Phil Burgess finds it amusing that a person can be honored for living their dream.
Burgess, one of the most highly respected drag racing writers, will join an esteemed group of honorees on Thursday evening as he is inducted into the Class of 2025 for the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame in Gainesville, Fla.
He has described himself as that teenager who collected every drag racing magazine he could get. Burgess said he grasped every written word and dreamed one day, he could be the one delivering those words.
But, that was just a dream.
Burgess found out one day that dreams can come true.
“I read those magazines back when I was a teenager and wished that that could be my job,” Burgess admitted. “That was a dream job, right? “But you never think that kind of thing could happen to you.”
Burgess joined the National DRAGSTER staff in 1982 and ascended into the role of Editor for Drag Racing’s longest-running publication within four years.
He was old enough to remember those days when Wally Parks spearheaded National DRAGSTER, believing the cars were the stars, and witnessed the transition where the cars were clearly behind the stars.
“NHRA was always star-building, and we’d take these drivers and celebrate their accomplishments,” Burgess explained. “When Wally ran the newspaper, he always believed the cars were the stars because back then, every car was different back in the ’50s and ’60s. Then, when everything got more regimented, the box got smaller, and we started promoting the stars.”
Burgess can reel off the names he’s been able to write about, whether it was Don Garlits, Don Prudhomme, Shirley Muldowney, Bob Glidden and, John Force. Likewise .he’s penned in Memorium memories about “Jungle” Jim Liberman and other legends.
The fact of the matter is Burgess has been content telling the stories of drag racing’s present, future, and past legends and doing it in a way that made him Hall of Fame material.
Burgess’ longevity enabled him to witness the evolution of drag racing as well as the way it is reported.
“If you look at the cars from the ’60s and ’70s versus today, there’s a huge difference,” Burgess explained. “Then you look at the way that drag racing used to be covered, where it rarely made its way in the daily newspaper. You were lucky to get maybe the agate [stats], and there was no internet, obviously, back then. National DRAGSTER would take a couple of weeks to get you, but the monthlies were delayed by three months.
“But now drag racing fans can have it minutes after it’s happened on our websites. And even before NHRA.tv and all that stuff, that instantaneous thing that people have today, they never had before. I think it’s changed
the way that people want to consume the news.”
Burgess will readily admit he was blessed to work in two eras of drag race reporting, printed and internet, and in 1995, he was instrumental in directing NHRA to become the first major race series to launch a website.
“When the internet came around, what, the mid-’90s, we got the opportunity to do it at NHRA.com, and I think email was just starting to be a thing,” Burgess said. “We had that little newsletter called Nitro News, where we would send out the big headlines to people. You can interview somebody, and 15 minutes later, you can have a story on the website.
“For guys like us who grew up with a monthly magazine, that’s just unheard of. I think it changed the way we look at it, and I think the way that our fans look at it, and everybody wants everything right now, right? The deadline was five minutes ago.”
And for Burgess, the challenge was always coming up with a gaggle of new content weekly in a print world, and now daily in a digital age.
“I got a nice email from Bruce Hampson, and he said, ‘You’re refreshing your product every issue. Every issue has something new.”
“It’s not like having a monthly catalog that stays the same year after year. I don’t think people realize what it takes to A, fill a print magazine or a website. You’ve got to have two or three, four, five new stories every day.”
In the midst of those stories, Burgess, being a fan, has acclimated himself by being right down the line with little or no emotion.
“Whether we admit it or not, we’ve all got favorites, right?” Burgess said. “People that we think deserve to win maybe more than the other guy, but the old rule, there’s no cheering in the press box. So you can have those people that you silently root for, but when it comes to putting paper to pen or to the internet, you’ve got to be unbiased. You’ve got to just ask, ‘What’s the story? What’s the reality of the story?”
“Even if somebody wins you don’t think maybe they’re as deserving as the next guy, or maybe you personally crossed swords with them. It’s all about telling the story.
“The media’s taken a lot of hits the last couple of years about accuracy and favoritism leading stuff, and I think that drag racing, I don’t think we have to worry about that. I mean, we just tell the story the way it is. Follow the facts, follow the story.”
Sometimes, the story hasn’t always been easy to tell, such as those times that up-and-coming drag racers were killed or injured.
“We’ve all lost people that were friends of ours,” Burgess said. “People who you admired, and people you’ve watched their careers but at the end of the day you’re charged to do this job with telling what happened, and you’ve got to just put on that other hat, right? Just file away your emotions for the time being. I mean we’ve lost a lot of great people that we all knew like the Darrell Russell thing was really hard for a lot of people, and even when you see people get hurt, like Angie Smith at St. Louis, it’s hard.
“These are people that you know and are like a second family to you, and it hurts. It’s hard to see it, but you’ve got to put on that other hat. Do what everybody’s expecting you to do, let alone your bosses. But your readers and your followers, they’re looking to you at that moment, in this moment of crisis, to be the guiding light to tell them what they need to know and do it in a professional way.”
Burgess has always been content to be in the shadows, but if he’s challenged to name a defining moment in his career, he proudly points to his Dragster Insider column, a weekly column reliving and focusing on drag racing’s so-called glory days.
“My online column and the fact that I was able to bridge the generations,” Burgess said. “I can call guys like John Wiebe and Jeb Allen, Marvin Graham and Rob Bruins, people like that and talk to them as easily as I can talk to Ron Capps or Antron Brown, and the respect that I’ve received from those guys when they see that I want to tell their story and give them the credit they deserve for everything they did, I think that’s really, really been a thing. I think where I’ve been able to cross eras of drag racing and do it successfully and have the people appreciate what I’m doing, and that really means a lot to me.”
From a kid whose first story of Don Wolf winning Super Stock at the 1983 NHRA was published without a byline to the man who is regarded as one of drag racing’s best storytellers, when Burgess takes the podium on Thursday night, it will be a well-deserved honor.
Pro Stock Motorcycle legends Terry Vance and Byron Hines, past Top Fuel and Funny Car world champion Gary Scelzi, longtime nitro team owner and driver Jim Head, former racer and racetrack owner Charlie Allen, drag racing pioneers Jay Howell and Gary Dyer will be enshrined along with Burgess.
“I have tried not to get too caught up in it,” Burgess admitted. “I mean, obviously, it’s this incredible honor that I never expected. I mean, just a long time ago when I started, but you never think about those kinds of things. And as we do our jobs, we’re all about publicizing everybody else. We don’t really think about ourselves, so I don’t want to get overwhelmed by it because it’s a tremendous honor. I’m just trying to stay in the moment. I’m sure when I see everybody there and everybody else that’s going to be in the Hall of Fame, Terry Vance and Jim Head and all these great people, Gary Scelzi, just to be inducted alongside them, it’s just incredible. And these are people who drag racing fans have looked up to for years, and to think that I am being honored alongside them is just amazing.”
