Sammy! 50+ Years of Winning, The Story of Sammy Swindell

Sammy Swindell is one of those drivers who has been so successful that his name has become synonymous with the winged sprint cars that he's driven for over 50 years. But over the course of that amazing career, he also raced NASCAR and Indy cars. In his new book, Sammy! 50+ Years of Winning, The Story of Sammy Swindell, you can hear all about his fantastic career as one of the hardest working and most enduring figures in the history of racing. Co-written by Bones Bourcier and Museum of American Speed historian Bob Mays, the book is over 350 pages of amazing stories from the man himself. With Bob's permission, we've excerpted a few pages below to give you a taste of what's inside:

A few minutes later, a guy came down the aisle and sat down in the seat next to me. Not across the aisle, not with an empty seat between us, but right next to me. That was how I got to know Raymond Beadle.

At that time, Raymond was a huge name in drag racing. He was the NHRA Funny Car champion in 1979, ’80 and ’81. Most of the top drag guys had nicknames for themselves and their cars; Don Prudhomme and Tom McEwen were the Snake and the Mongoose and Don Garlits was Big Daddy. Beadle’s car, the Blue Max, was definitely one of the best-known Funny Cars.

We had actually met before, but only briefly. Raymond was based in Dallas and sometimes he’d come out to watch the races at Devil’s Bowl; he even sponsored Bobby Marshall and a couple of other guys. In addition to his racing, Beadle owned the Chaparral Trailer Company, which built some of the first really nice enclosed trailers for race teams and LaVern Nance had what was, I believe, the first Chaparral trailer in sprint car racing.

So I had talked with Raymond once or twice and he knew who I was; don’t forget, I had just won my second World of Outlaws championship in a row. But we were basically strangers. Now, because of our random seat assignments, we were two guys sitting side by side, one thing in common: racing.

This was in the period when Raymond was putting together the deal to start his own NASCAR team. He bought an existing Cup team from M.C. Anderson, hired Tim Richmond to drive for him and ended up having a lot of success. But he told me that he was thinking about starting a sprint car team, too.

I knew a good opportunity when I saw one. I said, “Hey, I can do the sprint car part.”

I also mentioned that I would love to have a chance to race a stock car, if that opportunity ever came up. But it was the sprint car thing that really seemed to grab his attention. I think he liked the idea that he could do something right off the bat with a proven champion. That’s a pretty good way to start a new team, no matter what type of racing you’re thinking about.

We didn’t actually finalize a deal; it’s hard to get that much accomplished on one flight. But we did discuss what each of us had in terms of equipment and Raymond talked a lot about engines, like any drag racer would. He had a guy named Bob Westphal working for him; a few years down the road, Bob opened his own shop – Wesmar Racing Engines – and became one of the top builders in sprint car racing. But at the time Raymond and I first talked, Bob was building Funny Car engines and he’d done a sprint car engine or two for Bobby Marshall.

Like I said, my arrangement with Nance hadn’t totally fallen apart yet, so I was thinking that we’d just plug Westphal’s engines into Nance-built cars. But Raymond mentioned that he knew C.K. Spurlock, who owned the Gambler Chassis Company, so that was a possibility, too. Gambler had been around for a couple of years by then; I hadn’t run one of their cars, but they had won races with Steve Kinser, Danny Smith and other guys.

By the time we got off that plane, we had, at the very least, the start of something that could be really good. Raymond had been thinking about sprint cars and already he’d found a driver. From my side, he was a car owner who had chassis and engine connections and who also knew how to find sponsors.

We shook hands and said we’d stay in touch and we did. And in the course of the next few weeks, we put together a blueprint for a brand-new sprint car team."

Here’s another thing most people wouldn’t know: At Nance’s, my car had been #1n and Beadle’s sprint car was #1 and I spent most of my sprint car career carrying some form of that number. But that wasn’t a plan on my part, or me trying to make any kind of statement, like “I’m number one.” It just so happened that in NHRA drag racing, the class champion got to carry the #1 the following year and Raymond had won enough championships that he’d just gotten used to that number. So when we put our deal together for 1983 and it came time to decide what number we were going to run, Raymond made the decision: Our car would be the Old Milwaukee #1, red with gold numbers. That worked out fine for Raymond, because every so often he’d come to the sprint car races with his buddies – guys he knew from drag racing, business partners, whoever – and he could show them that his car was #1.

The Gambler chassis thing was fine, too. Kenny Jenkins, who had been at Nance, moved to Tennessee to oversee things at Gambler – their shop was in Hendersonville, outside Nashville – and both Kenny and C.K. Spurlock were okay with me making small changes to their design for the cars they built for Beadle. I wasn’t as involved in that process as I had been with Nance; instead of putting together my own cars, I just talked with Kenny and those guys about what I wanted built into my cars.

