The Most Colorful Drag Racer,NHRA #49 Top Driver Richard Tharp

Richard Tharp partied with Willie Nelson, lived by a motto that dared anyone to take him seriously, and was widely regarded as the most colorful driver of 1970s drag racing. Buried under all of that is a single 1975 pass that broke a barrier nobody had cracked before. Read on to find out what he did in New Jersey that summer, and why the NHRA put him on its list of the greatest drivers of all time.

Drag racers lined up at the starting line on a sunny day. — #49 Top Driver NHRA

Every era of drag racing produces at least one driver whose reputation away from the track threatens to swallow what he actually accomplished on it. In the 1970s, that driver was Richard Tharp. He ran with Willie Nelson, treated the space between national events as one long celebration, and adopted a personal motto that practically invited people to underestimate him. It worked so well that the anecdotes became the story. What gets lost underneath all of it is a summer afternoon in New Jersey when Tharp did something in a Top Fuel dragster that nobody in the sport had managed before, and that a great many people had argued was not physically possible.

The Motto That Cost Him His Own Reputation

The motto tells you most of what you need to know about how Tharp presented himself to the world. A Star I Are, A Saint I Aint is not the kind of line a driver adopts if he wants to be taken seriously by historians, and it worked exactly as advertised. He became known first for the personality and second for the driving, which is an unusual ordering for someone with three world championships. The friendship with Willie Nelson fit the same pattern, as did his willingness to race anything with wheels and attempt nearly anything without them. It helped that the era rewarded showmanship directly. Match racing paid the bills for most professional drag racers in the 1970s, and promoters booked names that would put people in the grandstands rather than names that looked good in a points standing. A driver with a reputation for spectacle had genuine economic value. The cost of that arrangement is that a half-century later, the anecdotes travel further than the achievements, and the achievements were substantial.

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Englishtown, 1975, and the Barrier That Fell

In the summer of 1975, at what was then Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, Tharp became the first driver to run a five-second pass in a Top Fuel dragster, a 5.97 that earned him the number one qualifying spot and that he drove across the stripe with the car on fire. Barriers in drag racing tend to fall the way records do in track and field: slowly, then all at once, with a lot of argument about conditions afterward. The five-second run mattered because the four-second era that followed was built directly on it. It remains the single most consequential thing Tharp did behind the wheel, and it is routinely overshadowed by stories about what he did afterward.

What a Mid-Seventies Top Fuel Car Demanded

Some context on the machinery makes the achievement land harder. A mid-1970s Top Fuel car was a long, slender, front-engine-derived rail running a supercharged nitromethane Hemi with a direct-drive or two-speed setup, minimal aerodynamic development, and safety equipment that looks alarming by modern standards. There was no computer managing fuel delivery down the track and no data logger to review afterward. Tuning was done by reading spark plugs, listening to the engine, and accumulating enough experience to guess correctly. Driving one required an appetite for risk that is difficult to explain to anyone who came to the sport later.

Eight Races a Season and Nowhere to Hide

The schedules of that era were also nothing like today’s. A season might consist of only eight or nine national events, which put enormous weight on each individual race. There was no long championship grind where a bad weekend could be absorbed across two dozen rounds. Miss a tune-up, break a part, or lose on a holeshot, and the season could effectively turn on it. That structure rewarded drivers who could win consistently under pressure rather than those who could simply accumulate points over time.

A Record of 82 Wins Against 46 Losses

Tharp’s head-to-head record reflects exactly that. Against the top drivers of his era, he compiled a mark of 82 wins against 46 losses. In a category where the difference between winning and losing a round is frequently a few thousandths of a second at the starting line, sustaining that kind of ratio across years of competition against the best fields the sport could assemble is a serious statement. It also undercuts any suggestion that his reputation was built on personality rather than performance.

Candies, Hughes, and the 1976 Championship

The championships followed. Driving for team owners Candies and Hughes, Tharp won the 1976 NHRA Winston Top Fuel championship, the same year he took the U.S. Nationals, the sport’s most prestigious event. He added the 1983 Springnationals to his record, along with two IHRA Top Fuel titles in 1981 and 1983. Across both sanctioning bodies he accumulated eleven IHRA and six NHRA national event wins, and he holds three world championships between the two organizations. In 1999 he was inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame.

Two Turns Behind the Wheel of the Blue Max

He also spent time in one of the most recognizable race cars ever built, driving the legendary Blue Max Funny Car both before and after three-time Winston champion Raymond Beadle sat in it. The Blue Max was a marquee operation, and putting a driver in that seat was a statement about how the team rated him. Moving between Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars also required adapting to two very different machines, since a Funny Car’s shorter wheelbase and enclosed body make it a substantially more difficult car to keep pointed straight.

The Muldowney Rivalry That Sold Tickets

His rivalry with Shirley Muldowney became one of the defining storylines of the period. The two raced each other hard for years, and the competition between them generated genuine intensity at a time when the sport was gaining mainstream visibility. Muldowney went on to become the first woman to win an NHRA Top Fuel championship and one of the most recognized figures in American motorsport. Rivalries like that one did as much to grow drag racing’s audience as any single record, because they gave casual fans a reason to care about the outcome of a specific pairing.

Wheels of Fire and a Place on the List

Tharp also appeared as himself in the 1973 drag racing film Wheels of Fire, alongside Muldowney, Don Garlits, Billy Meyer, and Don Prudhomme, all playing themselves. That cast list reads like a roster of the era’s most important figures, and Tharp’s inclusion says something about where he stood among them. The NHRA’s panel of drag racing experts, journalists, and historians later ranked him the forty-ninth greatest driver in the sport’s history. He is remembered for the motto and the stories, but the record underneath is the reason he made the list at all.

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