Since late in the 2022 season, Lee Beard has served as a consultant for Cruz Pedregon’s team.

Beard has had an amazing career in the sport of drag racing.

Beard tuned the late Gary Ormsby to a Top Fuel title in 1989. In 1992 he won a world championship as team manager for Larry Minor Racing when Cruz Pedregon captured the nitro Funny Car title. He also was the team manager at Don Schumacher Racing when Tony Schumacher was the Top Fuel champ in 2009.

As a crew chief, Beard has amassed 55 NHRA national event wins with 14 different drivers in Top Fuel and Funny Car. Seven of those drivers were first-time national event winners.

The starting point for those national event wins came at the Mile-High Nationals at Bandimere Speedway outside of Denver. Back on April 21, NHRA and the Bandimere family jointly announced the 2023 Dodge Power Brokers NHRA Mile-High Nationals at Bandimere Speedway would be the last NHRA national event at the historic track.

First opened in 1958, the Bandimere family has agreed to sell the current property and land, with the 2023 racing season marking the end of drag racing at the location.

Beard, as a crew chief, guided Jerry Ruth to the Top Fuel title at the 1980 Mile-High Nationals.

However, Beard acknowledged one of his fondest racing memories came at Bandimere Speedway came in 1979 when he was driving Jerry Ruth’s Funny Car.
 

“Yeah, I think it’s just been kind of a special place, because number one, I grew up in this area as part of the Division 5, which I raced in,” said Beard about Bandimere Speedway. We watched the thing grow from a little, we’ll say, mom and pop dragstrip when it first opened into a full-blown national event track that it is today, so we’ve seen changes that the Bandimere family, improvements that they continuously made, made it into really a first-class facility where it’s located up here on the side of the mountain. At nighttime, you’re looking out over the city. It’s one of the most spectacular views of any racetrack that we race on, so it does have... It also, as a driver, I won a really big race here in 1979, the Coca-Cola Cavalcade of Stars.”

Beard took a moment to recall his 1979 triumpH that was still etched in his mind.

There were some big-name Funny Cars there (at the Cavalcade of Stars event),” Beard said. “Don Prudhomme was here, Raymond Beadle Blue Max was here, the Hawaiian was here, and John Force was there, and all the Big West Coast cars and stuff were here. Then I beat John Force in the final round. And for me, this kid from Pueblo, (Colo., 90 minutes south of Bandimere Speedway) to win an event of that stature was really one of the bigger wins in my driving career.”

Outside of Ruth’s win in 1980 as a tuner at Bandimere Speedway, Beard also tuned Top Fuel driver Hot Rod Fuller to a 2007 victory at the facility. Fuller defeated his David Powers Motorsports teammate Whit Bazemore in the finals.

“It’s certainly a challenge for the tuners, trying to overcome the corrected elevation here (at Bandimere Speedway),” Beard said. “The density altitude is always 9,000-plus feet, even though the altimeter reads like 5,650 feet here. When you factor in the temperature, it’s usually very hot here. And the density altitude, which the engine thinks that’s what it’s running at, is in the 9,000 feet range. How you attempt to overcome that really high altitude to get you back to... Close to having the same amount of horsepower that you have at the lower elevation tracks has been the crew chief’s own little recipe secret, we’ll say, in that. But over time, that technology leaks out and then all the guys get pretty good at it. There’s usually not one team that has an advantage up here. It’s another good race on the national event tour.”

This being the last race at Bandimere Speedway in this Morrison location isn’t lost on Beard.

“I’m sad to see any of the tracks go,” Beard said. “But this one has a sentimental spot in my heart because I grew up a hundred miles south of here. But I have faith in the Bandimere family. I’ve been reading some things that they’re looking for property out there around DIA (Denver International Airport), and I think John Bandimere Jr. has a passion in his heart for what he does, and I think it was a big business decision for them to sell the place and close the doors, but I have faith in him and his passion for the sport that we’re going to see maybe perhaps a better facility than what we have here.”

As for two-time world championship driver Pedregon, he arrived in Denver 10th in the season points standings, highlighted by two No. 1 qualifying spots in Pomona, Calif., and Las Vegas. 

“We have an excellent combination to run under the cool... Really good conditions,” Beard said. “We can certainly qualify up in the top half in the first four positions really with that setup, but when we get into the heat of the summer and we’ve been on the hotter tracks, we’ve struggled. We just haven’t got the right horsepower combination to run in the hotter conditions. We did some testing at Indy after Norwalk, and it showed some promise. We’re going to try to build on that here and throughout the rest of the races where it’s going to be really hot.”