Don Schumacher Forges Ahead At Age 77, With Adjustments

Forced first by coronavirus then by a mass exodus to pivot his presence in NHRA drag racing, Don Schumacher has come full circle, in a sense.

After a driving career that produced five victories and such cutting-edge safety innovations as the Funny Car roof hatch and brake-handle-mounted fire-suppression lever, he was idle from 1974 to 1998, building Schumacher Electric. He returned to the sport to ensure that son Tony Schumacher would compete in a safe Top Fuel dragster with safe equipment (and they won the championship the next season).

On the eve of the 2022 season-opening Winternationals at Pomona, Calif., Don Schumacher has just one car and driver in the pro ranks. It’s just Don and Tony Schumacher again, although the team owner with a sport-best 366 race trophies is quick to point out that he still has Mark Pawuk and David Davies (and apparently a third driver to be named) racing in the Factory Stock Showdown class.

Don Schumacher, age 77 but thinking like a much younger tycoon, said he’s “always working on additional things. But at my age, I have decided to not be as intimately involved in any business as I was in the past. I’ll still be out there a lot. I mean, I’m still intimately involved and all of that kind of stuff. Things transpired that – it’s what it is.”

It clearly is a different spin on his usual approach to a new season. Gone are Jack Beckman and Tommy Johnson Jr., whose funding vanished after the 2020 season. Departed at the end of the 2021 season were Antron Brown and Ron Capps, who left to form their own teams. Leah Pruett married Tony Stewart, and Stewart has established a drag-racing dimension to his business sphere that accommodates her and Funny Car racer Matt Hagan.

But I will miss the one-on-one rivalry or competition. Not really rivalry or whatever you want to call it, but the competition against the John Force Funny Cars. It won’t be the same on the dragster side, as far as I’m concerned. – Don Schumacher

But Tony Schumacher is back after missing the 2019 season and spotty appearances since then, with backing from Scag Power Equipment and philanthropic couple Joe and Cathi Maynard.

So this Feb. 17-20 trip to Pomona will be much more upbeat for Don Schumacher than his previous one. At the Finals last November, his heart was playing tug-o-war with him. Longtime hire Capps duked it out with Hagan until the semifinals of the season-closer to win his second title. Yet the reality of his entire fleet leaving the once-powerful organization hit him especially hard.

“At Pomona last year, it was great winning the Funny Car championship. But the other things at that race created a finality for me, which certainly affected my emotions and I’ll leave it at that,” Schumacher said. “I’ve got the winningest organization in the history of the sport, and we’ll go from there.”

He will. But the revamping of Don Schumacher Racing has had a huge effect on other Funny Car owner-drivers.

“Don Schumacher built an empire that we all could only admire and strive to do. And maybe nobody will ever do it at that level again,” Cruz Pedregon, owner-driver of the Snap-on Dodge Charger said. “He brought so much to the sport. We’re going to miss him. In my class, he won’t be competing. Top Fuel will have a DSR car.

“When they had that four-headed monster with T.J., Beckman, Matt, and Capps, that was a pretty formidable operation and tough to beat on the track,” he said.

As a single-car team, Don and Tony Schumacher surprised everyone by winning the Top Fuel title in 1999, before going on a run of six straight titles from 2004-09. Another crown was added in 2014.

Bob Bode, who owns the Ar-Bee Ford Mustang and still races occasionally after yielding the seat to son Bobby, said the DSR label “always carried a little weight, because you were up against years of experience and money. People would say, ‘How am I going to run against four teams and they have a billion dollars?’”

And John Force surely will make a mental adjustment after years of feuding with “the other” multicar powerhouse. Schumacher knows he will when it comes to Force.

“I thoroughly enjoyed….it was always a high point for one of my Funny Cars to be running against one of John Force’s Funny Cars. But I feel that way about the J.R. Todd car and Cruz Pedregon and Bob Tasca, even though Cruz and Bob Tasca are kind of an offshoot from my operation. There’s a lot of my people that I brought in, and we accomplished a lot of great things that are now in other arenas and with other teams. I kind of look at it that way,” Schumacher said.

“But I will miss the one-on-one rivalry or competition. Not really rivalry or whatever you want to call it, but the competition against the John Force Funny Cars,” he said. “It won’t be the same on the dragster side, as far as I’m concerned.”

He hasn’t closed the door on fielding another Funny Car someday.

