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"Trouble in the Lights" Artist's
Notes: In 1969, I worked at Dick Olsen's
paint shop in Bellflower, California. Dick was a racer as well as a custom painter
and ran his "F-Troop" Junior Fueler with Don Ewald at the wheel regularly at Lions
Drag Strip. It was at Lions that I first saw the awesome new breed of "funnycars"; blown
fuel motors with automatic transmissions and
full suspension. These things were so NASTY.. imagine, a blown fuel motor rocking the
lightweight fiberglass bodied cars as they loped to the starting line, then hiking the
left front way up on the launch, as the suspension strained to
control power it was never intended to contain! The baddest of them all was a sleek,
Chrysler powered, Corvette bodied car named the "Invader". Although very "lo-buck", owner
Glen Solano and driver "Mighty Mike" Van Sant were the car to beat.
Ultimately, the invader ended up at Dick's shop as it's home base, and I went to work as
a crew member. In those days there was virtually NO fire safety equipment on the cars.. no
"thermal" headers, no "Breather" tubes and no fire bottles. When one let go (which was
a fairly common occurance) it was real scary, as it would usually burn the car to the ground
with drivers suffering burns. "Trouble In The Lights" was painted probably in the early
seventies, and was
my recollection of waiting to fire our car as the next pair, looking downtrack through the
tiresmoke and seeing one of the two cars in front of us blow up. In the picture, the
unidentified car on the left has "won the battle but lost the war", as it is getting the
"win light" (long before "scoreboards", the light to the left of the car) but won't be back
for the next round with the driver lucky if he doesn't make a trip to
Long Beach Memorial Hospital. The row of red lights between the cars marked the "end" of
the track at Lions. |