Dave Hill’s birthday cake will be covered in candles in June when he turns 58. 

In spite of all those trips around the sun, in many respects, he’s the same guy he was as a teenager growing up near Sevierville, Tennessee.

He was a speed demon back then, a young man whose idea of a big weekend was to spend Friday and Saturday nights dashing down 411 Dragway. It’s a need he couldn’t shake more than a decade later as a street racer in Chicago.

Hill, who lives near Valparaiso, Indiana, has a love of speed that hasn’t slowed one rpm. If anything, that passion has intensified as he’s aged. The latest testament to his love of motorsports is a new, 1965 Mustang-bodied, nitro-burning “Mad Max.” That car will make its debut this weekend (June 3-4) at Nitro Chaos as part of the Funny Car Chaos event at Eddyville, Iowa.

Eventually, Dave Hill will pass the reins over to his son, Ryan, a Pro Mod wheelman … just not yet.

"We want to get out and have fun with everybody and meet everybody,” said Hill, who participated on the tour last year with a 1995 Mustang body. 

“But to be out there in the mix of it, having fun … I dunno, it’s the way to grow old, I guess.”

If that’s the case, it’s the product of a plan that was unknowingly set in motion in the 1970s. At the age of 14, he said, he would siphon gas from a car in his father’s junkyard, put it into the tank of another junker that was still drivable, and in his words, “run the road like a madman.”

Why?

“Because I could.”

Later, after a divorce from his high school sweetheart, Hill felt the urge to make another drastic change. His mother was living in a suburb of Chicago, and she made him an offer he didn’t refuse.

“She said, ‘Why don’t you come up here? There are lots of jobs up here,’ so I did,” Hill said. 

“It got me away from that situation and sort of gave me a fresh start, if you will. I needed something. I needed a direction to go.”

Dave Hill, his brother Danny, and a friend crammed “literally all our stuff” into a tiny Mazda GLC and relocated from east Tennessee to the Windy City. The Hill brothers held a series of jobs for about five years until they decided to start their own business, Action Compaction, in 1990 with another brother, Darryl, and with their mother as the Chief Executive Officer.

“That was probably the hardest thing we ever did because we really didn’t know how to manage a business. We were hard workers and we were smart, but we didn’t know about business and we had to learn,” Dave Hill said. “We should have thrown the towel in, but we were stupid and/or wouldn’t give up. Persistent, I guess, is what we were.”

Over time, the realities of their business began to take a toll on Dave Hill, and racing, in a sense, became a badly needed outlet. It wasn’t legal racing on a dragstrip — he turned to street racing — but it was a necessity in his mind at that point.

“I can remember turning 30, and we were working so much to where I literally was at a point in my life that I just wanted to go crash into a tree and be done with it,” he said.

That’s when he managed to convince his current wife, Norma, to let him go to Tennessee to fetch the ’67 Firebird he had driven in high school. He had placed the Pontiac on blocks in his grandmother’s basement, and once he returned to northwest Indiana with it, he began a series of upgrades to take on anybody who wanted to challenge him.

It was a project that worked out well … until it didn’t.

“I had a nice, really fast street car. I was winning pretty good until the cops showed up,” he said. “The car was impounded, and I had to get a lawyer. But I was about done with it, anyway. It got to be where all you were doing was arguing with other racers, and that took all the fun out of it, so I sold the car.”

About two years later, that seemingly unquenchable need for speed stirred again, and to satisfy that urge, he purchased a nine-second, 150-mph ’63 Nova.

Near the end of 1999, Hill was told by a friend that a local racer, Rick Krafft, “needed some help crewing on a hot rod.” 

That car was built from the ground-up in Krafft’s garage. Hill, who “was as green as you could be on one of those things, man,” and he discovered first-hand how grueling a commitment it is to race at a higher level.

“We’d leave on a Thursday night and drive all night to get to the track Friday,” he said, “then be up just about all night Friday and Saturday night, finish up Sunday and drive back all night Sunday to be at work Monday,” Hill said. “Rick was phenomenal in teaching me a lot because I put him in that seat and sent him down the track I don’t know how many hundreds of times.”

