Almost Outta Control

by Carol Davis

When Richard Griffin maneuvers his high-powered car around a dirt race track, he doesn’t hear the roaring engines or see the dust kicked up by the cars ahead. “I actually don’t hear the noise,” he says. “I block it out, I guess.”

His sights are set on something else: victory. And Griffin certainly has seen plenty of that, as a four-time champion of the Sprint Car Racing Association.

Griffin, 39, of Silver City, N.M., is a leader in a motor sport that features small, lightweight, high-powered cars with a single seat behind the engine. “The cars are very fast, very quick-acting, which is why they are called sprint cars,” Griffin says. “It’s a short race, like a sprint.”

Distance varies, Griffin says, but most sprint races total 30 to 40 laps around an oval track (either 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile in length), with about 22 cars competing. Some go up to 50 laps, but that’s about the maximum, he says. “It’s hard to go 50 laps on a tank of fuel,” he says.

Unlike some car competitions, sprint racing, which typically occurs on dirt tracks, doesn’t have pit stops. “Because the races are so short, there’s no way to do it and ever make up any time,” Griffin explains.

Indeed, some races last just minutes. But those few minutes are nearly as exciting for spectators as for drivers, Griffin says. Sprint cars are very lightweight (about 1,200 pounds) yet the engines produce up to 800 horsepower, giving them among the highest power-to-weight ratios of any motor sport vehicle, he says.

“So a lot of what makes them accelerate as fast as they do, and because they accelerate that fast, drivers are almost out of control,” Griffin says. “The cars don’t always go where (spectators) think they’re going to go.”

Driving is much more than simply steering around the track, Griffin explains. Drivers must manage the power of their car. “You steer more with the horsepower of the engine,” he says.

“It’s very exciting, and even though they’re on dirt, they do wheelies because there’s so much horsepower, and they’re accelerating that fast,” he says.

Though the small cars possess powerful engines, they are lightweight, and therefore more fragile than other race vehicles, so drivers generally avoid bumping into each other, Griffin says.

Sprint cars are open-wheeled cars, which means they have no fenders, Griffin says. “If the tires themselves touch one another, one of them is going to lift, and that is what causes them to turn over,” he says. “So there’s not a lot of bumping and banking, because typically it ends with somebody upside down.”

In the beginning

Griffin’s racing career began as a hobby in an old Dodge Dart stock car when he was 15. The car was a safer alternative than the motorcycles Griffin initially was drawn to, so his parents encouraged him to drive stock cars. It also was a family affair. “My dad raced, too, but just for fun,” Griffin says.

Griffin discovered sprint cars when a race was held at a Las Cruces, N.M., track the same night he won a stock car race. “Naturally, the next thing is to move up a notch,” Griffin says.

He was just 17 when he won a sprint car championship, and has become a sought-after driver since. “There were people who had (sprint) cars, but nobody to drive them, and they were looking for drivers,” he says. “I just kept working my way up the ladder.”

Now, he’s acquired the nickname, “The Gasman,” and drives primarily for one individual, Ron Chaffin, a California businessman. “I drive for one particular person 99 percent of the time, but if something happens and there is an open weekend, and I want to go drive for someone else, I can,” he says. “But my agreement (with the car owner) is that I’ll drive for him in all those races.”

The arrangement is a plus for Griffin, who owns a propane business in Silver City. “I’m really fortunate that I don’t own a race car or have to work on it. I just drive it,” he says.

Griffin usually drives in 50 races each year, which means that his weekends from the end of February through mid-November primarily are spent behind the wheel. He leaves home Saturday in his self-piloted airplane, and returns to Silver City on Sunday.

Like NASCAR, sprint car drivers belong to a particular association (Griffin is a member of the Sprint Car Racing Association) and accumulate points with each race. The year’s champion is determined by those points.

“The SCRA has a schedule they put out at the beginning of each year that you can follow if you want to try to win the championship with SCRA,” Griffin says. “It’s hard to win a championship if you don’t make all the races.”

Sprint cars are raced two ways: Winged and non-winged. “The chassis, tires, and engine are similar,” Griffin says. “But when you put a wing on one, it holds it down on the ground and puts pressure on the car and makes the tires get a better grip on the track and stabilizes the car so they don’t turn over as bad.”

Winged cars accelerate faster, but wings also create drag, requiring more horsepower during the race, he says.

Griffin has raced winged sprint cars, but opted for non-winged because they’re more dominant in the Southern California region where he usually races.

True competition

Ken Urton has viewed sprint car racing’s growing popularity from a unique vantage point; he waved the starting and checkered flags for more than 35 years before retiring about eight years ago.

“The non-wing type is like the last testament of real racing as it used to be,” says Urton, 71, of Rocklin, Calif., who raced in his early 20s.

Sprint car racing is unique, and therefore more exciting to watch, Urton says. “Spectators are close to the cars and they can see the drivers, as opposed to stock car racing, where the tracks are big and the cars are closed,” he says.

A driver’s skills also are tested more in sprint cars, he says. “Years ago, all the race cars were about the same . . . speeds were quite lower and the races at Indianapolis were really exciting,” Urton says. “Then engineers came along and fixed the car better and the driver became less important, and therefore you don’t have competition between individuals.”

“In sprint car racing, Richard Griffin is competing against other individuals, and all of the cars are just about the same,” he says.

One of Griffin’s competitors is Urton’s son, Kevin, 44, who has earned several sprint car championships. “He’s turned out to be a far better racer than I was,” Urton notes.

Though he’s retired from the track, Urton remains a huge fan of racing, and the racers. “They are the greatest collection of free-thinking individuals that you’ll ever run across. They have a tremendous sense of humor about their racing and things that happen.”

Indeed, despite crashes, a broken back, and losing a championship by a single point in the last turn of the last lap of the season’s last race, Griffin still won’t put the brakes on his remarkable sprint car career. At least, not yet.

“I don’t have much else to really prove,” he says. “But today, when I go to races, I love to go and just have fun.”

Carol Davis is a Nashville, Tenn., freelance writer.

first appeared: 8/3/2003