Content area
Full text
One of fuel racing's top crew chiefs talks shop and a whole lot more
Dick LaHaie is arguably the most repected professional tuner in drag racing. As a driver, the Michigan resident won the 1987 NHRA Top Fuel championship at the final event of the season in Pomona following a season-long battle with rival Joe Amato. Since retiring from driving 1991, LaHaie has tuned Scott Kalita (1994-95) and Larry Dixon (2002-03) to consecutive NHRA Top Fuel championships.
The five-time champion got his start, in drag racing in 1958, piloting a '48 Mercury. He began driving nitromethane-powered dragsters in 1962. In this candid Q&A discussion LaHaie talks about his early days in drag racing, why he left the sport a driver, his initial conversation with Don "the Snake" Prudhomme about coming to work for Snake Racing, and how Dixon has own as a person and a driver.
Q: You grew up 90 minutes from Motor City (Detroit) in Lansing, Mich. Were you involved in the muscle-car era, racing on Woodward Avenue and that scene?
A: I raced on the street in the early days of drag racing in the late 1950s. I never had a muscle car. I always had hot rods that could beat the muscle cars. I had a '56 Ford coupe, and in 1958, I went down to the Chevrolet dealer and bought a brand-new Corvette motor and four-speed transmission and put it in the Ford. I'd race the Corvettes and those cars and just whip them, but once I began racing on the dragstrip, that was it. I began running fuel cars in 1962. It's pretty hard to run them on the street.
Q: Why did you decide to retire from driving in 1991?
A: I drove for 33 years; I was over it. I was fed up with the politics in the sport. I didn't like the way the sport was going at that time. Just having to deal with not only sponsors but the media, along with being both a crew chief and a driver, I got tired.
When we first started, being crew chief and driver was the way it was done. As the sport progressed, we needed more and more people to work on the cars. We...