National Hot Rod Ass’n officials listened to complaints about the Countdown to the Championship format and responded by trying to please the racers.
As hard as they are trying to do what’s right in terms of safety for the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes, maybe they should have listened to Gary Densham. It’s not too late.
Densham, the outspoken Funny Car veteran whose 28-year NHRA career includes four seasons at John Force Racing, said at this past weekend’s Nitro Blast-Off preseason test session that he might not agree with the sanctioning body’s reaction to the Force team’s two calamitous accidents in 2007.
“NHRA has come up with some new rules. We’ve had to do some updates on our older cars and then we have to all buy brand-new cars by Denver [the July Mopar Mile-High Nationals],” he said. “Whether they’re necessary or not, I’m not quite sure.”
Even if half of his funding had not disappeared in the Torco sponsorship collapse earlier this month, Densham would have found the rules burdensome for his small-budget, one-car operation.

“I know we had some failures last year. It was obviously a tragedy for John Force Racing. But you look back over the years, and those are the only cars that have ever failed. You wonder, ‘Are we having a knee-jerk reaction, making all these changes? I’m not sure.” — Gary Densham

“I know we had some failures last year. It was obviously a tragedy for John Force Racing. But you look back over the years, and those are the only cars that have ever failed,” he said. “You wonder, ‘Are we having a knee-jerk reaction, making all these changes? I’m not sure.”
Dan Olson, NHRA’s earnest director of Top Fuel and Funny Car racing, and diligent Graham Light, senior vice-president of racing operations, have stressed since Eric Medlen’s fatal crash last March that they have tried hard not to adopt knee-jerk reactions. It doesn’t matter that Densham’s concerns raise the issue — what matters is they have merit and are worthy of NHRA’s consideration.
“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t always strive to make our cars safer and better,” Densham said, “but we’ve got a pretty darn good safety record. We’ve run these types of cars and these designs for 20 years, and they’ve been very, very safe. There’s never been a [Funny Car] car break in two under any circumstances until . . . John’s and Eric’s incidents.”
Take, for example, a recall. “If Toyota trucks are having a problem, obviously you want to get all those Toyota trucks back in there and find out what’s going wrong with them and fix them. But they don’t recall Fords and Chevrolets and Nissans and Dodges. They fix the problem where it’s at,” Densham said. “When we’ve had only one manufacturer’s car fail, I think that we needed to look more closely into that particular scenario.
“There’s never been a Pflueger car fail. There’s never been a Victory car fail. There’s never been a Grant car fail or a Paralax car fail,” he said. “They’ve flipped end over end, down the guardrail, into the sand trap, blown tires off of ’em and blown motors out of ’em. And they never broke.
“In my opinion,” Densham said, “there’s something that was maybe not done quite correctly on that particular manufacturer’s automobile.”
His suggestion? “I think maybe they should have looked into those particular cars, found out what the differences were between those and what some of the rest of us run and how come we had no problems whatsoever and they had catastrophic problems — see if they could be changed more like ours and watch the scenario for awhile and see if there was a problem.
“Unfortunately, for a single-car team without a big budget, to finance two new cars by Denver to be competitive, it’s going to be very, very difficult,” he said. “To build 50 new Funny Cars by Denver is going to be difficult. You’d hate to see national events short on cars.”
International Hot Rod Ass’n President Aaron Polburn said his organization couldn’t survive with those rules. “Those changes to our cars would put us out of business. Our cars don’t run consistently as fast as NHRA cars, mainly for budgetary reasons. In the NHRA, their cars get beat up a lot more.”
Like Don Taylor, NHRA’s senior director of national technical operations, Polburn indicated that our world of instant gratification, coupled with sophisticated technology, raises false hopes of quick fixes.
“We are at least a year or two away from figuring it out,” Polburn said. “Right now, everyone is still throwing darts.”
Skooter Peaco, IHRA vice-president of racing operations, said, “This is still all in the developmental stages. We will race in the eighth-mile — reduce the course, reduce the speeds — before we’ll put our cars in the scrap pile. We’re definitely not in the same position as NHRA.”
But they’re listening. And Densham says NHRA isn’t.
“They don’t care about Gary Densham’s input,” he said. “Right at the moment, they seem to be focusing only on a couple of people’s input. Not that they’re not trying real hard to make it better…but obviously they’re biased in what they want to do. Whether that’ll make it better for the whole sport — if we can survive it financially — I don’t really know that for a fact.”