That’s ‘Motorsports Hall of Fame Member Larry Dixon’ To You . .
By Susan Wade
Three-time NHRA Top Fuel champion Larry Dixon hasn’t raced fulltime since 2015. The sanctioning body has lifted its indefinite suspension of Dixon, and he has renewed his Top Fuel license.
Dixon indicated this week that he doesn’t have any sponsorship deals in the works for 2021, but if and when he does return to competition, it will be as a member of the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America.
Dixon learned of his selection Dec. 31 via a congratulatory letter from Motorsports Hall of Fame of America President George Levy.
“You are now a member of what is probably the most elite and distinguished group ever assembled in American motorsports history,” Levy wrote.
“It’s quite an honor. I don’t have a lot of words for it yet, because it hasn’t quite all sunk in,” Dixon said. “It’s very humbling, and I’m very flattered. I didn’t even know I could be or was in the running for it. So it really caught me by surprise. I’m very proud but still humbled and flattered by the nomination. Those are the words that keep coming back to me, because it’s a bit of a shock, I guess.
“I was told there are only 30-some drag racers in the Hall, and I could probably think of 30 that would be on my hero list that aren’t in the hall. So that is humbling for me,” he said.
Levy said the Hall will announce the full list of 2021 inductees sometime this month. Out of respect for the Hall and the other honorees, Dixon kept the names of his Class of 2021 colleagues a secret. However, he said, “I’m really proud of the class I’m with.”
The plan is to honor the 2020 class this March 15-16 in a pandemic-postponed ceremony at Daytona Beach, Fla., and to celebrate the 2021 class September 29 at M1 Concourse at Pontiac, Mich. The day before, Dixon will unveil a statue bearing his likeness that eventually will be on permanent display at the Hall of Fame Museum at Daytona Beach.
“I’ve been to Daytona: took the tour, went to the museum, and made a lap around the track in the tour bus. I’m a motorsports fan, and certainly to end up down there for this, of course,” Dixon, 54, of suburban Indianapolis, said. “We try to go to Florida a couple of times a year, just to thaw out. So that’ll give us just another excuse to go to Florida.”
Dixon was elected to the prestigious body by virtue of his 62 victories that make him second only in the Top Fuel class to 82-time winner Tony Schumacher. Those 62 “Wally” trophies put him fifth among all pro NHRA racers and 10th overall in the series’ 70-year history.
Dixon earned back-to-back championships in 2002 and 2003 and again in 2010. He is one of six to claim three crowns, sharing the distinction with legends Don Garlits and Shirley Muldowney, Gary Scelzi, Antron Brown, and current Top Fuel king Steve Torrence.
On his way to his second title, he swept the grueling Western Swing through Denver, Seattle, and Sonoma, Calif., that features consecutive races in three far-flung venues with wildly different conditions. And to date, Dixon has 678 elimination round-wins, 10th among all NHRA drivers ever. Since he was named the NHRA’s rookie of the year in 1995, Dixon has driven for team owners Don “The Snake” Prudhomme, Alan Johnson, the Dote Family, and Australia’s Rapisarda Autosport International, in addition to himself.
News of his selection, Dixon said, “hasn’t taken over my life because we took off this [past] weekend. I might be a soon-to-be Hall of Famer, but I’m still a dad, so we were scouting colleges.” Daughter Alanna is planning to be an oncologist, and the family most recently visited Notre Dame and the University of Michigan as she goes through a selection process of her own, preparing to embark on a pre-med course of study.
“She’s very driven. I’m really excited to see how she cuts through life,” Dixon said. He and Ali also are parents to sons Donovan, an Ivy Tech student, and Luke, who will enter high school this year.
With family matters to attend to, including of support as his wife as she undergoes treatments following breast cancer surgery this past summer, Dixon hasn’t been focused much on his latest achievement. But been he said he’s certain of one thing: it would be hard to separate himself from the sport he has been immersed in for more than five decades.
“I don’t know what my life would be like without drag racing. My dad raced. So as far back as I can remember, we were always going to the drag races. That’s just part of my life. I don’t really know a life without it. I think I’ve literally spent every year of my life at a dragstrip, at some point every year,” Dixon said. “It’d be strange to not have drag racing. I met my wife out there. We have kids. I don’t know what my life would be like without it.”
Like probably any other endeavor in life for anybody else, drag racing has been a blend of blessings and blemishes for Dixon.
