Mr. Dirt didn’t invent the practice of renting a race car; he just made it fashionable.
For obvious reasons, Mr. Dirt prefers to keep his true identity unlisted, but it can be revealed with a reasonable amount of detective work. He prefers to have a race car he doesn’t have to do anything to but put in gas, and even then, with the option to return it on empty – he can just run off of a pre-paid amount. He simply rents them and returns them after he’d picked up a fair amount of loot in the process.
“I’d get a rental car and go race at Atco on Friday night, go race at Maple Grove on Saturday night, and then go work at Englishtown on Sunday, and then fly back home on Monday,” Dirt said. “Turns out if you use the exact same rental car every weekend to race, it’s not too different than having one sitting in your driveway. So over a period of about eighteen years, I ended up with 113 career eliminator wins. About 50 of those came from rental cars. Five national event wins in a rental car too.”
Dirt has taken a sabbatical from rent-a-racer competition, but as recently as 2018, he took home a win in NMRA competition. He likes to downplay his achievements, citing, “Anybody is one important part. Anything is the second important part.”
Dirt provides a solid example.
“I have witnessed a person named Nick Brem go triple 0 on a Zamboni,” Dirt revealed. “Zamboni actually makes an asphalt cleaner, right? Like they do for the ice rinks. I witnessed a guy go triple 0 on a Zamboni, which means he can win. I can sit here and boast about winning races with rental cars. I know tons of other people that have won with rental cars.”
Dirt isn’t the only racer with a rental car to win a national event drag race.
“A guy named Ed O’Reilly did it,” Dirt said. “He’s located out of Toledo, Ohio. Ed was an IHRA announcer and, at one time, the voice of the IHRA. I think very highly of announcers who actually go out and race because it’d be like a baseball announcer who’s never played baseball. It just doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me because, as we just pointed out, because everybody can go do this. Even if you only do it twice, just go do it and understand what it’s like.
O’Reilly won the 1979 IHRA Winter Nationals in Darlington, SC, behind the wheel of a Chrysler K-car station wagon while racing the Pure Stock division.
“Now, what happens when you win a national event in stock eliminator?” Dirt asked. “What happens immediately after that? Tear down. And since Stock Eliminator is a legal class, which means it has very, very strict rules. You’re not torn down in Super Gas, although they do look for illegal equipment and stuff. But in Stock Eliminator, the engine has to be stock, and that means you’ve got to pull a head. And that means you’ve got to take off the manifold, and he did.”
Dirt said O’Reilly left the car sitting in the pits overnight and went to a local auto parts car first thing in the morning to purchase gaskets to replace the ones destroyed by pulling the cylinder head.
“He ran them out to the racetrack, put the new gaskets in it, put it together and drove it back to the airport, turned it in and went home with his trophy.”
While those companies which rent cars frown on the idea of their vehicles running up and down the track, unofficially, one of the companies openly rented the Shelby GT-500H with the reasonable assumption these high-performance vehicles would end up being raced.
“People rented those things all the time,” Dirt explained. “That’s why the program didn’t last very long.”
Dirt confessed his choice of vehicle was about as far as you could get from the Shelby GT-500H.
“I liked the Mercury Sables for a long time,” Dirt admitted. “I liked the Northstar Cadillacs for a long time. I liked Chevy Corsicas for a long time. You were in the same car every year.
“You find a good working combination. Yeah, you can get a bad one every once in a while. Nowadays, you have to look really hard. I mean this literally. You have to really look, do some research and search for a car that doesn’t have enough power to spin the tires. In the ’80s and ’90s, none of them had enough power to spin the tires. So they were really good bracket cars, especially with the front-wheel-drive cars, I should say, which because the weight transfer problem and the fact that the rental car companies used rock hard tires.
“They use taxi cab tires that last 200,000 miles, so they don’t have to change tires, so they’re hard as rocks. So they spin easily. They just didn’t have enough power.”
While Dirt is unsure when his next race will be, he is adamant he will be looking for something different than in the past.
“An electric car,” Dirt said. “Just go rent a Tesla or something like that. They run 11.50s right off the bat, and they can’t spin the tires. There’s people murdering the bracket world right now in electric cars if you don’t already know it. I mean at big money bracket races. Yeah. You don’t need to mess with the inherent problems of an internal combustion engine anymore. Just rent a damn Tesla or whatever you can find.
“You can rent them for the exact same amount it costs to rent any other car, which, don’t get me wrong, isn’t cheap nowadays. But you can get them anywhere. But when you get into the Tesla S and stuff like that, those are nine-second cars. And not 990s either. Those cars go deep in the nines, like 9.30s at 150 miles an hour.”
And once you get them, as Dirt advises, always get the insurance … you never know what might happen on the way to watch the drag races.
