At the start of the 1977 season, no one was thinking John Wiebe had any
reason to retire from drag racing. No one that is, but John Wiebe.
“Kansas John” or “Weeb” was, while not a Top Fuel supernova on the
order of a Don Garlits or Shirley Muldowney, one of the class’ bigger
stars and most feared competitors throughout the first part of the
1970s.
Wiebe’s resume reflected his accomplishments. He was a three-time
American Hot Rod Association world champion, including the previous two
years running, when the AHRA Top Fuel ranks regularly included heavy
hitters like Garlits, Jeb Allen and Frank Bradley, a national event
winner and a real Hall-of-Famer possibility. Wiebe was the first person
to race Ed Donovan’s famed 417 fuel motor, and one of the last to race
a front-engined fueler.
1970s superstar John Wiebe raced – and retired — on his own terms
Wiebe stands beside a restored version of final front engine Top Fuel dragster.
At the start of the 1977 season, no one was thinking John Wiebe had any reason to retire from drag racing. No one that is, but John Wiebe.
“Kansas John” or “Weeb” was, while not a Top Fuel supernova on the order of a Don Garlits or Shirley Muldowney, one of the class’ bigger stars and most feared competitors throughout the first part of the 1970s.
Wiebe’s resume reflected his accomplishments. He was a three-time American Hot Rod Association world champion, including the previous two years running, when the AHRA Top Fuel ranks regularly included heavy hitters like Garlits, Jeb Allen and Frank Bradley, a national event winner and a real Hall-of-Famer possibility. Wiebe was the first person to race Ed Donovan’s famed 417 fuel motor, and one of the last to race a front-engined fueler.
Yep, seemed like John Wiebe had what he needed for a successful 1977. At 34 years old he also had a young family and a Midwestern sensibility.
That’s basically why, after the East-West race at Orange County International Raceway in the spring of that year, and years hauling and racing his dragster across the country, Wiebe sold his entire operation and went back to Kansas.
“You have to be so driven, so obsessed, so focused,” Wiebe said about his decision. “Maybe I lost the passion. It’s hard to explain – I still enjoy racing, keeping up with it.”
The year I got inducted, I went in with Garlits, (NHRA founder) Wally
Parks, Robert Petersen (of Petersen Publishing), Sox and Martin – you
talk about flattery – John Wiebe on his induction into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame
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Once the decision was made, it was made. Wiebe admits there were no second thoughts.
“I’m confident I did the right thing,” he said. “Right after, quite a few friends of mine were forced out because of money. I did it because I wanted to, not because I had to.
“I was one of the fortunate guys: fairly frugal, built my own motors, set my own blowers. That’s my German Mennonite heritage; nobody could do it as well as you could. I won my share of races, but I think if I would have run the car a bit harder, I might have won more, maybe paid for the parts I lost. But you don’t know that for sure.
“You know, they call that the good old days, today it’s too professional, too expensive. We would drive, seemed like a million miles a year, sleep in the truck, fix everything yourself – and they call that fun? Today is the good days, but it’s dog-eat-dog out there.”
It’s good days today for the 65-year-old Wiebe, too, who lives in Wichita, Kan., and works most of the year as a “storm administrator” for National Catastrophe Adjusters (NCA), an insurance services management company based in Indianapolis.
“NCA has a database of about 1,000 insurance companies,” Wiebe said. “Whenever a company has thousands of losses from a hurricane or a big storm, their staff can’t handle everything, we coordinate their field efforts,” Wiebe said. “I’ve been doing it 17, 18 years. A guy I used to race with was working with Allstate … he got me into this. It takes a special person – there’s so many hoops you have to jump through; you’re not going home for weeks, a month at a time.”
When he’s not busy chasing a disaster, he admits to a little farming and guides a few hunts.
Going fast apparently came naturally to Wiebe, who raced before he ever owned his first race car.
“I always like racing, the competition,” Wiebe said. “When I was a kid, growing up on a farm, I rode horses. Three buddies of mine also rode, so we always ended up in a race. Then I got into go-karting … got into track, ran the 880 (yard run). Then I broke my leg on the horse, so I couldn’t run track.”
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To satisfy his competitive urges, Wiebe bought a ’34 Ford in 1964, had it supercharged – “I’ve always run blowers” – and began his drag racing career in the B/Roadster Supercharged class at local track. He then built a ’23 Ford blown roadster on a Speedway Motorsports frame that set a national class record of 151 mph before he towed to Great Bend, Kan., for the AHRA Nationals.
“The car was really screaming,” Wiebe said. “We had three-tenth, four-tenths on the rest of the class. Then, the officials came up and said, ‘You’re too fast for the class, so we’re kicking you up a class.’ I felt really violated, said I might as well go Top Fuel drag racing.”
