RAYMOND BEADLE – 21ST MARKETING IN A 20TH CENTURY DRAG RACING WORLD
He revolutionized merchandising on the way to
becoming a three-time champion
If you’re one of those fans that cruises the souvenir tents and trailers at a National Hot Rod Association event looking for T-shirts, die-cast models, or other memorabilia of your favorite driver, thank Raymond Beadle.
To be sure, Beadle’s on-track results, mostly at the wheel of the famed Blue Max Funny Car, are reason enough to remember him. His resume includes 13 NHRA national event wins, including two U.S. Nationals victories; 19 International Hot Rod Association race wins; six world championships, three straight in NHRA competition from 1979-81 and the 1975, ‘76 and ’81 IHRA crowns; and innumerable match race and special event wins. He also owned the Blue Max when John Lombardo drove it to another U.S. Nationals crown.
I started the Blue Max with the money I saved from driving for Don Schumacher -Raymond Beadle
But along with Beadle’s race record, it was his business-like approach to drag racing - as Blue Max team co-owner with Harry Schmidt, then as sole owner – that set the gold standard of its time for presentation and merchandising in drag racing.
In the mid-1970s, a time when drag racing, especially the Funny Car circus, was loaded with catchy team and driver names, Beadle was the first to take advantage of the potential benefits to marketing their catchy name, although he said there wasn’t a “Eureka!” moment of inspiration that started the Blue Max marketing blitz.
“At the time, most cars had a nickname like ‘Chi-Town Hustler,’ or ‘Jungle Jim (Liberman),’” Beadle recalled in a recent interview from his native Texas. “We incorporated the name, got a trademark and started with (making and selling) Blue Max T-shirts and hats. Little did we know how big a resource that was going to be. Even at $5, $10 apiece, we still made a lot of money on those.”
Indeed. Between trackside and mail order sales, the team reportedly moved more than 100,000 T-shirts, hats, and halter tops (which were prominently modeled in magazine ads for the apparel) in each of its first few years.
Beadle also used his business acumen to bring the
Blue Max name to other forms of racing, starting both a World of Outlaws sprint
car and NASCAR Winston Cup team in 1983, several years before Kenny Bernstein
brought his King Racing enterprise to NASCAR and the Indianapolis 500. Rusty
Wallace won the 1989 Winston Cup title at the wheel of Beadle’s Kodiak Pontiac.
But a year later, Beadle was out of all forms of racing.
“At the end of 1990, I had to get another driver (Wallace took the backbone of the Max operation to form a new team with Roger Penske as owner), I was going through a divorce and there was all that uncertainty with the savings and loans down in Texas,” Beadle said. “So that was it.”
After getting out of the game, Beadle said he continued to operate a cattle ranch in West Texas and a horse farm near Valley View, selling the former three years ago and the latter last year. He said he opened the ranch at least partially as a way to entertain sponsors while racing and bred grand champions at both.
Beadle said he’s “retired, but I seem to stay busy. I don’t have time for a job” while buying, selling and trading real estate these days.
“I tell my wife I don’t know what I’d do for a living,” he said with a laugh.
He knew exactly what to do for a living 30-some years ago. Beadle was working for the Texas Department of Agriculture when he started drag racing in 1963 with an injected A/Competition 1957 Chevy.
Not long after, he stepped directly into Top Fuel, driving mostly a Division 4 schedule for team owners such as Leslie Barrett and Prentiss Cunningham. While with Cunningham, the team tackled the occasional national event that ran in Texas or Oklahoma, and Beadle took the fueler to the semis of NHRA’s World Finals in Amarillo in 1971 and ’72.
“We were fixing to win the (PRA) race,” Beadle said. “We had been low E.T. the first two rounds, but we blew up. Then I talked to Schumacher – he had spare everything; our spare parts could go into a cigar box. I drove match races … and started seeing a little bit of the sponsorship stuff Schumacher did with Revell and Wonder Bread.”
Beadle continued with Schumacher through 1974, winning his first national event that year at the AHRA Winternationals, until Schumacher pulled the plug and retired from the sport at the end of the season. Fortunately for Beadle, the time with Schumacher got him acquainted with fellow Texan Harry Schmidt.
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THE START OF SOMETHING BIG
Schmidt’s cars ran strongly; Jake Johnston won the prestigious Manufacturer’s Meet at Orange County International Raceway in 1970, and Richard Tharp won three IHRA events for the Max in 1972. But the constant travel and ever-increasing costs of running a competitive Funny Car saw Schmidt retire the Max after the 1973 season.
