'07 MARCH MEET PHOTO GALLERY
Whoopee, We Got Our Race Back!
Photography by Dave Wallace, ©2007
Perfect weather, great racing and big crowds all three days will put a smile on any promoter's face. Auto Club Famoso Raceway operators Blake (left) and John Bowser earned universal praise for the first March Meet planned, promoted and conducted entirely by track management since 1988. Father-son team inherited the reins in early 2006 from the late Jack Williams (who had been married to and divorced from John's sister).
Unlike all but one other independent event in drag racing's 57-year history (Cordova's World Series), the Bakersfield March Meet refuses to die.
In the mid-Sixties, my all-time-favorite drag race survived a sacrilegious sale to Eastern promoters Gil Kohn and Ed Eaton, who thoroughly soiled a proud California tradition both by mismanaging the annual Famoso Drag Strip showdown and by attaching the U.S. Fuel & Gas Championships title (which they'd also acquired from Bakersfield's Smokers car club) to their own weak shows. Racers and fans on both coasts were outraged, and the scam self-destructed. Although rights to the Fuel & Gas Championships name never came back, the event itself eventually returned to its birthplace — an abandoned WWII military airfield about 20 miles north of Bakersfield — under its nickname: the March Meet.
Saturday, the place was packed. Veteran estimators put the crowd at 8000 sitting down plus an equal number standing and racing.
As AHRA, IHRA and NHRA all added national events in the 1970s and '80s, competition for fuel cars spelled doom for once-prosperous independent meets such as Popular Hot Rodding's Martin, Mich., event. Bakersfield's was particularly hard hit by NHRA's Gatornationals, which pulled points-chasing pros all the way to Florida this time of year. Ill-fated schedule changes to April, then May — including a 1984 disaster during a 100-degree Mother's Day weekend! — only befuddled and frustrated a public accustomed to coming here in March; a winter month in which other outdoor competition was nonexistent.
The final confusion was contributed by a fledgling nostalgia group which booked the track in March 1988 for what it advertised as "the March Meet." Two months later, not even a dual appearance by Don Garlits in both his streamliner and his restored Swamp Rat I could stop the bleeding. When Bakersfield-bred track-operator Marvin Miller (of Warren, Coburn & Miller Top Fuel fame) and sons Mike and Jeff subsequently pulled the plug on "modern" racing for 1989, most observers feared they'd seen the last of serious fuel cars at the drag strip that had hosted the world's most-prestigious pro race from 1959 until at least 1964 (when, not coincidentally, NHRA rescinded its seven-year Fuel Ban).
Talent at work on Lee Jennings Sr.'s flopper includes tuner Ray Zeller (pictured) and artist Kenny Youngblood, who applied a 2008 Challenger grille treatment to the vintage-1970 body. The car was quick enough to beat Chris Krabill twice, but Krabill capitalized on the break rule and a second-round holeshot against Lee Jr., 6.20-6.17, to advance to the final, which he also won.
Against all odds, a series of well-intentioned, not-so-well-financed promoters gradually rebuilt the foundation by staging small nostalgia shows in March. In 1994, Goodguys-founder Gary Meadors was persuaded by his advertising chief, Jack Williams —a Bakersfield boy who moonlighted as manager of Famoso Raceway — to tip the can with injections of money and promotional muscle. During the next dozen years, the March Meet mushroomed back into the Bakersfield region's largest annual sporting event. Although crowd counts were never announced, upwards of 40,000 seats were sold to performances by 400-plus race cars. In terms of both spectators and vendors, the turnout approached the numbers of some West Coast NHRA national events.
The beginning of the end came a couple of months before last year's "48th-anniversary" March Meet, when Williams suddenly died. Besides selling ads for the Goodguys Gazette and jointly operating Famoso with two relatives by marriage, John and Blake Bowser, Williams was possibly the only individual outside of the Meadors family whose drag-racing guidance was respected and followed. After all, it was coming from NHRA's first Top Fuel points champion (1964), who had run strips since the mid-Sixties (Famoso, Fremont, Sears Point).
