Raymond Beadle has died. As expected as it was after so many recent health problems, it is still a shock. You see, Beadle was larger than life, a fearless, uncompromising guy who seemingly had the Midas touch, a guy who could win, and did win, in everything he set his mind to. Beadle seemed immortal in many ways and he proved it many times. He was like Superman – he was literally indestructible. He was a guy who the late Steve Evans once said “had ice water in his veins.” And Evans was right, of course. In an era of fearless and wild Funny Car drivers, Raymond Beadle was the coolest, most fearless, and perhaps wildest of them all.

The most striking thing about him was his nonchalance about nearly everything. Oh, he was aggressive – because you can’t rise to the top of any form of US Motorsport without some form of super aggression. But with Raymond, it was hard to see. With him, it was like things just….happened.  It was as if you never saw the effort he made.  Raymond was one of those people who made everything look so easy. He had huge success, in both business and in racing.  He had failures and struggles, too, but through it all he seemingly was the same even-keeled individual, at least on the surface.

Raymond’s favorite saying and answer to most everything was “no problem.” You could ask him anything, and it was always, “no problem.” Probably because there was nothing that was a problem for Raymond. Or so it seemed. Take the Blue Max Funny Car team for example. Beadle went from scraping by, driving for Don Schumacher in the early and mid-70s, to partnering with the late Harry Schmidt on the Blue Max, to somehow buying Harry out and winning the first of three NHRA championships in 1979. He had a team of three guys, Dale Emery, D. Gant, and Fred Miller, and those three guys stayed with him, pretty much through thick and thin. Those three guys and Raymond quickly became THE Funny Car team, challenging and beating the era’s dominant team of Bob Brandt and Don Prudhomme. Three straight years no less! Prudhomme never did recover, he never won another Funny Car Championship. It says everything about Prudhomme and Beadle that they were friends then, in the thick of being arch rivals, and remained friends, great friends, actually, forever. Those two guys are cut from the same cloth.

Kenny Bernstein is cut from the same cloth too, in a way. But compared to Bernstein, a fellow Texan and friend who had landed Bud in 1979, Beadle was a genius. Bernstein went through team members, trying to find the right chemistry, struggled with his own ability in the seat, and finally found success, of course, but it took an effort that you could SEE. It was all very public. With Beadle, it was just different. Beadle and the Blue Max won often, but unless you looked hard, you would never know why.

To understand the Blue Max and Beadle winning, you had to take a trip to Fabens Road in Dallas to the Blue Max Racing shop. By 1984, it was still the trio of Emery, Miller and Gant leading the way, but there were a few more guys on the team. And Blue Max World Headquarters, there was a new in-house machine shop with the best machinist in Dallas running it, and an in-house chassis shop with non other than the legendary Pat Foster building the cars. It was a modern day empire, with everything of significance done in-house, because this is how Beadle wanted it. To say Beadle was way ahead of his time is a huge understatement. Schumacher Racing, for example, only started building their own cars in the last several years. Same with Force. Beadle did it and only for a one car team!  It wasn’t done to streamline the expense sheet, it actually was a big expense. It was done only to win more races.

Beadle’s success made him a hero and even more of a character. He was a driver who people wanted to emulate. When you saw Beadle in the ‘70s and ‘80s, you were kind of in awe. I know I was. Beadle was the guy all the others wanted to be. My good friend, noted racing mechanic from that era, Butch Horn, described Beadle as being “the best of Prudhomme and ‘Jungle’ put together, if that was even possible.” It was possible, because that guy drove the Blue Max and won championships. It is true though, if you wanted to be a funny car driver, like I did, that meant you wanted to be like Raymond Beadle, like I did. Everything about the guy was just – cool. Once, in Darlington for an IHRA race, Beadle had a fairly bad fire. Really bad, actually. I don’t think anyone saw it, it wasn’t televised, so it never made decade of thrills, or the evening news, and Beadle never said much about it either. It just wasn’t his style. It was another day. It was “not a problem.” Same with the often seen infamous crash in 1982 in Gainesville. Beadle made crashing a Funny Car, and surviving without a scratch seem like just another ordinary day. “Yeah, it’s my fault,” he said. “I overdrove it. It’s no problem, we’ll just fix it and come back.”

Last year, Raymond had a severe heart attack, the first of two. To hear him tell it, though, says everything about the guy. “I was driving and luckily, right near the hospital, I had this heart attack.  So I just pulled right in and they saved me. It turned out to not be a problem, but they said I would’ve been gone had I not pulled right in.” Unbelievable. Only Beadle.

Phil Burgess, editor of National Dragster has called Prudhomme “the coolest” guy in drag racing. But being labeled cool means you aren’t – Beadle was never labeled as such. Was he cool? Did he ever get too excited? He won like he was born to win. He made money like he was born to be rich. He built a NASCAR team as a so called outsider – and then won 20 races in eight years and the Winston Cup Championship in 1989. That is huge and somewhat overlooked in the NASCAR world. I don’t think they liked it, that a drag racer came in and soundly whipped them at their own game. He never beat his chest, never really self-promoted himself in an in-your-face-way. He just did it. And he did it in that easy way of his, seemingly without even breaking a sweat.

But for all he did, I think his legacy is this: Raymond defines Funny Car racing for many of us. I think I can speak for my generation of racers, for Capps, for Worsham, for Force, too. Raymond was the guy. He was it. He was Prudhomme’s winning intensity, ‘Jungle’s’ awesomeness, and Bernstein’s business acumen, all rolled into one guy. Raymond Beadle was everything a Funny Car driver should be, and sadly, there will never be another Beadle. So many of us will miss him.   —Whit Bazemore

With his driving career winding down in 1984, Beadle won only one NHRA race while expanding into other avenues of motorsports. In 1984, Beadle expanded his growing motorsports empire in the World of Outlaws with driver Sammy Swindell. One of the more famous Raymond Beadle racing moments came during the 1981 NHRA Winternationals. During the semi-finals, the Blue Max Funny Car lost its roof. The resourceful team grafted a roof from Kenny Bernstein’s spare body onto the Blue Max Horizon. Unfortunately the team smoked the tires in the final round against Billy Meyer. In a day and age when crewmen buckle in their drivers, Beadle did his own.Beadle had a knack for spotting racing talent. One of his greatest finds was the late Tim Richmond. In 1985, Beadle broke with tradition in fielding the first red Blue Max with John Lombardo as the hired driver. Beadle was loyal to his crew and they recipricated. Longtime crewman Fred Miller once commented, ” I would have run through a wall for him.”

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