Ironically, one of the last times that Tommy Franklin raced at Bristol Dragway, a decade ago, led to his being in Bristol for the PDRA’s Thunder Valley Throwdown.
Franklin was part of the scarce car count that participated in the failed Xtreme Drag Racing League, a spinoff of the American Drag Racing League, a series that also fell on rocky ground.
Franklin’s passion for keeping major league doorslammer alive led to a group, including him, that formed the PDRA a decade ago. The successful businessman ended up becoming the last man standing in the group. In the end, PDRA has outlasted them all.
“I was out here as a racer and wanted a good place to race, and really that’s the only reason that PDRA was formed was because we wanted to keep it as a good place to race,” Franklin said. “I’m competitive from a racer standpoint, but I’m also competitive from a series standpoint that when we’re going to put something on, I want to put something on that’s good. And I feel like our team all has that same mindset as we want to be the best of the best every time we roll out there.”
Over the decades, there’s a longtime adage in the media that the best way to kill a series is to let a racer run it. But Franklin proves the skeptics wrong by using a straightforward philosophy.
“I have a good team,” Franklin said. “I’ll be honest. The hard part for me is I’m still a racer, and I want to be a racer, so I’ll do everything we can do to keep the series going and going strong, but I stay out of the business part of it when we’re at the racetrack. My team comes out here; they do it. They try everything to keep it away from me. I don’t even know what goes on at the front gate, back gate, anything. And that’s good because ultimately, I think if you take the fun away from it as a racer, that doesn’t help the situation at all.”
The PDRA celebrates a decade of bringing fast doorslammer racing to the drag racing community, and this is a source of pride for the successful businessman out of Fredericksburg, Va.
“I don’t think there was even a thought back in the days of that XDRL event that it could turn into what it is today,” Franklin said. “You know the PDRA is a striving, strong series. It is some of the baddest race cars. That’s the most proud thing for me, which is just to watch the level of race cars that can come out here on one property and compete at this level.”