As fate would have it, Schmidt took his mechanical skills to Schumacher’s superteam and worked with Beadle for part of 1974. With both looking for work after Schumacher’s retirement, Beadle asked Schmidt about reviving the Max, and the two went into a 50-50 partnership for 1975, Beadle driving, Schmidt tuning, joined by helper “Waterbed” Fred Miller.
“I started the Max with the money I saved from driving for Schumacher,” Beadle said.
The resurrected Max hit the ground running that year, upsetting Don Prudhomme’s overwhelming Army Monza in the finals to win the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis with an elapsed time of 6.16 seconds, which backed up his No. 1 qualifying effort of 6.14 for a national record. Beadle and Schmidt added four IHRA titles and its points championship.
Today, Beadle says that is his most memorable moment in racing.
It wasn’t Beadle’s first trip to the finals, though. Perhaps as memorable is Beadle’s runner-up finish to Prudhomme in the NHRA Springnationals, where a giant wheelstand caused air to get under the Max’s Mustang II body and send it skyward as Beadle fought to gain control before wheeling his now-altered-like car to the finish.
“It was really uneventful, as far as I was concerned,” Beadle said. “We carried the front end to half-track a lot of times. That run, it got a little too high.”
The Max team sailed into the year with lots of momentum and repeated its IHRA points win, but its only NHRA trophy came at the inaugural Cajun Nationals, which was not considered a “national” event until 1977. The following season brought two wins on the American Hot Rod Association circuit, but no NHRA nationals.
But events were happening on other fronts for the Max in those years. Beadle bought out Schmidt’s share of the team before the ’76 season, and sponsor names started showing up on the Mustang’s flanks: Amalie Oil, English Leather, NAPA/Regal Ride shocks. Also finding its way onto the car was a Kenny Youngblood artistic rendition of the actual Blue Max medal, which became as big a part of the team’s identity as Prudhomme’s coiled “Snake” cobra logo.
The Max also continued its hefty match-race schedule between national events, as did other professional Funny Car teams of the day.
The team also opened a satellite shop in Los Angeles, to avoid towing back and forth from its Dallas base, and built as much of its own equipment as it could.
Then, at the end of the ’77 season, Schmidt quit.
“Harry was just kinda burned out,” Beadle said. “He moved back to Dallas, got into jewelry and was real successful. Back in the day, you didn’t fly back and forth, you know – you rode in pickups. You were like a glorified carny gypsy.”
Ready to step in was longtime altered and flopper pilot Dale Emery, who retired from the cockpit after putting a Burkhart Camaro on its head at the ’77 U.S. Nationals and breaking an arm in the process.
With Emery joining Miller and Dee Gant on the crew, the Max donned a Plymouth Arrow shell for 1978 – half blue and half yellow, the first time a color other than blue appeared with any prominence on the Max - to replace the less-aerodynamic Mustang. But the car sputtered through the first part of the year until replacing its Milodon motors with Keith Black plants.
Beadle then closed the year on a hot streak, winning the AHRA World Finals, joining the 5-Second Funny Car Club with a 5.98 low-qualifier blast at Indy, then breaking a three-year NHRA national event drought in the season-closing World Finals to set the stage for Funny Car’s “blue period.”
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BECOMING THE DOMINATOR
1980 brought similar results, as Beadle took three national events and its second straight points championship while the team put together an ultra-trick, titanium-rich lightweight chassis with a low-slung Plymouth Horizon body late in the year. That car carried Beadle to both the NHRA and IHRA World Championships in 1981, along with the second Indy win in ‘81.
More sponsors, such as Rio Airways and Valvoline, came on board during the reign of the Max, and growing interest in 18-wheel enclosed trailers for race teams helped Beadle – then-owner of Chaparral Trailers – add to the coffers.
“Billy Meyer was the first (to get an 18-wheeler),” Beadle said, “but we did some conversions for Prudhomme, the Candies and Hughes team with Chaparral. I thought nobody’d buy ‘em. They were $125,000 – who in the world would pay that kind of money for a trailer?”
Another of Beadle’s more famous “agony of defeat” moments came at the season-opening 1981 Winternationals, when the roof flexed, then sheared completely off the Max as Beadle was winning his semifinal.
Kenny Bernstein offered the team the roof from his spare car, and a quick saw job and mad thrash saw a patched-up, Blue-with-red-top Max ready to go against Meyer in the finals. No, Meyer ended the Cinderella story by winning, and no, Beadle did not parlay the car’s appearance into a Red Roof Inns sponsorship.
