‘Racing has been very good to me’
Emporia drag racer Gary Stinnett has made a name for himself in the world of NHRA Sportsman racing
By Michael Ashford
Saturday, June 2, 2007
TOPEKA — Gary Stinnett pilots his golf cart through the throngs of people that fill the parking lot, past the million-dollar trailers and the colorful sponsor signs that greet the eyes at every turn.
It’s the 19th Annual NHRA Summer Nationals at Heartland Park Topeka, and all the big boys of drag racing have shown up. Their arrival has brought out thousands of fans — more than 100,000 people are expected to visit HPT this weekend — and many of them walk through the parking lot hoping to catch a glimpse of one of drag racing’s elite.
As Stinnett weaves his way past the trailers adorned with logos of huge corporate sponsors, where workers busily rebuild engines after every race, he can’t help but slow down and watch, too.
But for Stinnett, an Emporia native who owns his Stinnett Automotive business and races on the side, the pros can keep their fancy trailers and their mega-huge sponsors.
“I don’t want that,” Stinnett said. “There’s a lot of pressure to win as a pro, and if they don’t win, they lose their millions of dollars and become homeless and live on the streets.”
Stinnett whips his cart around — it has been painted black and features his Stinnett Racing logo on both sides — and he drives away from the crowds of people and into a different section of trailers. Very few, if any, adoring fans venture into this part of the lot.
Stinnett has set up camp amongst the other weekend warriors — the businessmen, the lawyers, the doctors, the bankers who fulfill their need for speed on the weekends. They’re a group known as the Sportsman class in the NHRA world, and Stinnett happens to be one of their leaders.
He’s a two-time World Champion (1998 and 2005) and currently in the thick of the race for a third. So far this season, his Super Comp dragster has a perfect record in Divisional events, having won at races in Dallas and Great Bend.
He’s had so much success in his 20-plus years of racing that the other Sportsman teams come to him for advice, opinions, even parts for their cars. Stinnett Automotive has built many of the engines in the cars Stinnett races against, and he even estimates that 75 percent of the cars in the field in Topeka are using a carburetor he built.
“When I come to these races, I’m also trying to deal with customer service,” Stinnett said. “ Guys come up and want me to look at their cars. Sometimes, there’s a line waiting for me to look at their cars.
“A lot of these guys that race do it part-time. They don’t do it as much as I do. They may only like to race three or four times a year, so they basically come to me for advice or opinions.”
While Stinnett technically is not a pro racer, it would be hard to tell the difference based on his schedule.
This past weekend, Stinnett and his wife, Joyce, were in Brainerd, Minn., for some races. After racing finished at 7 p.m. Sunday night, they and the rest of the Stinnett Racing team loaded up and drove through the night back to Emporia, arriving at 6 a.m. on Monday.
After using Monday to unload and clean the cars, work started on preparation for the Summer Nationals this weekend. Stinnett works each day until about 7 at night, and after dinner, he goes back to the garage to spend another four, five, even six hours working on the racecars.
When racing is done at HPT on Sunday, Stinnett will have just two days until he is due back at another track, this time in Chicago on Wednesday for five days of racing. The next week, he’ll be in Denver.
“I do just about the same thing as the pros do,” Stinnett said, “but I do have the option that if I don’t want to, I don’t have to go.”
Stinnett has been around drag racing long enough to know becoming a full-time professional racer is not for him. As if just seeing the lifestyle wasn’t enough, then the year he spent working for a pro driver told him all he needed to know about the life of a full-timer.
“From the moment you wake up, you have a job to do, and you’re working at it 12, 14, 16 hours a day. When you go to bed at night, you have no time to yourself,” said Stinnett, who worked for pro racer Warren Johnson for a season in 1986. “There’s never a time where you can say, ‘I’m going to take a night off, mow the yard, sit in my recliner.’ I don’t do that now anyway, but the fact is that I’m working this hard for me and not for somebody else.
“At any given moment, I could take the night off. You can’t do that when you work for those pro teams.”
As it is, Stinnett is happy racing any one of the three cars he owns. He has a 1969 Camaro for Stock events, a 1992 Camaro Z-28 for the Super Stock competitions and then his Super Comp dragster. With each car, the power increases and the rules become, as he calls it, “more liberal.”
His ’69 Stock Camaro makes about 575 horsepower. His Super Comp dragster? Try 1,200 horses. He ran what he called “two pretty good qualifying runs” on Friday at HPT in the Stock division.
He’s come a long way since he graduated from Emporia High in 1980 and moved to California the very next day after graduation to race. He returned to Emporia in 1987 to start his business and settle into racing, which has proven to be a smart move.
“Because of the winnings,” Stinnett said, “we’ve upgraded racecars and added second cars and third cars.”
He’s even got himself a trailer of his own — complete with a small kitchen area, a full bathroom, a bedroom and a separate storing space for his Super Comp dragster. It doesn’t matter to him that the outside of the trailer is white and void of the huge corporate sponsor logos.
“Racing has been very good to me over the past 20 or so years,” he said. “I’m just out here to race.”