Nobody has a resume like Ray Drew's. He was a crewman on a championship team as a teenager, co-owned a race track, served on the board of a sanctioning body, and now owns, tunes, and drives one of the fastest Alcohol Funny Cars in the country.
Drew, Treasurer of the Pro Sportsman Association, an organization dedicated to promoting Top Alcohol Dragster and Funny Car racing, has come a long way since the early 1980s, when he twisted wrenches for no-nonsense Fred Mandoline, whose longstanding zero-tolerance policy on dragstrip dumbassery is legendary. And let's just say Fred's never concerned himself with how everybody else does things.
In 1983, Mandoline, the only driver to win an Alcohol Funny Car title with Chevy power, swept three consecutive national events - the Sportsnationals, Springnationals, and Summernationals, beating Frank Manzo himself in the Springnationals and Summernationals finals - and won the championship when he was just 34 years old. Drew was only 19.
"Fred would go through crewpeople left and right because of his, uh, demeanor," Drew says. "He learned everything from trial and erro. He's a very smart guy, and it didn't take him long to learn what worked and what didn't. He'd go to a race with three different cylinder-head combinations, and he wasn't afraid to try them all. I'd show at the shop to go to a race, and the only things in the engine would be the cam and the crank. We'd assemble everything, then start driving. You could say that I was mentally abused at an early age, but I absolutely learned a ton. Sometimes it was just him and I running the car, and it gave me the desire to do it myself one day."
Today, Drew drives one top cars in the class, one that put down back-to-back-to-back runs of 5.54, 5.55, and 5.53 two weeks ago at the 4-Wide Nationals in Charlotte. With three final-round appearances in Lucas Oil Series competition, he's probably one of the more overdue drivers in the Top Alcohol Funny Car.
Long before he was contending for NHRA event titles, Drew was crewing, driving, and organizing UDRA events across the Midwest. "I basically grew up match racing, and we ran all over the place - Norwalk, Ohio; Martin, Mich; Xenia, Ohio; Detroit Dragway; Quaker City; Cordova, Ill; Morocco, Ind; - even some eighth-mile tracks," says Drew, who also worked with driver Randy Henning, who eventually let him drive.
"I made my first runs in Randy's car in the fall of 1991 at the Grove," Drew says, referring to Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wis. From 1994 to 2008 he was a co-owner of the track, and that decade and a half of experience has been invaluable in his current role with the Pro Sportsman Association. "I understand what it takes to run a track, but I know what it's like to be a racer, too."
As a racer, Drew competed on the UDRA circuit, then moved up to IHRA competition, and then, four years ago, to NHRA. "Everything I've ever run - UDRA, IHRA, NHRA - was competitive," he says. "In the IHRA days, Mark Thomas was the top dog and Dale Brand was right there. Wherever you go, there's always somebody you're chasing, somebody everyone is trying to beat."
Now, of course, that's Manzo. But Drew doesn't have to go to NHRA national events to find tough competition. Under NHRA's new regional format for Top Alcohol Dragster and Top Alcohol Funny Car, he's smack in the middle of the Midwest region, one of the toughest in the country.
"Nationally, I don't really have specific goals," says Drew, who will be one of the favorites at this weekend's Midwest Regional opener at Lucas Oil Raceway in Indianapolis. "I just want to be competitive. Within the region, I'd like to be in the top one or two. It'll be tough. Mickey Ferro's running this region this year. Manzo will be at some of them. Andy Bohl stepped up, Cassie Simonton stepped up, and Fred Hagen is really fast. I've been working on this thing for four years, sorting it all out. It's taken awhile, but I think we can run with the best of them now. I really enjoy the mechanical side of things, making the car fast. It's every bit as challenging as driving."
When he's not racing, Drew is consumed by his business, KW Manufacturing, a metal-fabrication and CNC shop in suburban Milwaukee that builds products for machinery and automation equipment. "I'm there all week, every Saturday, and a lot of Sundays," he says. "I'm driven to be successful. In business, things take longer than they do in racing, where you get instant gratification. In business, it takes six months to a year to get where you want to be. In drag racing, it takes five seconds."
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