Content area
Full text
With Bob Frey, Alan Reinhart is half of the best announcing duo ever to breathe across a dragstrip's microphone. The work of the mellifluous pair can be compared to the world's best announcers and play-by-play commentators: they entertain as they inform.
Despite Reinhart's gift for gab, talking for a living is not something he envisioned while growing up in Tucson, Ariz., where he still resides when not traveling to NHRA's 23 national events. His late father, Uarl, known as Win, was a pretty fair talker as a mobile-home salesman, and Alan was more than once sent to the principal's office with this admonition from the teacher: "Do you think you are going to talk for a living?" All Reinhart really wanted was to be the next Don Garlits.
"I always raced whatever I was driving," said Reinhart, who first went down the dragstrip in Tucson three days after getting his license at age 16. He still owns his first car, a '67 GT Mustang, and has driven or raced a Road Runner, Dart, and a big-block Fairlane.
Reinhart's announcing career came about by accident. While helping a friend sort out his car one Friday night in Tucson, he wandered up to the timing tower, where track owner and former Pro Stock racer Gerald Johns was lazily calling the action.
"The only thing he would ever say was, 'Left lane Camaro,...