She Earns Respect Behind the Wheel

You look at Lori Johns and figure if she’s ever going to climb into a car, it’s going to be into the back seat of a limo parked at the stage door, and there will be a guy there in a top hat carrying a bouquet of roses.

Whoever thought to put this woman into a dragster’s cockpit in a flame-proof coverall will never get a job as a casting director. A.J. Foyt, this ain’t.

But the facts of the matter are this 5-foot-3, 100-pound racer is as big a threat behind a wheel as any Unser, Andretti, or, more to the point, Prudhomme or Garlits.

You wouldn’t think anyone would want to put this woman in anything that might burn, crash, cartwheel or hit a wall. The consensus was, she should be in an evening gown, not a jumpsuit. Feminists get mad when you single her out. They want you to treat her exactly as if she had a mustache, sang baritone, smoked cigars and had spent her early life on a lube rack, but People magazine, CBS News and assorted entertainment periodicals were not fooled. Lori saw print and got air time where no race driver had appeared before. When she showed up around the pits, the crews wondered what she had done with her tiara. They were sure this was Miss Winternationals or Miss Delco Heartland. No way could she be a drag racer.

She turned out to be one of the best. Drag racing had always been thought to be as uniquely masculine as duck hunting or crapshooting. Shirley (Don’t Call Me Cha Cha) Muldowney put that notion to rest when she burst on the scene in the ‘70s to burn rubber with the best of the males. Her escapades were made into a movie.

Lori Johns probably could play herself if her life story is put on film. A lot of people thought she was merely trying to hot-rod her way into show business anyway. The thinking was, the first time drag racing mussed up her hairdo, she would turn to something simpler--like sky diving.

Lori was actually a student at Texas A&M; when she began climbing into cars and hammering them down runways. Her parents reacted as if she had run away to ride elephants in the circus, but Lori had always been difficult to keep at ground level and legal speed. She rode motorcycles when she was 8, she raced dune buggies on the sands of Corpus Christi, Tex., when she was supposed to be sunbathing.

Racing enthusiasts were glad of the attention Lori brought to their sport, but they didn’t take it seriously. The betting was she would return to a 30-m.p.h. existence as soon as a car exploded underneath her.

In 1986 at Baton Rouge, La., Lori found out what drag racing was all about. She was competing in something called an “econo dragster” when her competitor suddenly began to slide to the left and right. His machine slammed into the guardrail, jumped it and careened into hers. Lori went end over end, breaking bones and losing consciousness as she went. Her neck was broken, her back was broken--in three places--her right wrist was broken, so was her collarbone. She looked like a doll that had been dropped from the third floor. To put her back together required a blueprint.

She had internal bleeding of the lungs and kidneys. “I’m alive only because they didn’t try to drag me out of the wreckage,” she acknowledges. “Too often, in accidents of this kind, they try to pull you out of the burning car and they sever your spinal cord.”

In her case, it was all but severed already. The doctor who first got a look at her was to say he had never seen this much damage where the victim was still alive. Her next top fuel eliminator would be a hearse.

She had brain damage. She had to learn to read and write. In fact, a stranger stared back at her from the mirror. She wore a halo brace for her neck and back injuries, but there’s no prosthesis for the brain.

Her recovery took two years. A hole in her esophagus made it impossible to swallow food. She had to eat by tube. But as soon as her neck stopped throbbing, she was back on a drag strip looking for a ride. And not in the slower, more sedate sportsmen classes, but the brutish rail top-fuel dragsters.

The drag racer is a car that thinks it’s an airplane and is trying to accelerate instantly into speeds that will make it airborne. It goes so fast so quickly that it requires a parachute to drag it to a stop after a quarter-mile or it might cross two state lines before burnout.

Lori has driven one faster than any woman ever drove anything at sea level. And only six men have driven top fuel racers quicker. Muldowney has an elapsed-time run of 4.962 seconds. Lori Johns has one of 4.950. The fastest time ever run in these 4,000-horsepower machines is 4.881, or 296.05 m.p.h. by Gary Ormsby last year at Topeka, Kan.

Lori appears in ads for a perfume called “Dare,” but her only idea of the perfect scent is that of clouds of nitromethane exhaust from the engine of a vehicle that looks like nothing so much as a praying mantis with wheels and can cover 440 yards in a little more than four seconds from a standing start.

Engaged to former Raider quarterback Rusty Hilger, Lori, who won three races last year to rank No. 4 in the top-fuel competition, hopes to race all 20 nationals this year and win the championship. If so, she will be the prettiest world champion not on ice skates.