“We joke and laugh that (Krafft) is the reason we are what we are, whether you take that as a good thing or a bad thing,” Ryan Hill said. “He was a teacher as far as being involved heavily with all these Hemi deals, and a teacher who talks us through things and ideas and how to feel things. We owe a lot to him to get to do what we do.”

Dave Hill eventually tried to get his Top Alcohol Funny Car license in Krafft’s car, but a variety of issues twice prevented that from happening. By 2008, he had the chance to partner with Ben Ameling to field a nitromethane-injected dragster, and for three years, they raced with Dave behind the wheel in NHRA Division 3 competition and in IHRA’s Pro Fuel ranks. 

Then it came time to uphold an agreement to buy Ryan a race car after he finished college. It was nearly two years later, in late 2014, that Ryan debuted the only supercharged Top Sportsman car in Division 3.

“We didn’t know anything about the fuel system or where we needed to be,” Ryan said, “so I go out there for my first full pull down the quarter-mile and went 6.54 at 216 — and that – my licensing lap – was the fastest Top Sportsman run of the season. I mean, c’mon …”

In 2015, Dave Hill started another business, Electro Mechanical Services. For the last two years, it’s been a father-and-son operation.

“We repair anything that conveys, sorts, separates and compresses material to be shipped to prospective recyclers,” Dave said. “For instance, office paper goes back to a pulp plant, where it goes into this giant bowl that’s literally three to four stories tall, and it stinks to high heaven. It’s a giant mixing bowl that pulls fibers apart, and they add anything from some types of glues and chemicals to put the paper back together, and it comes out the bottom as recycled paper when it comes out.”

There’s also a side to the business that deals with large metal machines. One example would be shredders that turn cars into bits and pieces, and Hill’s company builds the computer panels that operate that equipment. Electro Mechanical also services and upgrades hydraulic systems.

“Some of these machines have 24-inch-diameter cylinders that will make a 2’x2’x30”, 500-pound bale,” Dave said. “That goes to a smelter, where it will go in a big pot to get melted down and mixed with other materials to make it back to whatever grade metal they want.”

Ryan had hands-on industrial experience that has come in handy when working with race cars. Before going to work with his dad, Ryan spent 10 years as a machinist, but said the “bottom fell out of that industry” in their part of northwest Indiana.

“I really didn’t care to go to the steel mills. I’m not about the swing-shift life,” he said. “Dad had enough business and customer base that now we both have our own customers, and we hardly do the same jobs together any more. I’ve come along enough that I have my own deal and almost don’t need him for the stuff I do. It’s done an awesome job of providing us the opportunity to go racing.”

The chance to tackle funny car competition arrived when Dave purchased an alcohol-burner once campaigned by Mick Snyder, who lived nearby.

“We got the funny car, and the plan was, ‘Hey, maybe we’ll go alcohol funny car racing,’ ” Ryan said. “Then we got to looking at the budget and that was kind of dumb, so we made an altered out of it.”

The car didn’t remain an altered for long, and after some upgrades by Jake Sanders, “Mad Max” became a reality. The car made its nitro funny car debut in September 2020.

“I originally put the altered together because I loved the concept of a small body, dumbass driving, fast thing. But the body, the end of that season, it was done. There’s only a few races where altereds are permitted, and they’re mostly a show piece. That lasted literally that summer,” Dave Hill said. “Through the winter, everybody was in my ear about running Funny Car Chaos, funny car this, funny car that. I didn’t have the money, but a guy had an old funny car body for 600 bucks. We called it ‘the 20-footer’ because it looked good that far away.

“We ran that last year at all the events, but we didn’t have a back-up. I looked at the finances and decided, ‘OK, I think I can swing this,' so I ordered a ’65 body for it.”

Dave’s early outings with the nitro funny car produced a best quarter-mile run of 5.71 at 254 mph “on a pedal job,” Ryan said, adding that when they took steps to calm it down a bit, they witnessed the opposite effect.

