Bobby Parks & The Black Nasty

Bobby Parks - Drag Racer for The Black Nasty

A staple in the DMV drag racing scene for the better part of two decades. Some of you in the area may remember an all-black 4th Gen Camaro roaming around Upper Montgomery County MD on huge slicks and skinnies. That car was the Genesis for what is now widely known as, the Black Nasty. 

Contact: Bobby Parks at N/A

         

• How did you get into Drag Racing?
• How did the Black Nasty persona come to be?
• Experiences on different “street racing” shows like Pinks and Street Outlaws
• Safety in Drag Racing
• What is “no-Prep” Drag Racing?
• Advice for folks looking to start out in Drag Racing
• EVs in Drag Racing?
• The future of the Black Nasty?
• Check out the collection of Black Nasty videos on YouTube

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Break fix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the auto sphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrol heads that wonder. How did they get that job or become that person?

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

At GTM, we pride ourselves on being ambassadors for all types of motor sports, but we haven’t really talked about drag racing much on break fix. Until now. Our guest today has been a staple in the DMV drag racing scene for the better part of two decades. Some of you in the area may remember an all black fourth gen Camaro roaming around Upper Montgomery County, Maryland on huge slicks and skinnies.

That car was the genesis for what is now widely known as the Black Nasty.

Crew Chief Eric: Some of you might also know him from Street Outlaws and Pinks. So join me in welcoming Robert Parks, the man [00:01:00] behind the Black Nasty persona. Welcome, Bobby.

Crew Chief Brad: Hey, how you doing? And as always, I’m your host, Brad, and I’m Eric. So let’s roll.

All right, Bobby. Was I right in my intro stating that the fourth gen Camaro, that is the original black nasty.

Bobby Parks: That is the OG black nasty. That is the one that started it all for me.

Crew Chief Brad: That was the looker that everybody, I mean, you know, driving around in my little stock Camaro or whatever. And I seen that thing.

It was like, how, first of all, how the hell are you driving that on the street?

Bobby Parks: That was definitely a question that was brought up by a lot of people, including a lot of the Montgomery County police officers.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. I’m sure you knew a lot of them by first name, but to start, so how did you. Get into that.

How did you get into motorsports and drag racing?

Bobby Parks: Growing up, my dad used to tell me all his stories about his drag racing and just a bunch of different cars and stuff that he had. One of my favorites was a 69 Camaro that he had that he always talked about. And when [00:02:00] I was about seven or eight, he finally brought me to the local drag strip, 75 and 80.

Like I was watching from the stands. The first fast car that I saw go down, I was like, man, that’s what I want to do right there. I don’t know what it’s going to take, but. One day I’m going to do it. It was just meant to be.

Crew Chief Brad: And then he didn’t get you into one of those like junior dragsters or anything like that.

I mean, at that age, don’t they start doing that?

Bobby Parks: The funny thing about my dad is he will point in the direction that, you know, he thinks you should go or maybe something you might be interested in. But until you actually do it yourself, he’s not going to do it. When I finally bought the original black nasty 99 Z 28 Camaro, I did a little bit of research before I bought it.

And that’s when the whole LS motor thing started. And the little bit of research that I did, I found out pretty much right away that it was going to be a superior engine to most of what was already available. Especially the LT one, which is. All the experience [00:03:00] I had back then, and I hated that engine. And I mean, it was good for its time and there’s people doing big things with it.

Now, still, I don’t know why, but the LS just took over and took off. And now, I mean, there’s pretty much no car out there that hasn’t been LS swapped. And I’m glad that I did buy the car that I did because it gave me a huge head start on this whole LS craze. I mean, there’s people that are just now. Really starting to get into the whole LS community stuff.

And I’ve been doing it for over 20 years now. Thank God I bought that car, started modifying it pretty much right away. I was working at Midas, believe it or not, when I got that car, I didn’t know much past doing oil changes and brakes and real basic stuff. When I got it fast forward 20 some years and pretty much nothing I can’t do now.

You know, that’s what I do for a living is, uh, I build drag cars and. Most of the stuff that I build is LS based and I tune and fabricate pretty much all my cars were 100 percent built by myself, [00:04:00] including the, the original car, which is where I learned a lot from, I

Crew Chief Brad: remember back then you had, at least in the early 2000s, you had like one of the only LS one edit cables.

You know, the racers in group and everybody was going to you because everybody had a Camaro or Firebird. And we were all like, Bobby, we need your help tune my car. I remember you changed plugs on my Camaro at one point.

Bobby Parks: LS1 edit, man. That brings back memories. That thing might have both been MS DOS based.

It’s so old. That thing was junk. Now we have HP tuners and I pretty much use all standalone stuff for my cars now, especially because I utilize the traction control a lot.

Crew Chief Eric: What are you using just out of curiosity? I’m

Bobby Parks: using a FuelTech 600 and that has a lot of the latest and greatest stuff. I do a little bit of stuff with Holley.

So if I was to choose something else, I’d probably jump on a Holley. And I’ve done a little bit with a lot of the other programs out there too, but for my budget, the Holley and the FuelTech are my two top choices. And I prefer the FuelTech and my personal stuff.

Crew Chief Brad: So we [00:05:00] talked about the car, the 4th gen Camaro that started it all, but where did Black Nasty come from?

Bobby Parks: As you I’m sure know all about, I’m not going to say how or why, but Lily ponds, one of the minutes down

Crew Chief Brad: the street from my house now,

Bobby Parks: one of the roads that we made famous, there’s videos and stuff all over the country now of that road. But we were out street racing one night. I had a buddy there with me that had never come out street racing before.

I think it was a turbo civic. That I ran, I gave him like 15 cars in the kick. I ended up beating them by like 20 some cars. And my buddy who’s standing behind the car, when I left, he was like, damn, that car’s nasty. And then when I came back, you could hear it in the video. So we were playing the video back and he was like, man, that car is so nasty.

And it’s black. You should call it black nasty. At first I thought it was kind of goofy. There was like 50 people out there watching the race. The name just stuck. I didn’t call it that. They just overheard it. And then from that point on, [00:06:00] everybody called it the Black Nasty. And still 20 some years later, that’s how 90 percent of the people in the car community know me.

Crew Chief Brad: I mean, it’s a great name. It’s funny how just like the simplest thing can turn into your entire Persona and celebrity. But before we get into your celebrity status, let’s talk a little bit more about some of the other iterations of the black nasty. So the fortune Camaro was the original, but that’s not what you’re rocking today.

How has the black nasty changed over the years?

