Part II: Billy Glidden Is Racing His Way, Despite Drawbacks

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Being the son of a National Hot Rod Association legend–and a talented crew member who contributed to 85 Pro Stock victories, including 10 at the storied U.S. Nationals–has guaranteed Billy Glidden nothing in drag racing.

He has no special privileges, no elite perks. Instead, for at least a decade and a half, the winning ways–that nose-to-the-grindstone, take-a-dime-and-make-a-dollar-of-it method – dad Bob Glidden taught him by example actually penalized him.

Photo courtesy NHRA/National Dragster

Photo courtesy NHRA/National Dragster

It’s hard to believe an America that always valued and admired hard work would foster an attitude of punishing a diligent worker. But that was the nuts and bolts of Billy Glidden’s life through the 1990s until about 2005, when various race-sanctioning bodies invariably rewrote their rules specifically to curb his dominance.

Billy said he saw it as neither a badge of honor nor an aggravating money- and time-waster.

“It is what it is,” the Whiteland, Indiana said, shrugging off such speed bumps in his career. “We just weren’t able to race.

“Just the way I was brought up, I did not approach racing in a typical manner. I just raced differently than everybody else,” he said. “As people have learned in the last 18 years, if you take something a much less but make it a lot more effective–if you use 100 percent of 100 horsepower or one percent of 1,000 horsepower, which one does the best?

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“So, the way I raced, it looked like I always had some sort of a horrible, unfair advantage. It’s just the fact that I didn’t get involved with ‘who’s got the most power?’ or whatever. I was always just racing my own–I was kind of in my own world, just racing, trying to make what I had get down the racetrack as clean as I could. People I raced against back then didn’t know how to do that,” he said.

So racing’s grand practice of socialism, still at work today, turned Billy into a racing nomad of sorts for awhile.

I was always just racing my own – I was kind of in my own world, just racing, trying to make what I had get down the racetrack as clean as I could.

“I would just move on. I’d just find the next place and go there,” he said. “And then when there were people from where we just came from that were trying to run my same exact combination that were left holding the bag, then the sanction would change their rules so that person could become more involved in the competition. And eventually, in a year, or two or three years later, I’d be back there. And then it would all start up again and there would be a problem,” Billy said, recalling that he would “run just something completely different than the both of them. In 2003, I didn’t really race any organization on a consistent basis. I raced a lot of match races and different races all over the country.”

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Glidden’s 1990 Ford Mustang that put him on the racing map. This car, which he campaigned in various 10.5-inch tire classes, won numerous championships, set records all over the country, and kept rulesmakers and his competitors scratching their heads.

“Yes, it was frustrating, but it probably just made us tougher,” he conceded.

As many already knew, and the NHRA Pro Modified Series is discovering, few come tougher than Billy Glidden. With a fraction of the dollars his well-endowed competitors have and with a chassis that dates back to 2007, he is a top five driver with one victory so far this season (at Englishtown, N.J.). He fell two places in the standings at Norwalk, Ohio, but he heads to the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis, in his backyard, only 32 points off leader Bob Rahaim’s pace.

Sailing or struggling, Billy doesn’t change his cadence or his style. And while the notion of doing more with less is that something fascinates fans and the media, he surprisingly said this is no longer is a characteristic he takes particular pride in.

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Glidden’s Pro 5.0 Mustang that he won the NMRA championship and the World Ford Challenge behind the wheel of in the 2000s.

“I guess a long time ago it was. Today it’s just what we have. I don’t really think about it so much anymore,” the Whiteland, Ind., native said.

What he has is a 2000 Ford Mustang body and a 2005 Jerry Haas model chassis from long-retired Mark Pawuk.

“Everything I’ve raced since 2007 has been with this same car,” Billy said. “My small blocks will go in this car. NHRA Pro Stock 500-inch engines will go in it. Our old 500-inch Hemi will go in it. Just about anything will go in this thing. I’ve got headers and everything from most everything–it’s always this car.”

