gonna be the world’s fastest driver,” he said with a hearty chuckle. “I was going to win the Indy 500 and I was going to set world records in a dragster.

“Only problem was, there wasn’t any drag strips around Atlanta, so some of my buddies and myself built a strip in Covington [Ga.] and called it the Newton County Drag Strip.”

The Newton County track is gone now, torn down to make way for a housing development, but it got Couch an introduction to the NHRA. As a track owner, he was invited to Detroit for the U.S. Nationals.

“All the officials from around the country came to the nationals and [NHRA founder] Wally Parks gave us all a job. Mine was a pre-lineup man. I got the guys ready before they came to the starting line. The next thing I knew, I was starting races. That was 33 years ago.”

Curiously, the closest Couch has come to serious injury was an incident involving not a driver, but a fellow official.

“On Sundays, we used to give guys a chance to shake down their car before the eliminations if they’d made some overnight changes,” he said. “We were at Pomona one year and a team out of Kentucky, Frakes and Funk, wanted to test a new motor so we let ‘em run.

“They made a pass and kicked a rod out and threw oil all over the starting line. Steve Gibbs [competition director] and I tried everything we could to get that oil up, but we didn’t have all the help we have now, and it was before we had cement starting pads. The surface was real porous.

“Steve decided to get a rent-a-car and spin the tires to try and pick up the oil. After a few burnouts, I went behind the car to see how we’d done. Steve didn’t see me and before I knew it, he threw the car in reverse and backed up. Somebody yelled and I looked up just in time to throw myself on the trunk. It knocked me down and I skinned my knees pretty good. Steve said he knew I was dead. I wasn’t so sure, either.

“That turned out to be a good lesson, though. I hammer it into my crew to never turn their back on a car.”

*

Out of those half-million or so starts, which have been the most memorable?

“It’s real hard to say because I’ve been there for just about every milestone in drag racing,” Couch said. “It started with Don Garlits when he broke the 200 [m.p.h.], right on down to the first 300 by Kenny Bernstein and then that 314 he did here at Pomona last year.

“If I had to pick one, I’d probably say Bernstein’s 300 at Gainesville [Fla.]. I was district director down there when I helped get that track built, so it was special for me to see Kenny make that big run there.”

Bernstein, who won four NHRA funny-car championships before switching to top fuelers, credits Couch with playing an important role in his development.

“When I first came out here, back in the late ‘70s, I was nervous on the starting line, like just about everybody else,” Bernstein said. “I used to look around, checking on the guy next to me, checking on everything that was going on.

“Buster got me aside one day and said, ‘Kenny, quit looking around and focus on what’s straight ahead of you. I’ll take care of all the other stuff.’ From that day on, I’ve tried to do nothing but look right down the line.

“Buster has been my comfort zone. As long as he’s there, I know everything is right on the track.”

Couch’s biggest thrill as a starter, however, had nothing to do with milestones. It was provided by a fellow Georgian, Pete Robinson, who won the U.S. Nationals top-fuel championship at Indianapolis in 1961.

“Pete and I were good friends back home and when he came to Indy with a little old Chevy, no one believed he could make it run so fast,” Couch said. “Jack Hart [then competition director] told me he didn’t believe the times Pete had posted, that the California hot dogs would run him off the track.

“Pete just kept winning until he was the only one left. That really tickled me.”

Nine years later, Robinson was killed during a qualifying run for the Winternationals at Pomona in what Couch says was the saddest moment of his career.

“Pete had broken his arm the year before and he had another driver to run his car here,” Couch recalled. “When [the hired driver] couldn’t get the car up to speed, Pete decided to make the last run. He just got into it too hard, the car got out shape, hit the hell out of the guardrail and exploded.

“Most everyone thought it was Pete’s driver, but I knew it was Pete. I had recognized his eyes when he came on the line. I told my wife, ‘It’s Pete, and he’s dead.’ It was a bad deal. We were such close friends. He’d got his start at the Newton County strip back home.”

Robinson’s death in 1970 was the last fatality at Pomona.

*

As he prepares to leave the starting line, Couch is continually surprised at the response of fans.

“Seems like everywhere I go--service stations, restaurants, McDonald’s--people come up and say, ‘Hey, you’re the guy who stands between the cars, aren’t you?’ ”

To commemorate his departure, T-shirts saying “Buster’s Last Stand” are a hot item at the track this week.

Late Sunday afternoon, when darkness is settling over Pomona, Buster Couch will press his starting button for the last time--for the final run of the Winston Select top-fuel elimination.

“I’m glad it’ll be dark,” he said. “I don’t know if I want all those folks to see a grown man cry.”