Bobby Parks: Yeah. So I’ve gone through a few different cars and even a truck and some motorcycles and all sorts of stuff. If it’s got an engine and some wheels and tires, I get into it. I got out of racing. And got into off roading for a few years. And that’s where that Jeep build came from.

And the Jeep, I actually traded it for the black Mustang. That’s how I ended up getting that. That’s kind of funny how it went from one thing to another, to another. And then of course, during all that, I also was racing motorcycles and got into motorcycles. [00:07:00] So bunch of different stuff. Like I said, if it’s got an engine and some.

Wheels and tires and I’m into it. I’ll, I’ll race it or whatever I can do with it. The second vehicle that I got into that I dubbed black nasty was an LS Mustang. Wait,

Crew Chief Eric: wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Isn’t that illegal? And like 48 out of the 50 States, you put a bow tie in a blue oval.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, you make a blue oval move.

Oh, my bad.

Bobby Parks: My bad. Don’t get me wrong, the Mustang on its own, it’s a great drag vehicle, but the original five liter that came in those cars is, let’s just admit it, it’s a pile of crap. They pretty much break right down the center at about 450 wheel horsepower and that’s just not going to cut it.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s a hot take right there, everybody.

Bobby Parks: So actually, when I got the Mustang originally, it was just a four cylinder, it had no motor in it or anything. No EcoBoost there. No EcoBoost either. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind doing something like that [00:08:00] if I was going to build a driver, but the cars that I build, even the ones that are street legal, Like my current one, I build them to be competitive in whatever class that I decided to run in.

You know, you’re not going to be competitive in today’s racing with the original 5. 0. I mean, that thing is junk. First thing I did with the Mustang, tore it all down, put an LS in it. And believe it or not, within the first Three years, I think of building that car. I broke the stock block nitrous record at Maryland international raceway.

We won the very first heads up race that we ever ran with that car. So I built the car, took it to 75 and 80, did some testing, entered it in world cup finals at MIR. And just by pure dumb luck, we ended up winning the whole thing. That was back in 2012, 2013. We entered again and we’re number three qualifier.

And that’s when we ended up breaking the world record and we did it in a restricted class. So we were only allowed to run a certain amount of [00:09:00] nitrous and we were still able to break the all time record with that car at that time. We went back a week later to re break the record. It was about 40 degrees outside that day.

The oil pressure got so high because it was so cold that it blew the oil filter O ring out. And I ended up crashing the car at about 120 mile an hour into the wall at MIR. That was a bad day, but I got really, really lucky. I mean, there was no square inch of the car that wasn’t covered in oil. And what it did was it allowed me to slide so freely that when I hit the wall, it just was like a sliding blow to the front end, spun around one time, tap the rear a little bit.

Believe it or not, I was able to get the car back out onto the track within three weeks, I was out running it again. Wow.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s

Bobby Parks: impressive. So I just cut the whole front end off, welded some tubes in it. I got donated a wrecked carbon fiber front end [00:10:00] from a buddy who raced in X275 class back then and a little bit of work later and we were back out racing all over again.

So

Crew Chief Eric: that’s the picture I saw that it looks like Mad Max from the front then. Yes. Yeah.

Bobby Parks: I didn’t want to do it, but it ended up working out for the best anyway, that front end on those things are super light. So I was able to remove some around like 85, 90 pounds out of the car with just that front end and tubing it.

Crew Chief Brad: You no longer run a Camaro. You’ve made the switch. How many Mustangs have you had? Uh, have you been all Mustang?

Bobby Parks: It was first the Camaro, then the Mustang, the Mustang I had the longest. I think I raced that for about eight years. I ended up getting involved in radio racing. That’s what I really wanted to do well in, but radio racing is so expensive.

It is just crazy how much money you can spend in that stuff. Now, these guys are going almost mid threes in the eighth at over 200 miles an hour. On little radial tires. That’s what I wanted to do. It just got a little out of hand. I spent [00:11:00] a lot of too much money. What I ended up doing was I got into no prep race, which is still kind of new to a lot of people.

It’s been around for longer than most people think, but no prep racing. We basically simulate street racing, which as you know, is right up my alley. The other thing it does is it takes a lot of the expense out of the vehicle You don’t need a ton of power. These places that we race, we’re typically racing either racetracks backwards.

So we’re going from the shutdown area toward the starting line, or we actually do it like one of the episodes of street outlaws that were on, we did airports. Airports are really big now. And the crazy thing about this racing is, is it’s like never any time in history. Could Joe Schmo go out and actually.

I hesitate to say make a living, but you could actually make a living off of racing and not have a full ride or a [00:12:00] big sponsorship to do it. To touch back on your question about the Mustangs, I have a Mustang now. So this is now my second Mustang. And I went back to a Mustang for good reason. They work very well.

I ended up selling the earlier Mustang because that one was set up so much for the track that it made it really difficult to work on the no prep. It had a four 27, all aftermarket LS motor in it that was run on methanol and had a big single turbo and it made about 2, 400 wheel horsepower. It was very difficult to tame that thing down enough.

To run these note preps and I ended up selling it And then that’s when I got into the truck. The truck was probably the shortest lived venture that I had mainly because of the cost.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. I saw it on Facebook that you had just gotten the truck and like a week later, it was just sold. I

Bobby Parks: ran it for one season.

So the chassis was actually imported from the Netherlands, which is kind of weird, but some guy in the Netherlands [00:13:00] really wanted my dad’s Chevelle. He had a 69 Chevelle that was blown big block. And the guy used to have one that he won some race back in the day was so he, he had to have this car. So he had a pro stock S10 chassis, which is borderline a pro mod, and he offered it for a heads up trade.

And I still had the engine and transmission from the old black nasty 2. 0, the Mustang. And we dropped that right into the truck, which was only like 2, 300 pounds. So we knew we were going to just fly with that thing. It took me. About four or five months to build it. We went out, did a couple of races, did very well with it right away.

That was a big tire car because we wanted to get into big tire, no prep. Cause back then it was like kind of all the rage. And it was like almost as soon as we built the truck. All of a sudden two chassis were outlawed from small tire altogether. So we stuck to big tire and [00:14:00] big tire actually pays less money and costs about twice as much to do.

So it just didn’t make sense for me to keep doing it. It costs a lot of money, like just putting the truck together, even getting the chassis for free. By the time we got done with all the parts and labor, I had easily a hundred thousand dollars into that vehicle, but I got rid of the truck. It left me with enough money to move on to the vehicle I have now.