We ended up with Gambler cars that had a few Swindell tweaks. I liked the idea of having something that was kind of exclusive, at least for a while. If it turned out to be better, I’d have an advantage until the other customer teams bought new cars just like mine. By that point, hopefully, I’d be on to whatever my next idea was.

It was pretty smart on Spurlock’s part, too. I had won two championships with another chassis brand, so I’m sure he figured that I knew what I was doing. He and Kenny understood that I wasn’t asking for changes just to be different. I was doing these things to make my cars better. And if I was out there winning with a new Gambler team – a new Gambler team with a pretty high profile – that could only help their company.

And we definitely did some winning with Gambler cars in 1983. In Raymond’s car, I won 26 features and they were all over the country. With the World of Outlaws, we won twice in Houston, twice at Lernerville, twice at Knoxville and twice at Fremont, California, near San Francisco. We also won WoO races at I-70, Williams Grove, Lakeside Speedway in Kansas City, Huset’s Speedway in South Dakota, Bloomington Speedway in Indiana and Santa Maria, California, north of Santa Barbara.

In our spare time, we won several non-sanctioned races. Some were close to the shop at Devil’s Bowl and three were at West Memphis. One was up at Flemington, New Jersey, a famous modified track, where we also set a new track record. But maybe the coolest of those non-sanctioned wins was the one that probably paid the least: I got $1,200 for beating Brad Doty and my brother, Jeff, in a Friday-night show at Greenville, Mississippi, where I’d won my first “B” car feature in 1971.

At the end of June, we got a little bit behind with our engine inventory, so I ended up driving the Gambler house car, the yellow #18, in seven or eight races. Wolfgang had been in that car, but they’d had some issues and Doug quit for a while. Anyway, the first night I ever sat in that car, at Wichita in June, we won a World of Outlaws feature. A week later, we won two more when we swept a doubleheader at Fargo.

But the really big deal was the Knoxville Nationals. By then, that event was huge. When I first went there in 1974, the Nationals was a three-night race. By 1983, there were qualifying nights on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to set everybody up for Saturday.

The Nationals had changed in other ways, too. There were more corporate sponsors coming in; I had helped to lead that trend with Federal Express and now with Old Milwaukee. Everything was just more professional. Open Wheel magazine, which was the first national magazine to really focus on sprint cars, was a few years old by then, so more people than ever were aware of the Knoxville Nationals and wanting to be part it. Knoxville didn’t have its big backstretch grandstand yet in 1983, but the front stretch seats and the infield were jammed.

For the races, it was the biggest deal of the year and it stayed that way. It didn’t matter that occasionally there’d be another race that paid as much, or even more. You still wanted to win the Knoxville Nationals.

I had always ran well at Knoxville and I’d even won there at different times of the year, yet come August I’d have problems at the Nationals. But I was never stressed about not having won it. Back then, my thinking was that the Nationals – like all these big races – would come to us sooner or later.

In ’83 we finally put it all together and won it.

It was strange, but that week was the opposite of my usual Nationals. Most years, things would go okay for me in the preliminaries and then Saturday would be unlucky. This time, our qualifying night was my big problem. I was supposed to start on the pole in the Wednesday feature, but they black-flagged me for jumping the initial green flag – I still don’t agree with that – and made me start from the tail. I came through the field and finished third, behind Steve Kinser and Wolfgang, who was back in the Gambler #18. It was a great run, but because the Nationals A-Main is lined up by points you earn on your preliminary nights, that black flag really hurt.

If I had won that Wednesday race, I’d have been on the front row Saturday night. Instead I lined up outside the second row, next to Wolfgang. Tim Green from Northern California had the pole, with Kinser beside him, just ahead of me. Tough group.

Steve took off and led for a while, but I could reel him in. His engine was blowing a lot of smoke, so I ran him as hard as I could. I passed him once with a slide job into turn one, but I lost momentum getting back to the top and he got back around me. That cost me some ground, but in another few laps I was right back on him. I slid him again into turn three and that was that.

I won by a good margin over Wolfgang and Ron Shuman.

I was happy, but I didn’t jump around and go crazy just because I’d finally won the Knoxville Nationals. It was more a feeling of relief. Like I said, I’d honestly felt like the odds were in my favor and that I was going to win it at some point.

As it turned out, I’ve only done it that one time. We ran good enough at the Nationals in different years that I could have – even should have – won it a few more times, but I didn’t. That’s just the way things went. Sometimes I had bad luck and sometimes we just got beat. I’ve had some seconds and thirds in that Saturday-night A-main, but just that one victory.

But I don’t measure myself by my record in the Knoxville Nationals. The way I see it, Mario Andretti only won the Indy 500 once and Dale Earnhardt only won the Daytona 500 once and that doesn’t diminish the impact those guys had on the sport."