He has won an NHRA Top Fuel championship by a whopping 330 points over his closest rival (2003 ahead of Doug Kalitta) and lost another by merely two points (2009 to Tony Schumacher).
Dixon has soared in the standings and literally soared as high as the scoreboards at Gainesville, Fla., when his dragster snapped in two in a violent 2015 crash that cracked a couple of vertebrae. Fifteen years before that, at Memphis, he was airlifted to a hospital, unconscious and with a broken leg following a ghastly accident that actually jarred one eyeball from its socket.
He has seen the fickleness of finances. His three championships didn’t make him immune from economic reality, and he has forced to learn the most basic step to winning titles: finding funding to operate the race car. His journey includes being sidelined for lack of sponsorship and even banned for awhile by the sanctioning body in an unnecessary dispute the NHRA triggered about his two-seat exhibition dragster. And he has been entangled with an antitrust lawsuit he filed in April 2019 against the NHRA because of that disagreement.
He overcame throat cancer in 2015.
So Dixon is resilient. He said, “I’m an optimist. I’ll keep forging ahead.”
And he has, occasionally headlining a match race or giving high-speed thrill rides down the quarter-mile to the adventurous. Naturally, he would be thrilled himself if he received a marketing package that allowed him to return to the newly named Camping World Drag Racing Series in competitive fashion. But he’s pragmatic.
“If it happens, great. If it doesn’t that’s OK,” Dixon said. “I think that’s all dollar-driven, sponsorship. Gosh, it’s hard enough to find funding to go racing, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. You’ve seen a lot of teams across the board have to adjust for this. So if it happened it would be great, but if it didn’t, I’m not going to hang myself. I’m carrying on. I’m having a lot of fun with the two-seater, and I apparently seem to stay busy without it.
“When I go and run match races with the single-seater and I’m sitting in the car and back up from the burnout and am rolling up to stage the car . . . I love that! I absolutely love being in that car. And going down the racetrack, I really, really love it,” Dixon said. “But you know, there’s a lot of people who love their sport and for one reason or another can’t continue on. So it’s not from lack of desire. It’s lack of opportunities.
“Do I miss it? Yeah, in that moment. But I don’t want to be a guy that piecemeals something together and goes out there and thinks that I’m doing something, because that isn’t how I was raised,” Dixon, whose father Larry Dixon Sr. also raced in Top Fuel, said. “The teams that I got to compete on, it takes an awful lot to compete at the level for a championship. I’m a long ways away from being able to do that. So I don’t get too caught up in missing it. I’ve got a lot of things – my family, that two-seat car – that more than take care of me from a satisfaction standpoint.”
The two-seat program, surprisingly, has brought him new clients in the past few months.
“With the pandemic, I thought that everything would get shut down, and some of the events that we were booked into did get shut down because of not allowing spectators. But on the other side of it, I had other people who had an epiphany, of sorts – they wanted to do a ride and they wanted to do it in 2020, do it while they can,” he said. “So I ended up running that car way more than I ever thought I would – and had a blast . . . made some great memories for some people. So from that standpoint, it’s going OK. We’re not running it enough to put food on the table or anything like that – or pay for college. But at least it’s taking care of itself, which I at least hoped it would do.”
From 2002-2010, Dixon and Schumacher gave drag-racing fans their money’s worth at dragstrips across America as they dominated the Top Fuel class. Dixon spoke with each triumph about the truth that it could be his last, that his star wouldn’t always shine. And that concept seemed so hard to fathom – it seemed the Top Fuel class always would be a Dixon-Schumacher tug-o-war with supremacy. For most, it was hard to envision an era that would belong to Antron Brown and Steve Torrence, with a sprinkling of surprises from champions Del Worsham (a Funny Car favorite son), Shawn Langdon, and Brittany Force. NHRA Top Fuel was Dixon and Schumacher and their epic clashes.
Schumacher doesn’t race fulltime anymore, just like Dixon. But Dixon didn’t say he found it weird – in fact, he said the opposite: “It doesn’t seem odd. If you went 10 years behind Tony and me, it’d be Joe Amato and Kenny Bernstein battling. It’s just how the sport is. That’s how the business of the sport is. So you either learn how to survive, like a John Force, or you find other things to do.”
Other than being a husband and father and a property manager in Brownsburg, Ind., Dixon isn’t looking for other things to do. An exception will be traveling to the Detroit area in September to receive his Motorsports Hall of Fame of America honor.
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