Which is exactly what he did, buying a Woody Gilmore rail. First time out, and for the only time in his career, Wiebe let someone else shoe the dragster, in Tulsa against a field that included Jimmy Nix, Benny Osborn and “all the big guns,” he said. The next weekend, Wiebe took the wheel himself and promptly drove into the Mickey Thompson 200 MPH Club.
“The next two years, it was just like it was supposed to happen. I won a lot of races,” Wiebe said. “So I thought, well, I could always get a job, and I’ll never have a chance like this, so I went professional. When I started drag racing, and this was back in the day, people thought you were a bad seed. But when you do good, then it was, ‘Yep, we always knew the boy was gonna make it.’”
Wiebe put his name into the record books in 1970, when AHRA instituted its Grand American season-long points race, booking top racers into the shows for appearance money and adding a $20,000 pot at the end of the year for the champion. With Garlits missing most of the year after the horrific clutch explosion that took part of his foot at Lions Drag Strip, Wiebe took advantage and claimed the first AHRA Top Fuel points title. He also had a shot at becoming a double world champion, losing the final round to Ronnie Martin at the NHRA World Finals on a holeshot, 6.62 seconds to Martin’s 6.65.
Added to those results, Wiebe won the Mike Sorokin Award, named for the late Top Fuel pilot considered one of the best of the 1960s, especially for his part in the Skinner-Sorokin-Jobe “Surfers” car.
“It was for most outstanding Top Fuel driver, voted on by your peers, not an awards committee,” Wiebe said. “To win an award your peers voted on, that meant more to me than any NHRA win. To me, it’s very prestigious.”
DEBUTING THE DONOVAN
Nineteen seventy-one saw big changes in the Top Fuel ranks, as Garlits demonstrated that mid-engined diggers were the way of the future with dominating performances. Wiebe kept his engine in front of him that year but found a different path to the cutting edge, thanks to Ed Donovan.
Donovan was a longtime engine builder, then manufacturer of engine parts for racers. At the time, most fuel racers used the Chrysler 392-inch Hemi motor, but the supply of blocks was drying up, although aftermarket parts were plentiful.
The result was the famed Donovan Engineering 417, the first motor designed and built specifically for drag racing. Donovan and engineer Dick Crawford based it on the 392, but the blocks were aluminum and beefed up where the 392s were breaking. Block No. 001 went to Wiebe just before the 1971 season-closing NHRA Supernationals at Ontario Motor Speedway.
“They really thought (Donovan) built the motor to save weight,” Wiebe said. “It was 50 pounds lighter, but the real reason was you kept splitting the cylinder walls in the 392. You could just drop the cam, crank, all your stuff from the 392 into it.
“I was doing real well then, and I just got to know Ed. During Ontario, on Tuesday, he said, ‘Here’s the block.’ They had not clearanced the cylinder walls or anything. I put my crank in it, went to Ontario and qualified for the race.”
Not just qualified – Wiebe ran a 6.53 to qualify No. 1 and set Low E.T. for the meet, and then rolled handily to the finals, where he and Hank Johnson engaged in a staging duel in the starting lanes.
“I should have won the race,” Wiebe lamented. “It was a start-line thing; I built up too much heat in the motor and smoked the tires. Just one of them drag racing things.”
Then, to ring in the new year, Wiebe ran a blistering 6.175 Jan. 1, 1972, in the NHRA Grand Premiere event at Lions Drag Strip — only to lose to Don Prudhomme’s 6.174 in a mid-engined digger. At the time, those were the two quickest E.T.s ever in Top Fuel, and Wiebe’s time remained the quickest for a front-engined fueler for 22 years, when nostalgia racer Ted Taylor wheeled the “WW2” machine to a 6.045.
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“It felt very good; however, the ‘moment’ seemed like minutes as I saw Don in the other lane; side by side,” Wiebe said about the race with Prudhomme. “(Realizing I lost) did not feel very good, as again my conservative background cost me a race. We had been running 6.30s all day, and I put about 2-3 percent in the tank, as the motor was very safe all day and I knew the Snake would have it on kill. I felt bad for Donovan, who wanted me to turn up the wick and put in more spark advance, which I know would have helped the elapsed time — and I declined. Oh, for hindsight!”
Of course, other fuel racers began shopping for motors at Donovan Engineering, while Keith Black, Ed Pink and Milodon began producing their own plants specifically for fuel racing. Wiebe, however, remained a Donovan stalwart throughout the rest of his career.
Wiebe said he didn’t have much chance to undertake serious testing or development work on the 417, though.
“Usually, you kind of just discovered things,” he said. “I did do some work with the heads, did run the first Donovan with aluminum heads. Mostly it was a seat-of-the-pants deal. It can be bittersweet – once you start running well, nobody will allow you to make a bad run. You’re running every night of the week, you get booked into a track, and the track expects you to make good runs, so you can’t do any (research and development).”
