John Edwin Mason: Racing Photography

Eastside Speedway: 47th Annual Easter Sunday Funny Car Show, with Bunny Burkett

I've said it before, and I imagine that I'll say it again:  The racing season doesn't start until the legendary Bunny Burkett makes a few passes down the drag strip at Eastside Speedway, on Easter Sunday.  I don't care what the NHRA or Nascar or Formula One have been up to.  Unless I see the Easter Bunny in her Funny Car, the season hasn't really begun.

Easter was late, this year, but it finally arrived, bringing with it the 47th Annual Funny Car Classic.

 

 

Bunny Burkett performs a burnout in her Alcohol Funny Car.  Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.  (All photos copyright John Edwin Mason, 2011.  Click on any image to see a much larger version.)

The Funny Car Classic isn't a race.  The track books Funny Cars (and this year Fuel Altereds) that they know will entertain the fans with thundering loud, smokey burnouts and, with a little luck, blazingly fast passes down the track.  The track was tricky, yesterday, so the passes weren't anything to brag about.  But the burnouts were everything fans could have wanted.

 

 

Bunny Burkett and fans.  Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.

I wasn't exaggerating when I called Bunny "legendary."  She was one of the first women to reach the highest ranks of drag racing -- a true pioneer.  She survived a horrible crash and came back to resume her racing career.  And she's waged a heroic battle against cancer.  (Among other things, she uses her continuing popularity with fans to raise money for cancer research.)   I was lucky enough to have a long interview with Bunny, as few years ago.  You can read an account of it, here.

 

 

Fans cover their ears, in anticipation of the howl emitted by a Fuel Altered's motor.  Eastside Speeday, 24 April 2011.

A couple of thousand fans turned out for the show, packing the grandstands and lining the track.

 

 

Tony Connoy performs a burnout in his Funny Car.  Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.

 

 

Gary "Li'l Bear" Pritchett performs a burnout in his Funny Car.  Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.

Gary "Li'l Bear" Pritchett, Bunny's godson and protege, was among the racers at yesterday's show.  He's making a mark for himself in drag racing.  Besides driving (and working on) Bunny's second Funny Car, he's a been member of several  NHRA Top Fuel racing team, including Morgan Lucas' and Hot Rod Fuller's.

 

 

Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.

 

 

Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.

Of course, most cars at the track, yesterday, weren't Funny Cars or Fuel Altereds.  Eastside is the home tracks of hundreds of grassroots drag racers.

 

 

Bunny Burkett (near lane) and Gary "Li'l Bear" Pritchett.  Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.

The highlight of the day's action was probably the side-by-side passes that Bunny and Li'l Bear made near the end of the day.  As you can see, the protege edged out the teacher.

 

 

Window of Bunny's Funny Car.  Eastside Speedway, 24 April 2011.

 

2009 Rewind: Drag Racing, the Democracy of Speed

This post is one of a series that I'm calling "2009 Rewind."  I'm marking time until the racing season gets going in my part of the country by looking at some of my favorite stories from last year.  This particular episode, however, is also "2008 Rewind," "2007 Rewind," and even "2003 Rewind."  That's because, for the last few years, I've been working on a book that I'm calling Drag Racing: The Democracy of Speed.

I could just as easily have called it Why I Like Drag Racing.

Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.  (All photos copyright John Edwin Mason, 2002-2009.)

Sure, I like it for some of the same reasons as anyone else -- loud, fast, dangerous cars, driven by men and women who do amazing things with them.

But I also like it because drag racing is -- by race, by ethnicity, and by gender -- the most diverse motor sport in the United States.  It's the most diverse by a lot, not a little.  And it's been that way ever since it's birth in southern California, over 60 years ago.

Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.  (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

There are a variety of reasons for drag racing's openness to blacks, Asians, and Latinos, and to women of all races and colors.

Early hot-rodders were often rebels, who prided themselves on marching to a different drummer.  If mainstream society in the '40s and '50s thought that the races ought to be segregated and that women were to weak to handle a fast car, that was reason enough for many early drag racers to go in the opposite direction.  After all, what mattered most was the quickness of the car and the skill of the driver.

Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.