Photo courtesy NHRA/National Dragster

Photo courtesy NHRA/National Dragster

To him, it’s practical. He can’t, and doesn’t, choose to buy into the rush for new equipment that might not be necessary.

“Everybody out here racing on this level buys a new car every year or so. I don’t have the money,” he said.

Rather than lament that he doesn’t have unlimited funds, Billy bemoaned the exorbitant cost of racing, and not just in the NHRA Pro Modified class.

“Any racing, really. I’m sure you have the resources to find out how much a new, all-decked-out, run-at-the-front Cobra Jet Mustang for Stock Eliminator costs. If you want to run at the front, you’re going to spend somewhere between $150,000-$200,000. And that’s for a Stock Eliminator car,” he said.

…everybody that’s out here racing on this level buys a new car every year or so. I don’t have the money.

Pro Stock, the class that dominated his formative years, is cemented in that mentality, too, he indicated.

“Those people are spending millions. I mean, once again, when you’re talking Pro Stock, you’re talking about people who are getting millions and they’re spending millions,” he said. “There are people in Pro Modified that are. There really are. There’s a lot of people in my class spending that kind of money. We can’t compete with that.

“The people in this sport are wealthy business people, almost all of them,” he said. “There’s damn few of us who try to make ends meet doing what we are doing.”

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Shannon Glidden, shown here adjusting the wheelie bars prior to a run at the NMCA World Finals in Indianapolis, is one-half of the two-person operation behind Glidden’s Mickey Thompson Pro Modified Mustang.

Does he ever get discouraged?

“Yes. The problem my wife and I have is that I’m in my fifties, and she’s almost in her fifties, and we’ve got a whole lot of used-up junk laying around here that we could sell off but nothing anybody wants right away. And then, when you do get rid of it, you want a dollar for it and somebody’s willing to pay a quarter for it,” he said.

“We’re not going to quit what we’re doing and retire, I can tell you that,” Billy said. “We’ll be mowing yards or standing on the street corner or something, because this just isn’t a money-making adventure. It’s just what I grew up with and what I knew. We’re making just enough–just enough…almost–to pay our bills and not have to deal with a 9-to-5 job or bosses when we’re here in our shop.”

DSC_3298The freedom appeals to him.

“It’s just us. So we don’t have to deal with anyone else–no employees, no bosses, not even many visitors, because we don’t have commerce going through here. We don’t have any customers.  We don’t do anything commercially. This is just our personal outfit—this shop is basically our house,” he said.

We’re not going to quit what we’re doing and retire, I can tell you that. We’ll be mowing yards or standing on the street corner or something, because this just isn’t a money-making adventure, what we’re doing.

Billy is plenty smart enough to generate income by building engines. However, he has been there, hated that.

“I don’t have time,” he said. “I did, once upon a time, in the late ’90s, early 2000s. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of knowledge at a racetrack. You give somebody something that really is your heart and soul and they’ll take it out and can’t find their way down a racetrack with it, and it’s your engine that you built. Or, they go out there and they do something silly with it and break it.”

He stopped supplying engines, quit cold turkey.

“I’m not a ruthless business person,” Billy said, “so people were taking advantage of me–and I was allowing it to happen. That wasn’t a very good adventure at the time, so I quit doing it, just cut it off, right now–told everybody, ‘This is it. I’m done. Go somewhere else.'”

DSC_3307That direct, no-nonsense approach is the only way Glidden knows how to behave. It’s how he is at the racetrack; if he’s there, he wants to devote all his attention to winning the event.

“That is our approach. That is what we do,” he said. “We have lots of people we talk to, and we have been fortunate to earn the respect of our peers. But we don’t really make it a habit to venture out. Plus, we don’t have time. Because you lose focus on what you should be doing, anyway. We go to the track with the intention of representing ourselves and Mickey Thompson in the best possible way. That’s the way we go about it. That’s our life,” he said.

Life is sensible and sane for Billy, whose parents, Bob and Etta, live on the same parcel of land, while Shannon’s parents live within seven miles of the shop. Family is close, physically and figuratively, but Bob has his own busy life and Etta, who could turn a mean wrench in her day, swore off automotive tools in the 1990s. They all have their friendly but brief encounters.