Wiebe has nothing but praise and respect for Donovan and Crawford.
“Donovan was a self-taught metallurgist,” Wiebe said. “If you read between the lines of what he said, you’d always learn something. Once, he said to me, ‘You’re never gonna go faster hanging around with people going slower than you.’ Dick Crawford engineered that motor; he was a brilliant man.”
However, mid-engined fuelers became more and more prevalent throughout 1972, while Wiebe held out as long as he could with his front-engined rail, even adding canards in front of the rear wheels – “That probably goes into my background again, being stubborn, frugal,” he said.
By 1973, though, the writing was on the wall for the front-engined fuelers, and Wiebe moved into an Ed Mabry-built, back-motored dragster.
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Results immediately took a turn for the better, as Wiebe promptly won an AHRA national in Texas, then took his first (and only) NHRA national in Columbus, Ohio defeating Garlits in the final. What most old-time fans remember about his ’73 season, though, is one of the most renowned accidents in drag racing history.
It happened in the first round of the Professional Racers Association National Challenge in Tulsa. After qualifying No. 1 in a 32-car field with a 6.11, Wiebe launched against Jeb Allen in the first round, the dragster turned hard right from the left lane and shot across the front of Allen’s car. The two collided and tumbled down the track, leaving Allen with burns and Wiebe with a broken leg.
“We had run low E.T. the night before,” Wiebe said. “But when I pulled the (cylinder) head, I saw the No. 7 cylinder hadn’t been firing. The next day, I turned the wick up a little … I got such severe tire shake, the car turned sideways. The only reason I broke a leg was that I landed on top of a post on the guardrail.”
Wiebe got his revenge on the National Challenge the next year, which moved to New York National Speedway, while the sanctioning body changed its name to the Professional Racers Organization. The 1974 race is infamous to this day for numerous hassles, arguments, controversies and organizational breakdowns between racers, track officials and PRO.
But that shouldn’t overshadow the fact that Wiebe – armed with the aforementioned aluminum-headed Donovan — dominated a strong Top Fuel field from the get-go, qualifying low at 6.12, running his first five-second pass ever, a 5.98, in the first round (and the only five of the meet) and 6.0s the rest of the way to claim the crown.
Asked if he sometimes felt the PRO win didn’t get the recognition it should have because of the controversy, Wiebe said, “Yeah, I did, but I get over things like that pretty quick. We came in, tried to act like professionals, didn’t get involved in those things. There were a lot of personal issues going on that were issues before the race started.”
As noted, Wiebe went on to take the AHRA points titles each of the next two years. His last big hurrah came at the ’76 U.S. Nationals, where he went to the final round to face Richard Tharp in the Candies and Hughes machine. Both ran 6.114, with Wiebe getting to the line first – but he left a red light back on the Christmas tree. The December ’76 issue of Super Stock and Drag Illustrated magazine wrote it appeared Wiebe and Tharp left at the same time, and Wiebe agrees.
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Wiebe made an appearance at the 2006 California Hot Rod Reunion
“Cacklefest” to fire up his ’72 car, his final front-motored dragster. He almost got hooked again.
“I did not red-light,” he said emphatically. “I’ve seen the video, and I know I didn’t. I think if you go back, everyone in the pro categories in the left lane red-lit. (NHRA competition director) Steve Gibbs or someone said they thought maybe the sunlight was hitting the line in a way to set off the lights. That was $20,000, plus a win at Indy – but you just gotta suck it up and keep going.”
A few months later, though, came Wiebe’s decision to leave the sport. But his name and accomplishments didn’t go away, and in 1994, he was voted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame.
“The year I got inducted, I went in with Garlits, (NHRA founder) Wally Parks, Robert Petersen (of Petersen Publishing), Sox and Martin – you talk about flattery,” Wiebe said with a laugh.
Then, Wiebe made an appearance at the 2006 California Hot Rod Reunion “Cacklefest” to fire up his ’72 car, his final front-motored dragster. Don Love of Washington found the chassis several years previously and restored it, then found Donovan block No. 002 that Wiebe ran in the car and had it rebuilt and installed.
“That was really a very cool deal,” Wiebe said. “These guys called and said they found my old car. I said, ‘Yeah, right, send some photos.’ And it had the canards I put on. A year later, they found the 002 Donovan motor; 001 is in Garlits’ museum. They asked me to fire it up the Saturday before Cacklefest.”
And even though he hadn’t sat in that car for 34 years, or any race car for 29, Wiebe’s professional racer instincts never went away.
“Soon as they lit that thing off, it was like time never passed,” Wiebe said. “I started thinking, ‘Let’s not get the motor too hot – I gotta qualify.’ I was, like, having a flashback.”