“Nitro’s so weird. It don’t make a lick of sense,” Ryan said. “One race, it went .950 to 60 feet. So when we backed it down, it went one-flat in the 60, but 207 to half-track. What happened? I don’t know, but it liked whatever we did to it.”

“Running nitro is a whole new world,” Dave said. "When you’re running the alcohol funny cars, you’re adjusting everything for the utmost power and speed. With the nitro car, no, no, no, the thing’s making more power than you can imagine. It’s about handling the power. It’s about putting power to the track without overpowering it.”

Part of Dave’s thrill with the nitro car is the challenge of calling the shots to produce the desired result. When he was a crewman on Krafft’s alcohol burner, he would make suggestions about the tune-up and wait to see if they would be implemented. Now, the onus — and the cost — is squarely on his shoulders.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to learn — and I know it’s going to be a costly learn — unless we do it,’ so we built this thing,” Dave said. “I’ve got the basic fuel-system baseline and here we go, we’re running it. 

“Jake Sanders is helping us” with the nitro car, he continued. “He put a tune-up together for me, mounted the body for me, and is steering us and keeping us in line. He has his choice — he won’t go out with just anybody — he chose to go with us. … We won’t tarnish his name. Everybody knows that Jake knows his shit. Am I paying for help? Hell, yeah, I am. I’m paying to get down the track. I learned on my own with alcohol, but switching to nitro is a huge step.”

Sanders, Ryan added, “doesn't see us as just a paycheck, he wants to see us one day go out and do this on our own. Eventually it’ll be us tuning the thing, and that’s exciting.”

Giving race cars catchy names such as “Mad Max” is a family trait, such as the “Big Booty Judy” Pontiac Pro Mod once campaigned by Ryan. Ryan Hill’s current car, which is on the sidelines for the time being, is Mike Janis’ former split-window ’63 Corvette known as “Widowmaker.” Ryan rechristened that car “Betty White” because of its color and his self-proclaimed obsession with “The Golden Girls” TV show, of which White was a star. 

“I have a friend who got me a signed picture from Betty White, so I have a documented piece with an authentication card that it’s her darn signature on this picture,” Ryan said. “Before she died, she knew all about the car. I taped a photocopy of that picture to the wheel well on the passenger side so she rides along with me.”

Being selective of the work they do and the time it will involve allows the Hills to schedule work around racing. Ryan is a key member of his father’s team as well as its future driver. Shannon Brock, Ryan’s fiancee, also has a role as a ‘Mad Maxine,’ the ‘back-up girl’ following Dave’s burnouts.

“She’s very opportunistic, but I wouldn’t say flashy — but she isn’t afraid to think outside the box,” Ryan said. “We’re feeding into this thing and trying to kind of build a brand. It’s definitely working, and she’s taken control of our webpage. It’s been a fun road for her to come along and do all this. It fits the theme of the car, and that’s exactly what we want.”

Besides, he added, “We’re never going to be million-dollar guys doing this deal, we’re just guys who thoroughly enjoy what we get to do. I always tell (Dad), ‘If we’re not having fun, we don’t need to do this anymore.’ ”

That will be evident at Eddyville, when the first trip down the track for the new car will be in Friday’s Nitro Chaos qualifying. They’ve “called out” a couple of competitors for head-to-head, bragging-rights runs. One of them, Brian Inouye, has accepted the challenge of facing “Mad Max” with his nitro-burning “Frantic Fueler” front-engine dragster.

There’s another call-out that would be a natural duel at a future Funny Car Chaos event: “Mad Max” vs. Ronny Young in the legendary “Blue Max.” Dave Hill said he would like nothing better than to be a part of those types of match-ups.

“We want to get out and have fun with everybody and meet everybody,” he said. “Ryan and I grew up watching these guys run, and we kind of want to be part of that. We ain’t gonna win ’em all, and I don’t care about that, but I do want to be out there in the mix of it, having fun.”