No opinion today; I just want to share something with everyone, something that I found humorous, entertaining and above all, pretty cool.

As everyone knows by now, I spent 11 years racing through the deserts of Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado and Mexico with my best friend, Dan Beaver, of Parker, in a Ford Tough Truck in Class 8 in the SCORE Championship Series.

After we won our second race together, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Dan, not as friend to friend, but as sportswriter to driver, and conduct an interview about his racing career and stuff like that. And the other day, I found the notes from that interview.

During the course of that interview, when I was asking about Dan’s early days in the sport, and who had the most influence on him, and all that sort of thing, and he brought up the legendary Mickey Thompson.

I knew Dan and Mickey were friends because I’d see them greet one another and talk and carry on at several racing events early in the mid to late 1980s.

And I did know that Dan and another racing legend, Bill Stroppe, were friends and had spent a great deal of time together and that Stroppe had been Dan’s co-rider and mentor in his early years.

But but I never knew that Dan had spent time pre-running the Parker 400 with Mickey.

Anyway, Dan shared this memory of Mickey Thompson:

“I remember we were driving down the Bouse Road in my old prerunner, and I must have been doing about a hundred miles per hour, driving the living hell out of it, trying to impress him, if you know what I mean.

“Mickey never quit talking, and all at once he asks me, ‘Are you the greatest race car driver there ever was?’

“And I said, ‘No I don’t think so.’

“He said, ‘Bullshit!’

“Then he says, ‘You’re looking at the best there ever was, son. I don’t care if it’s an off-road car, an Indy car, a sprint car, a NASCAR.’

“He says, ‘Nobody, can drive a car better than I can, and I can beat anybody in the world.’

“And he looked at me, and he says, ‘When you get that attitude, and that frame of mind, you will win.’

“And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Me?’

“It took a while, but the story sunk in. Now, I honestly believe that when I strap that brain bucket on, I’ll tell you what, when I get that attitude, I don’t believe anybody can beat me. And it works.

“That year I lost to Walker (Evans) by about a minute and six seconds. When I started the last lap, I was nine minutes behind. And I got it all back but the last one minute and six seconds.

“Mickey had me sky high before that race. I was walking around feeling like Superman’s gorilla. And I drove the livin’ hell out of that truck.

“Bill Stroppe taught me a lot. Mickey taught me a lot. Stroppe taught me more about driving technique; and being smart.

“Mickey taught me more about how to use my head, psychologically so to speak, how to get my mind ready for a race. And he did teach me a lot too about different angles of attack on ditches and ruts and things like that, to actually save the car, so it didn’t work as hard. He would make me turn around and make me go back over something.

“But he worked on my mind really hard, Mickey did. He taught me a lot of the psychological part of driving, and I never forgot those lessons; they were very valuable.

“I used them a lot, I still do.”

I can attest to the fact that all those lessons must have sunk in, because, in this writer’s opinion, although Dan may not have a shelf full of trophies to show for his efforts, whenever he was behind the wheel of a race truck, he was one of the best there ever was; he could go wheel-to-wheel with Walker Evans, Ivan Stewart, Dave Shoppe, Larry Ragland, Scoop Vessels, all of the big boys back in the day, and give them all a run for their money.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Up To Speed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.