The National Hot Rod Association [NHRA], the organization that did by far the most to make drag racing a national sport, also played an important role.  Open-mindedness was a matter of formal NHRA policy.  In 1952, it told its members, in no uncertain terms, that were no color or gender barriers to membership.  It spread its policies through its proselytizing wing, the Drag Safari (later called the Safety Safari).  Beginning in 1954, members of the Safari annually left their home base in southern California and traveled the country, from coast to coast, organizing car clubs and races and spreading its drag racing gospel.

The results of drag racing's gospel of inclusiveness were plain to see.  In the '50s and '60s, at any given event in southern California, you were likely to run into the Bean Bandits -- a popular and highly successful team composed primarily of Latino drivers, but which included Asians and African Americans, as well.  The multi-racial team of Stone, Woods, and Cook might have been on hand with its legendary '41 Willys Gasser.

 

Bunny Burkett, right, in her souvenir stand.  Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.

By the end of the '50s, women drag racers, like Shirley Shahan, were winning major national events.  Many other women followed.  In 1977, Shirley Muldowney won the first of her three NHRA Top Fuel championships (the drag racing equivalent of the heavyweight boxing crown).  By that time, Bunny Burkett, seen above, was one of the most popular -- and one of the most competitive -- racers on the east coast.  In 1986, she won a championship of her own, in the International Hot Rod Association's [IHRA] Alcohol Funny Car class.

Bunny Burkett's team prepares her car for a trip down the track.  Eastside Speedway, Waynesboro, Virginia.

Today, black, Latino, and female racers, such as Antron Brown, Cruz and Tony Pedregon, Ashley Force Hood, and Melanie Troxel, compete at drag racing's highest level.  All have won multiple times.  Both of the Pedragon brothers are former champions.

At the grassroots, drag racing also remains true to its culture of inclusiveness, as you can see in these photos.

No other form of motor sports even comes close to matching this record.  No woman has ever started a race in Formula 1.  Danica Patrick is the only woman to have won a race in IndyCar racing, and she's won only once.  No women have won in any of Nascar's top levels; the last African American to do so was Wendell Scott, in 1963.  (Nascar has historically not been inclusive, to say the least.  Its Drive for Diversity program may be changing things, however.)

You can see many other photos from Democracy of Speed in its photo gallery.  Click here or on the link at the top of the page.

I've written more about diversity in motor sports on my main website.  You can find those thoughts, here.

2009 Rewind: Talking to Bunny Burkett

"Legendary" has got to be one of the most overworked words in the English language.  Overwork and overuse have just about drained it of its meaning.  I'm going to use it as it ought to be used, to describe in one word the status of the legendary Bunny Burkett, one of the very first women to rise to the top of the drag racing world.

One of the greatest thrills that I had last year was to spend five and a half hours talking to Bunny.  I wrote about the experience and about Bunny's amazing career, last July.  What better way to inaugurate my new racing photography blog than by reliving that incredible afternoon.  (You can that report, here, on my main website.)

Bunny Burkett, speaking to Jon Paulette and me, 15 July 2009, Fredericksburg, Virginia.  (Photo copyright John Edwin Mason, 2009.)

Jon Paulette, the motor sports writer, and I interviewed her for an article about her that will appear, later this year, in the Encyclopedia of Virginia.  Bunny is the perfect interview subject -- smart, funny, self-possessed, and a wonderful story-teller.

Bunny earned her legendary status by winning, beginning with her very first race, in 1964, at Old Dominion Dragstrip, in Manassas, Virginia, and continuing through her 1986 International Hot Rod Association Alcohol Funny Car World Championship, the first and only Funny Car championship that has been won by a woman driver.

Bunny also earned the respect of everyone in motorsports for the courage and determination that she showed coming back from a violent crash on the track, in 1995, that almost took her life.

Bunny with the car that she raced in the Miss Universe of Drag Racing tour, in the late '60s and early '70s.  (Publicity photo courtesy of Bunny Burkett.)

I learned a lot that day, about drag racing, about Bunny, and about the price that women drivers sometimes had to pay, if they wanted to go drag racing.

You can read much, much more about what Bunny had to say in the interview and see several photos from various stages in her career by reading my original report.