1979 - MY YEAR RACING TOP FUEL MOTORCYCLES PART 4
My next booking was a week after the Shuffletown appearance, a match race Frog Thacker had arranged at Old Dominion Dragstrip in Manassas Virginia. Thacker was the guy who had made the first passes on my bike at Gainesville 6 months earlier. He was a hired gun and was riding for Virgil Naff, a pioneer Bowling Green T/F racer who had hung up his helmet a couple years earlier. Naff's bike was almost identical to mine, a blown & injected nitro I-4. Danny Johnson was to be Thacker's opponent but did not have his new bike finished. I was really shocked when Frog called me knowing I had only made a few passes on it. But he didn't think like most people. He was one fearless dude. I was told he had once worked as a steelworker on skyscrapers.
The plan was to leave Charlotte at 6pm on Saturday evening with my crew chief Frank Norris and drive the 5 hours to Richmond, an hour from the track, and spend the night there. I had purchased a Dodge Maxi-Van to haul the bike to the races. In 1979 vans were the vehicle of choice for many motorcycle racers. You could remove the bench seat behind the two front bucket seats, turn it sideways, and have room for a large race bike....and a large tool box. Enclosed trailers were rare back then. Touring pros like Joe Smith had them. My van was just 4 years old but had over 100,000 miles road miles on it. It still looked about new and ran and drove great. It was just what I needed.
We departed Charlotte on time and started the trip with me driving. We talked for awhile about the race and Frank leaned back against his seat. I tuned in to the pop music station and a new song I liked very much was playing. I had been hearing it while we were listening to the radio in Frank's shop. This was the era of disco and this was ....well different. It was not disco but was very catchy. It started out with an electric piano and the lead singer, who had a high voice, singing "When I was young it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, it was beautiful, magical". That was me living out my magical fantasy of being a T/F Motorcycle racer. I finally found out the singer. It was Supertramp's "The Logical Song" which became one of the year's biggest hits. The trip went quickly and we decided to drive past Richmond to stop.
When I woke up the next morning it was raining. Gulfport again. Shit. The morning news wasn't encouraging about the day. We ate breakfast and headed for the track. About five miles up the interstate "all hell broke loose" under the van. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the driveshaft turning wildly and sliding like a snake. I pulled over and ran to get it out of the highway. I had a CB radio so I called the Virginia Highway Patrol. Soon a patrolman arrived and I got out of my van as he was getting out of his patrol car. As he walked by my van he looked in the windows and saw the bike. The first words out of his mouth were "have you got a radar detector". You see they were illegal in Virginia and if you were caught with one you were fined a stiff penalty or arrested. I told him I didn't but he still searched my van..even the toolbox. He could have been looking for drugs too I guess. He called a rollback and it was an hour before we got to his service station. He could not repair my van until the next day because the parts stores were closed on Sundays. I told him I was booked for a race in Manassas and he quoted me a price of delivering my van there but he could not stay so I would pay him twice. It was all moot...it was still raining. I called Thacker to tell him what was going on and that if it cleared up I would get there. It never did that day. Frank Norris caught a Greyhound bus (the station was 1 block away) home and I stayed until Monday to get the repairs done and started home. Our match race was rescheduled for the next weekend.