Seven-time NHRA Top Fuel winner Richie Crampton will be back in a dragster – in Australia.

Lamattina Top Fuel Racing has hired the Adelaide-born racer to drive the Fuchs Lubricants Dragster at the May 5-7 Nitro Thunder event at Sydney Dragway.

Team owner Phil Lamattina said, “You don’t get opportunities to put drivers of Richie’s caliber in your race car very often, so when he became available, we grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

“Australia’s Top Fuel competition is tough. We’re up against outstanding teams, like Rapisarda Autosport International, and signing an international star like Richie Crampton means Sydney Dragway’s race fans are in for one fantastic show,” Lamattina said.

For Crampton, it’s a chance to compete in a Top Fuel dragster in Australia for the first time.

“I have wanted to race back on Aussie soil for quite some time,” Crampton said. “And to now have that chance and drive the LTFR dragster for the Lamattina family is quite an honor. Lamattina Top Fuel Racing is a world-class team with world-class equipment, and while we’re up against some very strong opposition, we’ll be going all out to achieve a great result at Sydney Dragway.”

Crampton, best known in NHRA circles as the seven-year clutch specialist at Morgan Lucas Racing who earned the driving job when Lucas stepped aside, had a rich history before that. He saw his drag-racing dream progress through his own grassroots driving experience in Australia, as well as stints working for the legendary Graeme Cowin and Don Schumacher.

With Dad Alan as the team owner and crew chief, Crampton raced the family's 1958 Holden (which he said "kind of looked like a '55 Chevy Nomad") at Adelaide and nearby dragstrips from his late teens to early 20s.

"We primarily raced that in the supercharged outlaw category. I had a huge amount of fun, and I learned a lot about driving short-wheelbased race cars,” Crampton said. “It taught me a lot about trying to drive and what to do when the thing was getting loose or spinning the tires. That car only ran in the mid-seven seconds at about 170 miles per hour. But for me, in my late teens, that was still a pretty awesome, fun race car for me to get to drive."

Perhaps he fancied himself one of Australia's "Wild Bunch" outlaw doorslammer racers (named by Willowbank founder and ANDRA Hall of Famer Denis Syrimis after the U.S. "Wild Bunch" that included Tommy Howes, Camp Stanley, Nelson Grimes, Scott Weney, and Denny Brightwell). After all, Crampton followed all the action from "Top Swashbuckler" Victor Bray and his cronies Peter Kapiris and Ray Ward. Said Crampton, "Growing up, all I knew was it would be awesome to drive a supercharged sedan and do big burnouts. That's the kind of mold I wanted to fit into."   

His parents provided the financial backing, and Dad, he said, "was absolutely the boss." But critical to Crampton's development was – by his description – "that grassroots, traveling around, racing what you can at whatever level you can, and having huge loads of fun, learning-a-lot kind of thing that we did."   

By the time the Adelaide track closed, Crampton had met ANDRA pioneer Cowin and ended up moving to Sydney to work from 2001-2004 on Andrew Cowan's Top Fuel dragster. (Along the way, he helped Jon Cowan, Andrew's twin, win a championship, too.) In the U.S., Cowan raced with both Darrell Gwynn and with the Carrier Boyz before a serious head injury from a pit accident in 2005 led to the team's return to Sydney.

"I'm very lucky the Cowan family brought me to the U.S., where I got my foot in the door to stay on when they decided to return home at the end of 2005. I learned a lot from the Cowan family.”

Then he found himself at Don Schumacher Racing, in charge of piston and rod assembly and servicing the left-side cylinder heads on the dragster Melanie Troxel drove. That job morphed into working as the clutch specialist for Troxel when she drove the second Morgan Lucas Racing dragster in 2007, as a teammate to the young boss. At the end of that 2007 season, he moved over to Lucas' GEICO/Lucas Oil Dragster. So by the time he replaced the semi-retiring Lucas in the seat, Crampton literally knew the car inside and out.

Less than 20 years ago, Crampton was a teenaged fan at the NHRA Finals at Pomona, Calif., visiting from Adelaide, South Australia. The NHRA is kicking off its 2017 season at Pomona, as news broke half a world away that Crampton would get to race a dragster in his homeland.

"I would go around [during his first visit to the United States, at Pomona], getting hero cards from all these people I'd been watching and reading about from the other side of the world. I was just blown away with how awesome Top Fuel racing is in the U.S.," he said.

"It was definitely a pipe dream to think I could get to the U.S. and compete at any level," Crampton said. Yet in 2014, he debuted on that same racetrack and won his first round of NHRA competition. That year, he also received the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Road to the Future Award that signifies the top rookie performer that season.

Once he had the opportunity to race a Top Fuel dragster, Crampton – who became a U.S. citizen – recorded three straight top-10 finishes. His best was third in 2015.

Crampton shocked the sport in 2014, winning the 60th anniversary edition of the world’s biggest and most prestigious race, the Chevrolet Performance U.S. Nationals.