So let’s

Crew Chief Eric: go back and clarify a couple things. Black Nasty 2. 0 followed by Black Nasty version 12 at this point. These Mustangs are all Fox bodies? Or are they SM95s? Are they the new retro cars? What are we talking about here?

Bobby Parks: I did not want to build one. I was anti Fox body. Everybody has one. There are a hundred of them at every racetrack you go to.

And you know, everybody wants to be different after getting that car. I finally understood why so many people use that car. It is just kind of a cookie cutter. Take it out of the [00:15:00] box, do a couple of things to it. And you have a race car. I mean, it’s just really is one of the most perfect. Drag race cars that you can get lightweight, even though it’s a triangulated four link, it still comes with a four link, which works pretty much just the same if you know how to use the instant center calculator.

It’s just right out of the box. It’s basically a drag car. And with as light as it is, you throw a cage in it and you’re off to the track and you don’t have to make a ton of power to go fast with them. It’s just like the perfect car. Yes. I do want to build other stuff. And you know, over the years for customers, I’ve built a ton of different stuff.

One of my favorite things I’ve built recently was a AMC Rambler. So I did a 5. 3 swap in one of those. And those cars, a lot of people don’t realize it, but they’re super light. The one that I built, it was like 2, 450 pounds or something like that before I started tearing it all apart. I didn’t even weigh it after I was done, but I have to imagine it was no more than about 2, 600 pounds and, and I didn’t cut any weight out of him.

It was still the regular car. That thing turned out awesome. That was nasty. [00:16:00] Fox bodies are where it’s at. Then of course we had COVID and that pretty much destroyed business for everybody, myself included. And, uh, I was also still dealing with a divorce at the time. So between COVID and the divorce, I pretty much was like losing my ass on everything.

So

I got rid of the truck and I was pretty much just going to get out of racing. I told myself I’m done with it. I’ve had a lingering back injury from power lifting back in the day. It’s evolved to a point now where I have to get spinal injections on a regular basis, just to even be able to just live my normal daily life, much less work.

But other than the tuning and going to these no preps that we do now and helping those guys out, we did start going to races again. So when I sold the truck, I got about, I would say three months into my, I’m never going to race again phase. When I decided that’s just not going to happen, I have to race. I just cannot sit around.

It’s it’s not possible. So I threw [00:17:00] together a little budget build. It took me about three and a half months to build it. I wanted to do it for 15, 000, but it ended up costing me about 25. And again, I don’t build a car unless I think it’s going to be competitive. So yes, I could have built it for even 10 if I really wanted to, but a 10, 000 no prep car is not going to be competitive.

You know, there might be ways, but. I wasn’t interested. So one of the things I had to have was my FuelTech 600 with the traction control that it has helps me a lot in the no prep world. So I had to have that. I didn’t want to skimp on that couple other small things that I had to have got the car together, started racing and this car based on all the Experience that I had from street racing and track racing and everything.

I, I put it all together and I put it in this car and it didn’t cost a ton of money, but first day out, this car just worked. It is amazing how well this car works and how little really is done to it and how little money is really in it. [00:18:00] But we went out and won the first race. And that was for about 3000, which was awesome.

Cause 3, 000, I really needed it at the time. You know, I was living in my shop after my divorce for about three and a half years. And then the shop got shut down due to COVID. But my main goal was to make this race called dig or die. Which now is basically the super bowl of no prep racing for small tire guys.

And just to clear something up real quick, depending on who you ask, no prep can mean two different things. Like a lot of guys know no prep from no prep Kings, which is a new spin off of street outlaws that they’ve been doing. No prep Kings is what we refer to as fake no prep. If you’re racing on a track and you’re going in the direction that you’re meant to race at the track, it only takes about 10 or so cars to go down before the track is sticky enough.

You know, it’s basically like racing on a normal day at the track, especially if you have a big tire. So what we do is we [00:19:00] purposely race on crappy surfaces.

Crew Chief Eric: I thought it was kind of funny as you’re talking about NoPrep and Kings of NoPrep and their fake NoPrep and it’s like, so there’s a lot of preparation in NoPrep.

So it’s a bit of a misnomer. Why is it called NoPrep? At the racetrack,

Bobby Parks: basically what they do to consider it NoPrep is they scrape the track clean and they don’t put any, it’s like a form of glue that they put down on the track. They spray it down the track. If you’re going to a prepped event, no prep Kings, they basically scrape the track and they don’t put any glue on it.

The problem with that is one. When you scrape the track, you give them a perfectly smooth surface to lay down new rubber. Soon as the new rubber is laid down, it becomes sticky again. It’s basically like the racetrack. And when you have a big tire. You don’t want a really well prepped surface. You don’t want a ton of glue.

We need what you call wheel speed for guys that don’t drag race and wheel speed is basically just a controlled slip. [00:20:00] So with a big tire, if you did hook it off the line, typically you’ll go slower. It’ll, it’ll lug the motor down and you don’t get out of the hole as fast. So you want a control amount of spin, which is exactly what you’re going to get.

On a track surface that has just been scraped and now you’ve got cars going down one after another after another, you know, after 15, 20 cars go down, it is a perfect racing surface. It doesn’t get any better than that. In contrast, what we do, we go to the crappiest surfaces we can find. I mean, borderline gravel roads, some of these places, and the asphalt is 50 years old and cracked and broken, and it’s really grainy.

You typically can only get about 50 percent of the surface area of the tire. Actually on the ground, you’re just doing everything you can to just get the car to hook and go. And that’s the name of the game and no prep. The other funny thing about no prep that a lot of people complain about. [00:21:00] is we do actually bring what we call prep, which is stupid and I’m kind of against it for the most part.

I say we just use water and do water burnouts only, but most of these no preps do allow you to bring your own. Prep typically it’s a form of glue mixed with denatured alcohol. And when you pour it down and you, and you do your burnout in it, you try to drag it up the surface as far as you can to give yourself a little bit more adhesion and get the car to take off a little bit faster.

But even with that stuff, these places that we race are so horrible. that we can typically only use us a little bit of our power of our car. So it ends up just being a game of who can get down the most power out of everybody

Crew Chief Eric: else. Is all this prep just really about the fact that the tires aren’t good enough to withstand the amount of power and torque that you’re putting down.

Even at a

Bobby Parks: racetrack, if you’re on a slick. Depending on how your car is set up, if you know how to set the car up properly, [00:22:00] most of the time you’re going to wheelie rather than spin. It happens. You can spin in the radial world. We typically have about 56 to 58 percent of the weight of the car on the nose.

