One conversation with Richard Tharp and you will quickly conclude this is a man who has lived life on his terms. He certainly was no saint but a star… he was every bit of that persona. 

Tharp is 81, and every one of those days, he’s lived bearing the reputation of what some say is one of the best drivers to climb behind the wheel of a race car or snare the race queen. He has a straightforward answer for what earned him this legend. 

“It’s pretty easy to realize I had big balls,” Tharp said without hesitation when asked what made him a great race car driver. “I had two balls and a brain.”

As Tharp asserts, driving a Top Fuel or a Funny Car wasn’t easy, and winning could be even more challenging. Having a balance of confidence and cockiness was the only way one could make it. 

“That helped, but that’s just the way I was raised,” Tharp added. “I’ve had that with everything I do, and I still have it the way I do everything right now.”

These days Tharp lives a less dangerous life, peddling high-end automobiles. But, the memories, he says, remain as potent as the nitro-burning engine he had both in front and behind him. 

Tharp won an NHRA Winston World Championship in 1976, but he credits his crowning achievement as winning the NHRA U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis. He nearly added a second one in 1977 but lost to Dennis Baca. 

Tharp won Indy and then a championship. He said he was a man with his priorities in order. 

“It’ll stick with everybody that won it back in the day,” Tharp explained. “When you win Indy, you got your own place. I won the two World Championships in the IHRA and one in NHRA, but they don’t mean s*** compared to Indy. And I really don’t understand that, but that’s the way it is with everybody, and it’s damn sure the way it’s with me.

“When you win Indy, you’re in a different class of people; you know what I’m saying? And it ain’t no easy task to win Indy. When I won, it was a 32-car field. I really should have won it two years in a row. That second year, I won it, ’76, and ’77 I should have won it.”

Tharp said he was battling against a wealth of Top Fuel teams who had pitched in to help Baca, which was just how the community did when a racer was down. 

“I’ve done the same thing to other people, too, so it doesn’t bother me,” Tharp admitted. “We used to trade parts, and if somebody didn’t have it, we’d give them their parts, and they’d go out, and they’d outrun us and we’d outrun them. It’s just the way it was back then. It was a lot different than it is now.”

Tharp is very selective when he doles out who could have survived back in those days of Top Fuel racing. 

“Probably [Tony] Schumacher and Steve Torrance would have made it,” Tharp declared. “You got to have a personality. There’s no personalities out there racing anymore. You had to have the personality and the swagger and a whole lot of want to.”

Tharp quickly says he doesn’t see any Top Fuel racers who he envisions as the second coming of himself.

“Oh, hell no,” he added. 

But then again, Tharp has proven over the decades to be a “one-of-a-kind,” whether it was running from the FBI in dodging the Vietnam War draft and losing that race. Or starring in a drag racing movie “Wheels of Fire” where he was typecast as an odd-bird, one who loved the ladies, and they loved him. 

He loved the personality rivalries, especially the one with Shirley Muldowney, which today has been repaired. Ironically, it was Muldowney with whom he beat to score his final national event victory. 

His business cards back in the day told the true story, “Texas & Tharp: The Damndest Thing You Ever Saw!”

Who needed heroes when you were a one-man walking wonder of nature? Tharp rarely cast heroes out of his peers, but there is one who inspired him to set his benchmark high. From the first time Tharp saw Don “The Snake” Prudhomme running the Greer, Black & Prudhomme dragster at Green Valley Raceway, he knew there was a standard he needed to shoot for. 

“When you have a car that only loses 11 rounds out of 284, that makes the mark,” Tharp said. “I just thought I’d really like to be just like him, but that would take a big step.”

Tharp said that admiration made it easy to transform into friendship over the decades. 

“We talk on the phone probably twice a week,” Tharp said. “I’m six weeks older than him. We celebrate our birthdays together. I go to his house. In 1963, I thought I’d probably never see him again. And it turned into a friendship that’s just really close and really great.”

Prudhomme might have had his number on the drag strip, but when it came to his actions as a party animal, he just couldn’t hang with Tharp. Honestly, few, if any, could. 

“That’s just my life and it’s still my life,” Tharp admitted. “I don’t drink anymore. I don’t hardly ever go out anymore. I’m 81 years old. That’ll slow you down pretty good. But I didn’t take a lot of pride in it. I thought that’s just the way it was supposed to be. I did that from my high school days right on until just a couple years ago.”

Tharp has always shunned the rockstar comparison because he always believed the rockstars were drag racers with guitars. 

“A star I are, A saint I ain’t,” Tharp said with a chuckle. “I saw that thing on the postcard one time, and I kept that forever. I just had it on the back of the wing of the dragster. I got more attention off of that sign, and you won’t believe, obviously, I’ll be walking down through the pits they go, ‘A star I are, a saint I ain’t”. 

“That stuck with a lot of people. It was really a cool saying.”

Tharp took so much pride in his unsaintly image that when he got the call to be inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, he viewed it as defeat. After all, the Hall of Fame, as he believed, was reserved for those who had a squeaky-clean image. 

“When I got inducted to the Hall of Fame, my speech, I didn’t really know what to say and I said, ‘I was very lucky. I always had the best cars, got to drive the best cars. Always had the best owners, always had the best crew, always had the best crew chief. Always did what I wanted to do, always said what I wanted to say. And then here I am getting inducted into the International Hall of Fame, kind of a sign of defeat.

“With me, you just never thought it was going to happen. I never even thought about going in the Hall of Fame. I just did what I wanted to do and I didn’t do it for anybody. To me, that was just me. 

“A lot of squeaky things about everybody in there.”

Yeah, and Tharp knows snitches get stitches. 

As Tharp attests, nobody has any scandals on him because he did his bidding in the wide open. 

“I was pretty much just a care-free guy, and as Dave Densmore once wrote, ‘He’s probably one of the very best driving out of trouble, but he’s also grown the very best for getting in trouble.”

Tharp smiled and continued, 

“I say things everybody wishes they’d said, I’ve done things they wish they’d done, and I’ve done things that they’d never even think about doing.”

And as Tharp put it, he just did the things a man with two balls and a brain would do.