“Well, the roofs didn’t have enough support,” Beadle said. “We were trying to get the car lighter and lighter. Later, we added side windows for more support. We started with little kick-outs, three-quarter windows, then went to the full side windows. Then there was the roof hatch - we were the first to do that, so you could get out of the car.
“A lot of inventing was done by breaking stuff and fixing it. My first bad crash was at Memphis in ’75 or ’76. All the cars had torsion bar front ends, and I was carrying the front end all the time. Then I broke a torsion bar, it dug in, and I flipped five or six times. That’s when Harry and I built a car with the A-arm front end. Everybody said it wouldn’t work, but pretty soon, everyone had A-arm front ends.”
Today, Beadle says he doesn’t know why the Max suddenly started flying high near the end of 1978.
“I can’t pinpoint any certain thing,” he said. “It’s just that the car was running real good. We changed the body style, always ran good with the Plymouth body.”
Then Beadle and the Max switched back to the Ford body style in 1982, running an EXP while adding sponsorship from Ford’s Motorcraft division. He got off to a flying start, literally, rolling the car at the second NHRA national event in Gainesville, landing on his wheels, crossing the finish line and climbing from the car with arms raised.
“I just raised my hands to show I was OK,” Beadle said. “(The crowd) thought I took a bow.”
He won two nationals that year, finished fifth in NHRA points, then dropped a bombshell – Blue Max Racing was going in circles in 1983.
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This wasn’t Beadle’s first attempt to diversify the racing efforts, as a Blue Max Top Fueler ran occasionally, and with some success, in 1979 and ’80. Dave Settles won an IHRA national in the car, but Beadle couldn’t drum up the additional dollars it needed to run. He could find those dollars for the NASCAR effort, though.
“We tried Top Fuel, but the sponsors didn’t want to pay the same dollars for the same markets,” Beadle said. “That’s why we went to Winston Cup; it was just easier to get a sponsor.”
The team approached its oval-track efforts with the same professionalism it brought to the Funny Car, building everything it could in its own shops and marketing the Max name.
“In Winston Cup, we were the only ones merchandising,” Beadle said. “Richard (Petty) and Cale (Yarborough) were doing some as drivers, but the Blue Max name was better known than Rusty or Tim were. We were instrumental in starting Fred Wagenthals of Action Collectibles; we made a lot of introductions for him to get started.”
As for the straight-line efforts, Beadle managed one national event win in 1983 and two in ’84, then retired to focus full-time on the business side of the Max. Longtime California favorite John Lombardo took the helm for 1985 and scored a popular Indy win in the now-Mustang-bodied, Old Milwaukee red-and-blue Max. It would be the last time the Max took an NHRA title.
Lombardo left after the 1986 season, and Beadle got back behind the wheel of the Max, now Pontiac-bodied (the team ran Pontiacs in NASCAR) and sponsored by Kodiak tobacco (also a hand-me-down from the NASCAR effort).
Beadle scored two runner-up finishes in ’87, then left the driving chores of the Max to former Max pilot Tharp for 1988 and little-known Ronnie Young in 1989-90. The drag team was fading from the spotlight, but the NASCAR team was rapidly ascending, with Richmond and, starting in 1986, Wallace winning regularly, culminating in Wallace’s 1989 Winston Cup championship.
“It wasn’t that I totally lost interest (in the Funny Car), but I was concentrating so hard on winning in Winston Cup,” Beadle said. “The sponsorship wasn’t there for the drag car; it was for Winston Cup. At the end, Kodiak didn’t want to give extra for the Funny Car.”
As it was, the Kodiak program in NASCAR gave way to Miller beer for 1990. At the end of that season, Beadle quit racing, with Wallace and Miller beer going to Penske and fellow Texas flopper veteran “Flash Gordon” Mineo buying the Funny Car to run under his own name. The Blue Max was done.
Until recently. Not one, but two Maxes are appearing at nostalgia events. Mike Boisvert of Wisconsin brings what he and his crew claim is the actual 1976 Blue Max to shows in the Midwest, while professional Funny Car pilot Del Worsham runs a replica of the ’77 Max at selected shows.
So, fans who think nothing of wearing a T-shirt or displaying a die-cast model of their favorite drivers and cars have the chance to see the car that started it all. Not that Beadle is worried about the legacy of the Blue Max.
“I don’t know,” he said when asked how he and the team should be remembered. “We just tried to have a real competitive team. And have fun.”