And that’s to keep the front end down. We usually strap the front suspension down, make it so that they can’t travel. So the car doesn’t want to flip over back. I got some pictures that I’m sure you could see of my car. It’s trying to do just that. And that’s with, you know, 56, 57 percent on the nose.

Whereas in the no prep stuff, we’re doing almost the opposite. We have to put so much weight in the back of these cars. That it almost ruins the suspension. If you were to just take a regular car and try and go no prepping with it and try and put down over a thousand horsepower, it’s not going to get traction.

So we put a ton of weight in the back of these things to get them to work. If we were to take our no prep cars and go to the track, they would just want to flip over backwards. And same thing, vice versa. If you take your. Track car and try to go no prep racing. You’re just going to spin all the way down the [00:23:00] track and you won’t go anywhere.

And then of course I utilize a few different methods of traction control, which do not make the car faster, but it’s basically a safety net. So when I put the tune in the car, I put in it, the amount of power that I think that surface will hold that day. But if I miss on the tune up and I put a little bit too much power in it and it wants to blow the tires off, I utilize the traction control.

To keep me going down the track and not having a boarded run. Over the years, my, uh, experience in traction control has actually helped a lot in the no prep world. And now it’s pretty much a staple. And if you’re not using some form of traction control, then you’re probably not winning a ton of races either.

Crew Chief Eric: And that’s in partnership with automatic transmissions then too, right? Because, I mean, who’s really running a manual. I mean, I guess. But there is a

Bobby Parks: manual transmission class. It’s best that they keep them separate because the manual transmissions do [00:24:00] have a big disadvantage in the drag world. Every time you shift the gear, you got to worry about it breaking loose again.

It upsets the chassis and yes, you could use like a Liberty transmission or something like that, where you don’t actually have to hit a clutch and those actually do work pretty well. But they’re very expensive and a lot of people don’t have them. We also do a lot of little tricks with the converters and line pressure, converter pressure to basically give it a lot more converter slip when we’re leaving so that the engine isn’t transferring power so hard to the wheels.

Gives us a nice, smooth transition in power. We also use what’s called dump valves to bleed off converter, charge pressure to make the converter slip even more than normal. That also helps us get down and then we can start bringing that converter pressure back in as we go down to apply more power to tires without even adding any more boost or timing.

Those things all help a lot. The key is, is being able to do it all together. You got to have the chassis set up [00:25:00] well first, then you got to have. The tune and everything just has to work together in unison to make a good pass and no prep at the racetrack. You throw a tune up in it, you think is gonna go down and typically you will, you might wheelie, but you can pedal it and you’ll go right down.

No prep. These guys that. Have been doing it for years, are still having trouble getting an A to B pass. That’s all we look for is just being able to start and finish. And if you can go down without spinning, you’re typically

Crew Chief Eric: going to win. Of all the places you’ve been and whatnot, what’s your favorite drag racing track?

Is there a particular venue that’s better than the other? Well, Jason

Bobby Parks: Miller, when he does world cup at MIR, well, now it’s called MDIR. The prep that he does is amazing. That was one of the best surfaces I ever ran in terms of track racing and also capital raceway. And they’re still prepping the Bradshaws.

Mafia is what they call it. And ever since Capitol Raceway shut down, they [00:26:00] still go around the country and prep tracks. But when the Bradshaws owned Capitol Raceway on a regular Friday night, that track was so sticky, it would rip your shoes clean off anytime. They’ve made my track racing program jump leaps and bounds because I no longer had to worry about.

Whether or not the track was there, the track was always there. If I spun, it wasn’t the track, it was my car. And that helped a lot in figuring out how to get the car to actually go faster. Cause it’s one thing when you’re traveling around and actually racing, because you’re not going to go out and try and run a new best every single pass.

That would be a dumb way. To go around the world and try and win race. Cause typically when you’re trying to break a personal best, you’re going to spin, or you’re going to do something and it’s not going to work out. So those two tracks, I don’t know if one is better than the other, but a lot of it just has to do with the guys that are prepping them more so than the track itself, [00:27:00] huge props to those guys.

I believe that they could go to some of the crappiest tracks and make them work very well. And, and they’ve proven themselves time and time again, but I’m a little partial to MDIR because of. Winning world cup finals there. That was huge. I mean, I think there was 40, 50, 60, 000 fans that were there when we won.

Well, technically when we won, it was like one o’clock in the morning and just not everybody had gone home. But during the day when we were in the brunt of the race, there was a lot of people there. It’s. It’s an experience that very few will ever get to experience. It’s amazing. It’s crazy. The energy and the electric there, but on the flip side in the no prep world, I raced at Rockingham Raceway, but we’re racing the track backwards.

The end of the track is horrible. It’s a horrible, horrible surface, but. I won there and it was probably the most fun I ever had at a race ever in my life. [00:28:00] It was just, it was incredible. Even if I didn’t win all that money, which is by far the most amount of money I’ve ever won in my life at anything. By far.

So that definitely adds to it and probably changes my perspective of things. But if you were there, you would understand this mad max atmosphere there, where it’s just like, these guys are just thrown together what they can. And they’ve got these cars out there and everybody’s going down the same surface.

You’re limited by the surface in terms of who can go how fast, and you’re the guy that figures it out and beats over a hundred cars on the same surface. Yeah, that’s. Just incredible. It’s something that again, very few people ever in their life will get to experience something like that. And I’m just blessed beyond belief to have been able to, to do it myself.

Honestly,

Crew Chief Eric: you know, obviously you’re a big advocate for the Fox body, but then they’re not really Ford powered Fox bodies anymore, as we discovered. So if you’re looking to get into this and you’re [00:29:00] talking about budget bills and stuff like that, what’s a good. You know, starter drag car, or what do you think is maybe one of the best drag cars outside of the Fox body, right?

That is maybe attainable for a lot of people.

Bobby Parks: If I were to go to a different vehicle, I’d probably go back to like the OG black nasty and F body. The fourth gen F bodies are a really good starting point for a drag car. The suspension is really easy to work on. Matter of fact, it’s easier to work with than a Fox body.

It just doesn’t have all the adjustability that a fox body has, but it will put you in the ballpark and it will get the job done. There are a few hundred pounds heavier than a fox body. from the factory. So there’s a little bit more work to be done. There’s a couple extra dollars to be spent, but for the most part, an F body will do well.

