Antron Brown, eager to compete in multiple categories at the same event, hinted at an NHRA policy change
Erica Enders – the 49-time NHRA winner, six-time Pro Stock champion, and most successful woman in all of motorsports – has fallen out of love . . . with Funny Cars.
Before she broke into the professional ranks 20 years ago this season, she had her heart set on wrestling one of the nitro-powered beasts. Now she just says, “They’re noisy. They stink. They blow up.” So she concentrates on mastering her Chevrolet Camaro, which, in comparison, rides like a Cadillac.
“You get in one of our cars, and it’s clean and nice and pretty,” she said.
So Funny Car no longer is on her radar. A Top Fuel dragster, the so-called Kings of the Sport, aren’t really for this queen of the sport, either.
Rumors have spread that her Elite Motorsports boss, Richard Freeman, purchased some Torrence Racing equipment for Enders to make the switch to Top Fuel. She addressed that in a conversation with Competition Plus publisher Bobby Bennett and said of the dragster class, “That’s the pinnacle of the sport, right? So, you want to raise Top Fuel, but if you want to run a real driver’s class, you come over and run Pro Stock. You get in there, and you swap feet and you have to pull levers. It’s a lot of fun. So that’s where my heart’s at.
For her, the bottom line with Top Fuel is that while she said “as a little kid, my heroes were Shirley Muldowney and Shelley Anderson,” she could take or leave the cars they drove. “Given the opportunity,” Enders said, “I’ll drive, but it don’t do nothin’ for me.
“Richard and I have had a lot of fun and a lot of success. Six world titles in a total of 10 years is pretty substantial. So I love Pro Stock. I’ll always be a Pro Stock gal,” she said.
Her career didn’t start as the Enders and Freeman act. It began as the Enders and Epler partnership.
“Funny Cars is what I wanted to do,” Enders said. “In 2004, I went and got my Alcohol Funny Car license at Frank Hawley’s [Drag Racing School], because I was working with Jim Epler. I was going to drive his Nitro Funny Car. He said if I could drive Alcohol Funny Car, I could come drive his deal. So I got my license, and I was working to be a driver for his program.
“And that April, I won the national event at Houston in Super Gas. And for whatever reason in the interview,” Enders recalled, she mentioned that Pro Stock intrigued her and that she hoped she could race in the factory class that produced drag-racing legends Warren Johnson and Bob Glidden.
Amused at her response that ignored the obvious, she said, “I’m working with a Nitro Funny Car team. You think I’d be talking about that.” But when the interviewer asked, “What’s your next plan?” she replied, “I don’t know. I really love watching Pro Stock and how they shift and whatnot. And Victor Cagnazzi and Stevie Johns heard that interview, and that was the start of my Pro Stock career. I didn’t plan on saying that. It just came out of my mouth. So here we are 25 years later. That’s how you know God works in mysterious ways.”
At the recently completed Lucas Oil Winternationals, she said that when Freeman announced last summer that they were going to change her class, “my sister’s and my phones blew up. My dad called me. He’s like, ‘What the hell are you thinking?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘How do I not know about this?’ But anyway, Richard loves this sport, and he wants to see it do well. He sees lower car counts and kind of just wanted to put something out there and expand the Elite brand. So it’s definitely something that we’re dabbling in.”
And Enders was willing to support his idea.
“I went and got fitted for a car when we were in Indy last year, and it’s just one of those things: If the sponsorship and marketing partners come together, it’s something that we’ll do. But I will preface that by saying I’m not leaving Pro Stock to go race nitro.”
So was she talking about a Top Fuel dragster or a Funny Car? Rumors have mentioned both. Enders explained: “Twenty-plus years ago, my plan was to drive a Nitro Funny Car.” But her initial talks with Freeman centered on Top Fuel: “When Richard and I talked about it, that was the first thing we said, ‘Well, the dragster, whatever. But no woman’s ever won a Funny Car title, and we’ll go the Funny Car route.”
