Bad can be good.

To me, the best part of drag racing is the people involved in the sport. Sure, I love the cool cars and the noise and the excitement. I like the technology of the motors, and I even like the smell of rubber and race gas. Winning and the thrill of competition is great and gets my heart pumping, but it is really the people of drag racing that brings me back to the track. So many times I have had friends at the track save my butt when I broke or needed help. I have even had racers than I didn’t know that went out of their way to lend a hand when needed and I always find that racers are the most helpful people around.

Recently, while racing my Currie rearends sponsored ’66 Chevy nova SS, I had a rocker arm break and the little needle bearings went everywhere.  I should have just stopped racing, but I was at a big event and thought maybe I could fix it. If I could get all the little needle bearings out of the motor, and put on a spare rocker arm, I might still be able to race. Luckily, I had some friends around and we went to work on the motor. One guy went and found some intake manifold gaskets while we torn the intake manifold off. We used magnets and retrieved as many of the needle bearings as we could. Then we dumped a bunch of ATF into the motor to try to flush out any stragglers. A couple of oil changes to get rid of anything in the pan and we reassembled the motor. It was a lot of work but we had three guys wrenching, cleaning, and working. Of course, many friends had to stop by and check on our progress and off suggestions, encouragement, and advice. We got the motor running and made it back to racing, but I was amazed at how much fun we had working on the car. What started out as a bad situation, turned into a fun day. Not just me, but the other guys working on the car called me later to let me know they hadn’t had so much fun in months.

Like I said, racing really is about the people and sometimes a bad situation can be turned into a positive day because of the involvement of the racers.

No, I didn’t win the race that day, but I went home feeling like a winner because of the involvement of the friends that helped me with the car.

Scott “Lucky” Hudson is a Drag racer and host of Speed Scene Live TV. Watch a free Drag Racing TV show on your own computer anytime just by going to www.speedsceneracing.com.