And also I’m a big fan of S 10 pickups, first gen or second gen. Those are really good cars to start off with. All of them are, are relatively light. They all have good working suspension. You [00:30:00] have to do like a Caltrax split monoleaf set up on the leaf spring S10s. But once you do that, those things work awesome.

There’s a lot of guys out there that use those that work done. Very well over the years,

Crew Chief Eric: you know, since we’ve been talking about Mustangs for a while, let’s bring up a topic here that may be sensitive for some folks, right? Because the Mustang for the longest time was a solid rear axle because they were catering towards the drag market, the NASCAR guys, you know, the rum runners and everything else.

But, you know, the new generation Mustangs are now leaning towards circuit racing with independent rear suspension. Obviously we saw that for the first time on the SM95s with the Terminators and stuff like that. And then they disappeared again and you know, so on and so forth. But now IRS is the default from the factory.

So what do you think about that? Is it true that, you know, IRS doesn’t work for drag racing and vice versa? Let me put it this way. You

Bobby Parks: can get it to work. The problem is. So much so that in no [00:31:00] prep, I can’t think of a single independent rear suspension car that has won a race as long as I’ve been doing

Crew Chief Eric: it.

Is that because of the inherent weak points in the IRS? It’s not really the suspension itself. It’s that you have so many more mechanical pieces, right? Parts and components, solid rear axle. It’s a bar and wheels. Let’s just call it that. Versus IRS, you’ve got axles, you’ve got CV joints, you’ve got all this other stuff that’s in there.

It’s a. So is that where it really comes in? Or is it something else? Nope. Actually, it’s in the suspension

Bobby Parks: geometry for drag racing. There’s two different styles that people use for suspension setups. One is referred to as squat, which is. typically used on big tire cars. What it does is it puts the instant center point long and low typically.

And what that does is when the car goes to take off, it makes the back of the vehicle drop down because the rear axles actually trying to lift itself off of the surface. That’s why [00:32:00] it looks like the vehicle is squatting, which it is, it’s, but it’s squatting because the suspension geometry is set up in such a way.

That it’s trying to pull the tires away from the surface. And then there’s what most of us small tire guys use, and you can use either, but most of us use separation. Separation works where if you have a, a high and short incident center. It will drive the tires into the surface you’re racing on. You can actually use the geometry to your advantage in the drag racing world.

Whereas if you have independent rear suspension, the mounting points of the arms are fixed. And even if you could make them adjustable, You can’t really change the instant center height and length the way that you can with a four lane. It makes geometry correction or even just modifying the geometry in general really difficult for IRS and IRS usually [00:33:00] because the instant center on those is way out in left field.

You’re going to have a car that squats and you can either use the squat, which a lot of guys in drag racing, what they’ll do is they’ll allow it to squat. And they set their castor camera points up to that squat point. The one trick that guys use with independent rear suspension is you find out where that point is, where your car squats, which is easy to do.

If you, especially if you have shock sensors, they’ll tell you how many inches the car squats. Then you put it on the alignment rack, you squat the car down to that point, and then you adjust your caster camber and get it to where the tire is sitting as flat as possible at that point. And then you have the most available traction.

So yes, you can get it to work. It’s just not easy. It’s going to cost more money. And yes, as you mentioned, there are more failure points. If I were a newbie getting into no prep. And I already had an independent rear suspension car. Sure. I’d go for it. But if I were to start building [00:34:00] one, that would definitely not be ideal.

You would definitely want to go toward a four link setup. And again, Because of the rules, it’s why Fox bodies are so popular. It’s one of the few vehicles that come from the factory with a four link suspension that you’re not going to break any rules. You can run a stock suspension class. You can run stock style suspension classes and all of these no preps and stuff.

Now they’re required that you don’t run a full tube chest. If you’re not running a full tube chassis. then it’s kind of difficult to have a car that’s going to work well that doesn’t have a four link or that you’re not going to turn into a tube chassis or at least back half. So it’s just right out of the box.

It’s a, it’s a car that’s ready to rock. What are the target times you guys are shooting for? It’s different for every surface. Obviously we’re going a lot slower than what the cars are capable of going. It really depends on the venue, like the airports that we go to, you know, you basically have to have [00:35:00] A low eight second car, and it will launch like about a 10, nine second car, but then it’s going to back half like a low eight second car.

And you’ll wind up making a pass. That’s equivalent to about mid eights in the quarter. And then you’ll go to a different venue and you can run, you know, low fives, maybe even a high four, which would be like seven seconds in the quarter mile. It varies from place to place, but I would say if I were to Build a purpose built, no prep car going to be on small tires.

I would shoot for a car that is capable of running low fives, high fours in the eighth or high sevens in the quarter.

Crew Chief Eric: So that makes me wonder, like, how do you feel about when these guys show up, you know, at the track and they’ve got a brand new nine 11 twin turbo or a McLaren or Ferrari, and the car’s putting down eights from the factory, how does that make you feel?

Bobby Parks: Actually.

Crew Chief Eric: I kind of like

Bobby Parks: it. And I know 90 percent of everybody I raced with would [00:36:00] completely disagree. But for example, there’s a car coming out that I’m really interested in Tesla Roadster. I was always kind of a hater of the electric vehicles. I was not into it, especially Tesla’s. I thought they were a joke.

I couldn’t believe that people would even consider thinking of those cars as performance vehicles. And then my buddy bought one and I took it for a drive one day. And I. I couldn’t believe it. It’s the technology and those things is incredible. And one of the things that kind of sparked my interest in the electric vehicles is the traction control, the traction control, because it’s an electric motor, it’s perfect.

You can drive through a puddle and it feels like it never skipped a beat under full power. It’s just nuts. And this new Tesla Roadster coming out is supposed to run high eights right off the showroom floor. Typically like a Ferrari or anything that’s even close to capable of running those from the factory.

They can’t do it in a no prep, even with all the fancy traction [00:37:00] control and things that they have on these new exotic cars, the traction control works very much the same as it does in my car, where if it’s working, it’s slowing you down. Yes. They can go down these surfaces and yes, they can do it pretty fast.

But you can pretty much bring any factory vehicle that’s made today and go to these no preps that we’re racing and you’re not going to win. You might come close, but you’re probably not going to win.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s always the counter argument to that, which is the guy in the Ferrari or the Porsche goes, well, I can do more than just go straight for eight seconds.

Right? So something to be said there too.

Bobby Parks: Yes, but I can also buy a house and still have my car for the same amount of money that they spent. It just depends on what you want to do. I can build a road race car that will beat their car and I can have my drag race car and beat them in a drag race and have two cars to their one car.

