Page 14 - NM Fall_2018

engines you’ve tuned in particular. dealerships doing make ready on
GT – Glad to be here and thanks
for having me.
CM – To start with, you’re living
in Texas now but you’ve been a
crew chief for several cars on the
west coast and other parts of the
country. Where did you grow up
and what prompted your interest in
cars?
GT – I’m originally from Dallas
and ran with a couple of buddies
that had a ’34 Dodge with an Olds
engine and a ’34 Ford with a Chevy.
CM – When and where did you
attend your first drag races and
were you racing your own cars
then?
GT – No. I had a ’57 Chevy but
never raced it. Caddo Mills, Circle
Drag Strip in Dallas and later, of
course, Green Valley were the early
drag races we’d go to.
CM – What was the first car you
crewed on?
GT – In 1964 and 1965 I started
working for a couple of Chevrolet
The car that began Tipton’s career as crew chief – the Mr. Bardahl ’63 Corvette
belonging to Bill Hielscher.
14
went to San Antonio and, while
some of their factory muscle cars.
I lived close to Bill Hielscher at the
time, who was a contract electrician Cortines and we raced the Lone
that loved drag racing. He liked
what I was doing and hired me to
work on his ’64 Chevy ll and then
the “Mr. Bardahl” ’63 Corvette. I
was with Bill for quite some time
and, since it was before he bought
Green Valley Raceway from Bill
McClure, we just raced a lot all
over.
CM – You’ve crewed on or been
the crew chief for a number of
different teams over the years.
Can you give a timeline on some of
those?
GT – Well, after Hielscher, Dickie time off and in ’83 moved to North
Harrell called and I was with him
for two years before joining up with
Mike Burkhart and his two funny
cars. Eventually he expanded
his team to four, with Charlie
Therwanger, Mart Higginbotham,
David Ray and Mike driving. We’d
race, load up and head to the next
track…sometimes three or four
times a week!
Sometime after that I left and
Nitro Madness Magazine
working at a Honda motorcycle
shop, I hooked up with Buddy
Star Longneck, an ex-Tom Hoover
funny car. Let’s see, in the early
‘70s I was with Gene Snow’s Hot
Wheels Vega before going over to
the Candies and Hughes Barracuda
funny car driven by Leroy
Goldstein.
CM – That was certainly a busy
time for you during the heyday of
the funny car.
GT – It was! They didn’t have all
the national meets back then, so
match racing all over the country
helped pay the bills. I took some
Carolina where I installed satellite
dishes. In 1984, Roy Hill hired me
to work at his drag racing school
that was nearby.
CM – How long before the bug bit
and you went back to racing?
GT – I went back with Snow
in ’86 when he won the IHRA
championship with the black top
fuel car that had a canopy. We ran
the wedge car right after that but
never had much success with it.
In 1989, Earl Whiting, a logging
company owner from Tacoma,
Washington, bought a top fuel car
that he only was running a few
meets a year. Dale Emery was the
tuner and I was a crewman. We
based the car here, out of the Blue
Max shop just south of the Reeder
Road complex where many of the
race team’s shops were located.
CM – Wasn’t it right after that
when you became Tom McEwen’s
crew chief?
Continued on page 17
Fall 2018