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10-time NHRA Pro Stock world champion Bob Glidden. In the early 2000’s, the elder Glidden drove his son’s nitrous-equipped 1990 Mustang in select events before returning to Pro Stock years later. Today, the drag racing legend has golf, pets, and wife Etta to keep him busy.

“I’ll walk over there in a little while and check on the house and if Mom’s there say hello and make sure she’s doing okay. Later today I’ll walk over there again and say hey to both of them,” Billy said. “We’ll stop in there a lot of times when we’re going home at night, whenever that might be, just to check on them and say hello. It’s not like we go over there and hang out for a long time. But we’ll go over there multiple times a week when we’re home and say hello. Sometimes days pass when I don’t see or speak to either one of them, other than maybe if I’m out riding around, I will wave across the field. But we’re close with both sets of parents.”

DSC_2134He got a kick out of his 71-year-old father’s high-octane golf game and his zest to keep busy. “He likes to take on big projects. When he goes after something, he goes full tilt,” Billy said.

Moreover, that’s how he wants his father to stay, active on his own and not necessarily involved in his Pro Mod operation. It’s not a knock on his racing-icon dad. It’s just the pragmatic way to preserve their congenial relationship.

“Dad has three dogs, four birds, a cat, Mom, and golf, so he’s already pretty busy,” he said. “Mom stopped doing the wrenching stuff early ’90s. She just said, ‘I’m done with this’ and she got away from it. She doesn’t want anything to do with wrenches or coming over here to the shop.”

I like the fact he’s my dad. And you know dang well either I’m going to be doing something he thinks should be done differently or he’s going to be doing something that I didn’t want done that way.

Billy knows that “every now and then, dad gets a thought that he wants to help out if he can. And the problem that I have is when you’ve got a normal routine and you just throw some new variance in the middle of it, it screws up your whole routine. He offers every now and then, and I tell him thank you. If I got to where I had to have help, he would do it. But I’d like for him to stay retired and do things the way he wants to do them.

“I like the fact he’s my dad,” Billy said. “And you know dang well either I’m going to be doing something he thinks should be done differently or he’s going to be doing something that I didn’t want done that way. And I don’t want to have that as a probability to create any friction, so I do my best to keep the operation just my wife and I.”

He races in the NHRA Pro Mod Series because “that’s what Mickey Thompson wants, and that’s where they want to showcase the brand: NHRA. We could race an NHRA sportsman class of some sort or we could race NHRA Pro Mod.

DSC_9615“About four years ago, the folks at Mickey Thompson decided, ‘in three years, we want you to race in NHRA, so you need to start racing in places where you can make that happen.’ So we had to start racing where we could get grade points. We started racing NMCA Pro Street so we could get grade points to be able to race Pro Mod as well as start building a platform of just exactly what we needed to do to be competitive in Pro Mod,” Billy said.

“It’s a bonus that we’re able to race NHRA Pro Mod as competitive as we are. We’re just fortunate that we’ve had good luck and some good people to help us along. There are a lot of people in the background that help us out because they know our situation.”

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And what will his next situation be? Billy said he hasn’t thought that far ahead, that he’s “just trying to help move Mickey Thompson in a good direction with products – all products, not just race tires, whether it’s race wheels, street tires, street wheels, over-the-road or off-road–whatever we can do to help promote and grow and make Mickey Thompson products better, that’s what our goal is.”

For his efforts, he already is a legend at Mickey Thompson Tires. But on the racetrack he still gets no special favors. He has to work hard to earn them, and he does.

About the author

Susan Wade

Celebrating her 45th year in sports journalism, Susan Wade has emerged as one of the leading drag-racing writers with 20 seasons at the racetrack. She was the first non-NASCAR recipient of the prestigious Russ Catlin Award and has covered the sport for the Chicago Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger, St. Petersburg Times, and Seattle Times. Growing up in Indianapolis, motorsports is part of her DNA. She contributes to Power Automedia as a freelancer writer.
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