It just depends on what you like. Now, me, if I had the money, obviously I would have an exotic car, so I’m just hating [00:38:00] because I can’t buy one.

Crew Chief Brad: But let me ask you this question. So we talked about the electric cars and you know, how great they are for what they are out of the box. But how do you feel about the archaic technology of the Dodge Demon purpose built drag car from the factory paying homage to the purpose built drag cars in the 60s and 70s?

How do you feel about something like that? And then one of those showing up at the track with like a boomer that bought it, you know, it’s their midlife crisis and they got their Dodge Demon and they’re ready to rock. So

Bobby Parks: that’s the funny thing about these cars that they’re building now to the average guy, they read about it in the magazines or they see it on the internet.

They go, wow, like, that’s crazy. You know, this car straight from the factory, it runs nines or runs eights. In reality, first of all, the times that are given on these cars are like the absolute best. Possible time imaginable. I read a little bit about the Dodge Demon when it came out [00:39:00] that they went like a nine 60 with it.

And it turned out that they had taken one of the cars and completely gutted it and ran it. And that’s how they were able to obtain the time because normal customers couldn’t go faster than like 10, three, and they couldn’t figure out why. And then. The truth came out. And then, you know, like I said, like the Tesla Roadster that’s coming out, that’s really the only car that I’m worried about in the no prep work.

If you’re going to go to the track and race, you’re going to get beat anyway. There is no production vehicle out there made that’s going to even run. With the average Joe at the drag strip now because of the LS motor, obviously I’m driving an LS swapped Mustang. So I’m not brand loyal. I couldn’t care less who makes it.

If Honda made a good motor next year that I could go even one mile an hour faster with for 1 less, that would be in my car and I don’t care. You know, I’m a racer. I’m Henry Ford never did anything for me. He’s not writing me any checks. So I couldn’t care less about the Ford Mustang or any [00:40:00] of that. If someone’s got something that’ll work.

Then I’m going to use it. The Tesla is really the only thing that I’m worried about when it comes out because of its advanced traction control. And it’s going to be a monster. If you can run eight 90 with that thing in a wet parking lot, then it’s going to be competitive. I would love to get my hands on one.

If Elon was like, Hey man, here’s a Tesla roadster. Do what you will with it. Let’s see what we can get these things to go. I would have a field day with one of those cars, man. I would tear that thing apart, make it super fast. And I think it would be absolutely unbeatable in the no prep world just because of how the traction control works.

Controlling an electric motor in comparison to electronics, trying to control a gasoline motor or diesel motor or whatever, but in terms of all these other cars, like the Dodge team, and I thought it was nice. It’s a nice car, but that’s not something I can buy and I can go be competitive and really any class.

If I run it, no prep, it’s way too slow. If I run it at the track, [00:41:00] it’s extremely too slow. I mean, nines nowadays. Is like, you’re not even trying, if you’re at the drag strip and you’re running nines, that car had better be nuts because it’s not fast. It’s not to today’s standards. When you can go out and buy a motor for 500 out of the junkyard, slap an eBay turbo kit on it and go out and run eights in the quarter mile.

These nine second, a hundred thousand dollars cars are not impressing anybody

Crew Chief Eric: anymore. So you couldn’t see putting a Tesla power plant in your Fox body and just saying, Oh,

Bobby Parks: I would love to, but there’s a couple problems. One, Tesla is not allowing anybody to do it. So the only way you can do it is you would actually have to buy a car and ruin it, which I don’t have the money to do that.

And there is a couple aftermarket companies now that are selling electric motors to do something similar. That might be the future. It’s still a little bit pricey now, but especially in the no prep world, that may end up being the future. And I hate to say that [00:42:00] cause I’m huge what they say in your petrol head, but, uh, it’s the way of the future.

If they keep going this direction, the electric stuff is going to outperform the gasoline stuff by. Leaps and bounds. If they can just figure out how to get those stupid batteries a little bit lighter, they are going to fly.

Crew Chief Brad: We talked about going to the factory or going to a dealership, buying a car off the showroom floor, taking a drag racing.

That’s going to be probably your novice, your drag racer, your beginner. It doesn’t really know what they’re doing too much. Tell us about some of the safety aspects. Especially since cars are going faster now, what are some of the things that you, I guess, do, you know, safety wise. And I’m assuming that you’re following NHRA guidelines and things like that.

Bobby Parks: That’s one of the other crazy things about this no prep stuff, which is why I kind of refer to it as being like Mad Max style racing, there are not too many safety guidelines, which is scary, especially for the average guy looking to get into racing. It usually turns most people away when they show [00:43:00] up.

And they see some of these rust buckets with like barely a cage in it. And the guy has his regular seat belt on with a bicycle helmet. And guys look at that and they go, Oh my God. It’s like, it’s like

Crew Chief Eric: lemons for drag racing. You hear this?

Bobby Parks: And, you know, it appeals to the budget racer. The problem is 90 percent of these races are being put on by just regular guys.

You know, they’re not sanctioned events. They’re not NHRA. They’re not IHRA. These are just guys that say, Hey, let’s put on a no prep race. Let’s get 30 plus thousand dollars together. If we can get enough guys to run this race, we’ll give away 2030. We got three races coming up this year for a hundred thousand dollars.

If you’re looking to get into drag racing and you’re thinking about actually trying to win money in the real world, this is where it’s at. As a matter of fact, this is your only option. Like I said earlier, for example, dig or die, which is considered like the super bowl of small tire, no [00:44:00] prep. And that’s, that’s one of the.

Big race. That’s the one that I wanted to go to so bad. We ended up winning that one, which was huge. It was a 32, 500 to win that race. One of the most incredible moment in my whole drag racing career. I paid for my car in one race. Think about that. What other type of racing in the whole world? Think of any type of racing.

There’s nothing that you can do nowadays where you’re going to build a car and you’re going to be able to pay for it in one race as an average Joe that’s not backed by multi million dollar companies, it just doesn’t happen until now. So no prep is where it’s at, but the safety is lacking in a lot of it.

And it’s going to catch up with us. The last race I went to a car flipped over the wall and there was a girl filming from the wall, sitting on the wall. Don’t ask me why I have no idea, but the car flipped over on the wall and ended up crushing. And luckily for her, she got out of it with just a broken [00:45:00] arm and a messed up ankle.

Easily could have killed her. I don’t know how it didn’t kill her. From my view, she was dead already and they ended up having to, uh, medevac her out, but she lived and she’s fine now. But the no prep stuff is a little sketchy to say the least. And like I said, it’s kind of a simulated street race. That’s kind of what draws these guys in is they want to see, you know, these ghetto venues.