But in saying that, she revealed some eyebrow-raising news about the NHRA considering changing one of its longstanding policies.
“When we started working with NHRA on planning to be able to drive both time-wise on Sundays with live TV, we couldn’t do Funny Car and Pro Stock because they run back-to-back. So, they said, ‘If you run the dragster and you run Pro Stock, we can figure it out. So that’s how we got off the Funny Car onto the dragster,” she said.
That supports Antron Brown’s statements from a pre-season conversation at Phoenix with Competition Plus. He claimed that one day he will be driving a Top Fuel dragster and a Pro Stock car at the same event – and maybe even a dragster and a Pro Mod entry . . . or maybe” one day I’d be in a marathon of racing. I would love to do a Pro Stock bike, Pro Stock car, Funny Car and Top Fuel car” in a single event.
(Brown, the 16-time Pro Stock Motorcycle winner who moved to Top Fuel in 2008, said, “You know how I got into this sport? I got into this sport because my dad was a super fan of Pro Stock car. I knew every Pro Stock car driver and always wanted to drive a Pro Stock car and never got to drive one. Isn’t that crazy? Super fan of Pro Stock car from the Lee Shepard days to Bob Glidden to Warren Johnson days, all them fighting each other. The Jerry Ekmans were out there. I knew all the names of Pro Stock car. I knew every single one: Scott Geoffrion and the Wayne County Boys, all of them: Daryl Alderman. I remember all the names back in the day of how they raced and what they do . . . Mark Pawuk, “The Cowboy” . . . all the names that made Pro Stock car what it is.” An he said he can race a Pro Stock car, too: “I know how to make it happen. I can click the gears and everything.”)
And Brown said he’s convinced muti-pro-category racing is in the NHRA’s future.
“I’m going to do it one day. I’ve been talking to ’em,” he said. “They were talking about it for Erica, where they’re not going to wait for you [if she competed in classes that run back-to-back]. But that’s a new stipulation that . . . you could do two of those classes, but they won’t let you do two fuel classes and you can’t do two stock classes.” (Sportsman racers are permitted to compete in multiple categories at the same event.)
The NHRA has not announced a change in the rule that would please, among others, Top Fuel owner-driver Mike Salinas, who is itching to race in several pro classes at the same event.
Freeman said, “We put that on the back burner after Erica and I sat down and talked about it. And not just us, but our guys. Not that you wouldn’t like to run a fuel car, but my good friend, Randy [Gloede, of SCAG], just sat down beside me and at the end of the day, after listening to what he was spending and all that stuff, I think I can do more help from outside and maybe give some insight to how to help these classes. And I’m not saying we’re not or we won’t, but now’s not the time.”
Enders said that doesn’t disappoint her: “I don’t care. I love Pro Stock. It’s our bread and butter, and we take a lot of pride in our program, and I have a lot of fun teaching these new guys how to race.
“And Richard’s allowed me that avenue for something else to do. So as a competitor, I want to win. I want to race, I want to make all the money I can, win all the trophies. But at the end of the day, our job is to make it better and to make it safer and to make it more enjoyable for the next idiot that wants to do it like me,” she said. “So you have to have that at the forefront of your mind. And it’s not something that I thought about until Richard made me. So just embracing it all. And I’m still going to try to go out there and rip their throats out and send them packing.
“What we’ve built at Elite is something I think we should be really proud of. We have the best drivers in the world under our canopies: both Stanfields [Greg and son Aaron] there, a couple Coughlins [Jeg Jr. and Troy Jr.], and the [Cuadras: brothers Fernando Jr., Cristian, and David]. We’ve got a really good group of people. So, I love what we do. And it’s not to say that we won’t explore the Top Field avenue at some point. I never say never. I’ll drive anything. You know that. But if I do it, we’ll do it at Elite or we won’t do it at all. So whatever Richard says, we’ll do.”