“I have some opportunities there but nothing that allows me to look at a full season. I choose not to think about putting together a partial season on any fuel car. It’s a very difficult way to compete at the highest level if you only run part of the season,” Schumacher said. “If I’m going to run a team, that’s going to be for the whole season or I choose not to do it any other way.

“That’s the only reason I’ve ever raced, is to win races and win championships. That’s the only reason I will be out there at Pomona and the future,” he said.

“And when it gets to the point that that isn’t what I choose to do, then I’ll turn the reins over to Megan [his daughter, who has served as vice-president of the company], and we will go from there,” Schumacher said.

Megan Schumacher indicated she feels content to keep learning about the business of drag racing that she has been exposed to since her elementary school days.

“It’s all I’ve ever really known and grown up with,” she said. “To be able to work hand in hand with Don every step of the way, and my family and our teams, it’s been an honor.”

Don Schumacher built an empire that we all could only admire and strive to do. And maybe nobody will ever do it at that level again. – Cruz Pedregon

But she said she has no idea when he might hand the reins to her.

“He has such a passion for NHRA racing, for obviously DSR, and he loves it out here. It’s one of his greatest happinesses. So he definitely does not have a timeframe in terms of stepping away in any capacity at all,” she said. “Our plan is just that we will continue to work hand-in-hand and he’ll just continue to be a great teacher for me and leader for our teams.”

She’s well aware that it takes time and experience to develop a sense of chemistry and what individuals are most likely to blend seamlessly with each other as teams are assembled. And as former DSR crew chief Dean “Guido” Antonelli said, “The team is what makes you win. You can have the best of anybody or the best three of anybody, but it doesn’t guarantee anything.”

Tony Schumacher will drive DSR's sole entry in 2022, with backing from the Maynard family and Scag Power Equipment. Photo: Don Schumacher Racing

Don Schumacher will say he isn’t Spiderman and doesn’t have those superpowers: “It’s not a spider sense, not a ‘this feels right.’ It’s my knowledge and experience of working with a lot of people in a lot of organizations over my career.” For years, before he sold the bulk of his controlling shares of Schumacher Electric, he had another 2,000 employees there. He said, “In every company, you have to make decisions and look at the people who are there and coming up and moving around and make the decision to put the right people in the right place and to do the right thing at the right time. Undoubtedly that’s some unknown ability that I seem to have been lucky with.

“I’ve been very fortunate in the decisions that I’ve made and the teams that I put together, and the people that I put together out there. We shall see what transpires,” he said.

Success undoubtedly makes working much more palatable. Tony Schumacher told Autoweek’s Mike Pryson, “My dad, he loves the business. He loves getting up every day not knowing what the day is going to hold but knowing he’s got this killer mind and a group of people who are so good at what they do that something’s going to pop up that’s going to make some more money.”

One of those fortuitous visions is DSM Precision Manufacturing, the state-of-the-art machining operation that his sprawling 150,000-square-foot race shop houses at Brownsburg, Ind. Strategic partnerships with a robust blend of industries, quality work that the company proudly touts as part of its DNA, and a special attention to customer service in just a couple short years have made this addition to his portfolio a bit of a lifesaver amid the race-team shake-up and challenging economic times.”

“That is going just great. We continue to expand in that area and bring in more machines and bring in more people and such. It’s a very vibrant part of my operation. My son-in-law, Chad Osier, is the one that’s building and running that. He’s just doing a phenomenal job,” Schumacher said.

“It was a necessity with the sport cutting back in 2020 with the number of races, and even only 20 races in 2021. We had to broaden our spectrum of business. It couldn’t just be a machine shop for race parts. So we had to expand our vision there,” he said. “And we’ve gotten into a lot of other areas of manufacturing that is really the right thing for that machine shop to do. Ultimately, when I moved in and opened the building in Brownsburg and started to expand the machine shop, my desire was to have a machine shop that took care of a lot of outside business, and there was just a little corner of it that took care of racing parts and pieces. So we’ll see if that dream that I had when I put together the machine shop in the first place, we’ll see if that can come to be in the next few years.”

Don Schumacher Manufacturing (DSM), once a primary and largely exclusive component of the race team’s success, now serves the machining needs of numerous industries.

DSM Precision Manufacturing services the aviation, defense, space, fishing, and automotive industries, all of those areas. “We’re reaching off in a lot of different areas,” he said. “That will probably continue to expand from what we’re doing today.”

But his joy remains in drag racing.

“I look forward to Pomona,” he said. “Let’s get out there and qualify.”

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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