They want to see crap. Basically. They want to see. nothing being done to the track. It’s horrible surface to race on. They don’t care if it’s safe. They just want a place where they can go and actually win. That’s how far the N. H. R. A. And I. H. R. A. And all these people have gone away from entry level racing.

There’s no more entry level racing at the track. It doesn’t exist anymore. The only option for budget guys is bracket racing. I don’t like bracket racing. Who wants to build a car to run the same time over and over and over again? Not me. That’s typically when everybody goes and gets hot dogs and, [00:46:00] and makes phone calls and goes to the bathroom when the bracket raisers come out.

We don’t want to do that. You know, we want cars that are overpowering the track, doing wheelies, crashing, spinning, flipping over, catching on fire. That’s what people want to see. Small tire, no prep brings it all. You know, you’ll see a li in terms of safety for my I’ve been lucky enough wh outlaws, I picked up a sp and racequip actually supp everything I need to stay I’ve built NHRA certified, NHRA certified cages in my cars, so my personal stuff is safe.

Obviously, I do that because I want to be safe. I don’t care what everybody else around me wants to do, but I wear my Hans device, I wear my certified helmet, and I got a nice fancy carbon fiber helmet from RaceQuip that I love. I wear my fire suit, even though I Probably 70, 80 percent of the people there don’t even own a fire suit.[00:47:00]

I still wear all my safety stuff and I’ve crashed before. So I know how it is. I don’t take those types of chance. I got little girls. So if you got kids, it just makes sense. If you want to walk away from some of these crashes, it’s best to do that. Uh, for example, a matter of fact, if you watch the show, one of the two episodes of street outlaws that I raced on season three of Memphis street outlaws.

Episode six. So we’re racing at a airport in West Virginia, super sketchy. One guy crashes in a car called the hillbilly hustler. So you can probably imagine what kind of safety equipment that guy had on board. But when this thing started rolling, parts just started flying off the car. Like they were never even bolted down.

Like the doors. We’re literally just door skins look like they were glued onto the car. And the guy flipped over and he ended up smashing his arm so bad that he had to get it amputated. Another guy crashed. He flipped just as bad flipped over end over end [00:48:00] crashed into the camera equipment and everything.

And because he had a certified cage and a nice safe car, he got up and walked right away, like nothing happened. So, I mean, that’s kind of the difference. I understand not having the money, dude, I I’ve been there. You get by on what you can just to do it. And it’s you that’s taking the risk. So it’s like, you know, you decide how important this racing stuff is to you.

Is it worth your life? Is it worth a broken arm or are you going to just wait and save up a couple extra dollars to make sure that you’re safe? And then go down there. And if something, God forbid does happen, you just get right up and walk away. I would say 99 percent of all the crashes that happen in certified cars, guys just walk away, they don’t even go to the hospital.

I mean, they’re hitting walls at 200 miles an hour, flipping over and catching on fire, and they kick the door open and they walk away. Not everybody, but almost everyone, but the no prep is a little bit different. And that’s why I think it draws so many people. There is an element [00:49:00] of danger to it. I do think that it’s going to change slowly, but surely with every race and with every accident, there’s going to be mandates until it gets to a point where it’s going to be almost like track racing.

Crew Chief Brad: So we talked a lot about your time on street outlaws, but that’s not where you got your, your television debut. You were on pinks. Oh, yeah. On ESPN, the Ocho. Oh,

Bobby Parks: yeah. Matter of fact, I was on two episodes, but one of the episodes I was just kind of hanging out with a buddy. And then, um, the other episode was Justin Birchman from JPC versus a guy named Brian Leaf, a guy named Nate Pritchett.

He was one of the co hosts for the show. And he’s a personal friend of mine, drag racing buddy. And he was like, man, you should put your car on pinks. And that was the OG Black Nasty. And you know how I felt about that car. That was my baby.

Yeah. There was

no way that I was going to lose that car. I got the advantage of knowing who I was supposed to race before I raced them.

So I agreed. I signed the contract. I don’t know. What it was like after [00:50:00] my episode, it was legit. You had to sign the title to your car over. If you lose, that guy gets your car.

Oh

my god. But behind the scenes, which kind of makes the show kind of suck, outside of the fact that the show actually sucks, because, because the way that it was set up, the host not knowing anything about drag racing, Or anything about sandbagging.

It just made the whole entire show pointless. You would just go out, purposely lose first round, so that you could get something in the next negotiation, and sandbag the entire time, just pretend that your car is slow, and then when it comes down to the last round or two, Then you take off and you beat them.

The first season that aired, nobody was really catching on. I don’t know how. I mean, that’s like street racing 101. So I don’t know why it took so long for everybody else to catch on. But I mean, we knew about it right away. So we went out and lost the first two rounds like that on purpose. [00:51:00] And then just annihilated them for the rest of the rounds.

It’s like easy money every time. So we did that. I did two commercials. I did one commercial for a place called altered atmosphere that it worked for a time, which was actually an import shop. And, uh, I kind of opened up my own domestic wing and then you may have seen it. I did a commercial for GM at one point, which was weird.

I was working for the dealership at the time and some guy asked me if I wanted to be in a commercial and I thought it was going to be some little cable access thing and I was going to be like in the background somewhere and nobody would ever see it. Turns out it was nationally televised. They showed that commercial on just about every channel, every 15 20 minutes.

I forgot all about that. Yeah, I

Crew Chief Brad: remember it now. I forgot all about that. Oh my god.

Bobby Parks: When they went to go film, they’re like, oh yeah, we got a paid actor, so don’t worry about it. And you know, here’s your script. I was like script, like what, I got to say something? And the paid actor turned out to be a guy that just literally [00:52:00] drove by in a car.

That was the paid actor. Meanwhile, they’re giving me 850 to do the whole entire commercial by myself. And I had no clue until two tractor trailers pull up with a big GM logo on the side and like 50 guys with camera equipment come out and I’m like, Oh my God, what did I get myself into? But it was a cool experience.

You know, I don’t, I don’t know why I keep ending up on TV. Hopefully, Not on the news or anything for America’s Most Wanted or anything like that in the future. But that was the first thing was Pinks and the commercials. And then we got an offer to go to Memphis. A guy named Dwayne Morris said that he had heard my name being tossed around a lot because they were looking for legit street racers.