Event-specific trophies were another popular innovation from track-operators John (pictured) and Blake Bowser. Bakersfield's downtown arch was recreated in metal by Steve Metz's Staging Lane Productions (Monrovia, Calif.). Genuine fuel-car rods were purchased from Bill Miller. Identical awards went to pro and sportsman winners alike.
Exactly how much this one man mattered to these car-show promoters became painfully evident during consecutive weekends of March 2006 — concluding with the first cancellation in event history. Whether the March Meet would even survive was among the uncertainties left behind in a wake of frustrated racers, fans, vendors and media people. Also left behind were at least three race cars and an asphalt surface that had been heavily damaged as a result of dumb decisions to ignore, then attempt to mop up, tiny puddles of "weeping" ground water. When large, sticky rear tires encountered these areas, the surrounding pavement was ripped apart like wet sand. Even after the track dried out, it was virtually useless for running fast cars.
All this guy needed to attract attractive visitors was a two-door '59 wagon, tons of tequila, and a gas-powered blender controlled by a motorcycle throttle, as demonstrated here.
Twelve months and many legal maneuvers later, the Bowsers somehow emerged with the rights to the race, and the city of Bakersfield rallied behind a return to local ownership. Meanwhile, the entire racing surface was repaved with the finest compound available for drag strips, then precision-ground — at an additional expense of nearly $50,000 — to ensure a flatness that Famoso had never known. The Bowsers' boast that theirs is now a "national-event surface" was borne out by three days of big numbers (in spite of continuous, direct heat from the sun), side-by-side action, minimal down time, and no crashes from 500-plus drivers — with the single exception of our colleague and former Goodguys staffer, photojournalist Dawn Mazi.
After Ms. Mazi launched a Nostalgia Eliminator digger into the starting line's sturdy center board, longtime-NHRA-official Steve Gibbs couldn't resist breaking Dawn's, uh, "balls" about the day that her daddy, Frank Mazi, drove his A/GS Opel GT into a concrete center stand at Bowling Green. "What is it with your family," asked Gibbs, "always trying to run down our Christmas trees?"
Michael Hollander was a welcome addition to the March Meet team. The veteran publicity man helped secure impressive coverage on most, if not all, Bakersfield TV stations before, during and immediately after the region's largest annual sporting event.
The favorable racing conditions undoubtedly contributed to the best-run nostalgia meet that this reporter can recall. Famoso's weekly crew — assisted here by Gibbs and Alan Miller, another NHRA veteran (and former Pure Heaven AA/FA pilot!) — certainly proved itself capable not only of maintaining a first-class racing surface throughout qualifying and eliminations, but also of keeping a show on schedule. For the first time in a long time, each day's activities were wrapped up well before the sun went down, leaving plenty of time for eating, drinking, visiting, bench racing and sleeping. Perhaps this adherence to the advertised schedule was one reason why so many more folks stuck around for Sunday's eliminations, instead of heading home after a frustrating night — or two — of qualifying that stretched late into the night.
Famoso's regular announcer, John Matijasic, summed the improved experience up nicely immediately following the Top Fuel final, while Famoso's customers filed down from the old, wooden grandstands. "If you enjoyed your weekend, please tell your friends," he said. "If you did not, please tell us how we can make your next experience better."
This is one of the two main reasons why NHRA banned topless Funny Cars, reportedly under pressure from FoMoCo. Ed Lenarth's Holy Toledo and Gene Conway's Destroyer Jeeps were both capable of beating the flip-top Comets, along with everything else running in 1966-67. Note the forward-thinking chassis design and engine location. Although the drivelines of "cackle" cars were supposedly disconnected, Lenarth surprised the surrounding crowd by driving through the staging lanes.
Since you asked, John, there is one little thing that bugged the holy hell out of my crowd all weekend: Because a few scoreboard bulbs were burned out, we couldn't tell an "8" from a "6" on the tower-side e.t. board. More than once, our initial excitement about having just witnessed a world-record pass of "5.64" was doused by an announced time of 5.84. Now that the strip is paved and the lawyers paid, on behalf of us bums at 1000 feet, ask the Bowsers to set aside a few bucks for light bulbs before next year's half-century celebration, will ya?
Other than that, don't let them change a dang thang!
'07 MARCH MEET PHOTO GALLERY