They weren’t looking for Some guy that races at the track and wants to dabble in the street racing world and not get in trouble, they wanted to find guys who legit had street raced in their life, knew what they were doing, at least to a point [00:53:00] and go out there and try and run with these guys. At the time and still is probably one of my favorite shows on television because there’s not that many drag racing shows on TV.

So it appealed to me right away. I went out there not knowing how it was going to be. And there is a little bit of uh, I don’t want to say trickery, but let’s just put it this way. Hollywood magic. Well, let’s just say we’re on their home turf, so they have home field advantage and they have home field advantage in more ways than one.

For example, we’re not supposed to test on the road that we’re going to be racing on and those guys had been racing on that road for at least a year or two. So who knows how many passes these guys had on that road. And then we’ve got to come from 16 hours away. And drop our cars out of the back of a trailer, go down a road.

We’ve never been on before in our lives and be expected to beat these professionals because that’s what they are. I mean, they’re basically professional street racers. What we [00:54:00] ended up doing is we ended up going down almost a week early. We found out from previous guys on the show, what road that they raced on.

And we went out there and we did our own testing in the middle of the night illegally. That’s part of the reason why, if you’re going to do this stuff, Don’t pretend to be a street racer, either be one and do it, or don’t do it at all. Cause you’re going to get yourself embarrassed. And it happens a lot.

Luckily for me, with my experience, I did well on the show. There was a little bit of trickery played on me in terms of tire size, which really screwed me up. I sent emails out to the production company and asked them about what size tire I was allowed to run. They don’t know much about drag racing.

They’re just putting on a TV show. So they told me a certain tire size. I ended up getting that tire size. And when we showed up, we found out everybody else was running on bigger tires. I didn’t want to have to deal with the disadvantage. We ended up going to the shop of one of the guys who’s on the show named Dennis Bailey, and we went to his shop and bought a new set of [00:55:00] tires and why everybody else was having a good old time hanging out with JJ, the boss and all the guys from the show.

Me and my dad and one of my guys were in a parking lot somewhere in Memphis. We’ve never been before changing tires on the back of my car. It ended up messing with my traction control settings. I did lose that race, but I was out on them by two cars within the first 200 feet. So it was going to be an easy win.

We had them covered by long shot. Just a stupid mistake on my part. But luckily for me, I got some of my redemption. They came to West Virginia to run on the airport and we shot the season finale. We ended up running, I forgot what it was. I want to say it was five rounds and we went to the finals with Dennis Bailey, believe it or not, and did really well on that show.

That was episode seven of season three. So we did episode six, and then we did episode seven right after that, which ended up being the season finale. That was a hell of an experience, man. That was really neat, you know, with the show having been on air [00:56:00] for, I forgot what it was, eight, nine, ten years, and me wanting to be on the show, and you and I have a mutual friend, Dasan Holloway.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. Rest in peace.

Bobby Parks: We wanted to be on the show and he would be at my shop working on his car all day, every day for months and months and months. Eventually he went to go work for revolution and he built a bad ass car that he would have definitely been competitive down there. And him and I, our goal was to make it on the show one way or another.

We were hell bent on making it on the show. You know, as we both know, he ended up. Taking his own life. The really sad thing about that was not even four, maybe five months after that is when I was offered to be on the show, he would have been on the show. If he would have held out a little bit longer, he would have been right on there with me.

But I ended up taking a picture. Of them down there with me. And I had it in my dashboard when I was down there racing those guys. So he was there with me in [00:57:00] spirit. He came with me to the airport race. So, you know, he made it in one way or another. I’m glad that we did well. I’m glad that we went on the show.

So regardless of the outcome, you know, we made a little bit of money on it. We picked up a couple of sponsors from it and did really well on the show. So I can’t complain. I loved it. I’d do it again. Matter of fact, we got offered to go back on the show again. To their new spinoff called the, uh, America’s Fastest, I think is what it’s called.

And that was in between my transition from the truck to my current car. So I didn’t have a car at the time, so I had to bow out. But the truck, the guy that I sold it to, Eric Carey, matter of fact, you know him as Sledgehammer. He ended up buying the truck from me and he took it to Las Vegas to race on the show.

Crew Chief Eric: So two of my vehicles were on the show, you know, a lot of us in at least this community come from a different world, right? Where we’re all motor sports brethren at the end of the day, but there’s different disciplines within this. So drag racing is one of them. They got the [00:58:00] rally guys and the autocrossers.

And I happen to come through autocross and cart racing into road racing. Now, now road racing, not to be confused with street racing, road racing being circuit racing, where we make the right and the left turns, you know, and sometimes go straight. But. You know, for us, there’s a lot of schooling involved.

There’s a lot of just coming up through the ranks and developing your skills and honing yourself as a driver and going to different venues. Right. And in the drag racing world, it seems like, yes, there’s different classes of drag racing, but to your point, there’s the no prep, you know, there’s the street racing and then there’s the track racing.

So is there the same kind of education system in drag racing, or is it really just the school of hard knocks? Mostly just the school of hard knocks.

Bobby Parks: Now the faster you go, chassis has to be certified. You have to get a license. I’ve had a license. You got to make your track passes. They got to know that you can handle the car at whatever speed that you’re going to be going.

But that’s the track stuff. Once you get into the snow prep world, it’s kind of just a free for [00:59:00] all. You know, you could have never made a pass in your life. And just jump in a car. You don’t even have to have an actual driver’s license and they’re going to let you go down again. Like I said, this is still the early stages of no prep.

So no doubt in my mind, the safety stuff is going to come on. Certainly it’s probably going to come because it’s going to be forced on everybody, no skin off my back. I already got everything I need. If, if they were to come and check my car out or check my safety equipment. I’m legit, you know, for as fast as I’m going, I’m legit, so I don’t need to worry about it.

The rest of the world is still playing catch up and a lot of it just has to do with money.

Crew Chief Eric: So I think you’re in a rare position where you’ve been doing this for a long time. And in motorsport, I often see that a lot of people either are lifers like yourself, and you’re in the minority in that respect.

Or they’re like these, you know, bluebirds, they fly in for a couple of years and then they disappear. And then all of a sudden they’re doing macrame and playing tennis and God knows what else. What’s [01:00:00] the life expectancy. And I don’t mean that in a morbid sort of way. What’s the seasonal expectancy of a drag racer?

Is it about three to four years, just like it is for us in the road racing world? Nope. That’s a big part of why I got into it, believe it or

Bobby Parks: not. My original passion was road racing. I desperately wanted to be. You know, the next Mario Andretti, I think most kids do want to be that way. You know, I grew up loving Ferraris and Lamborghinis like every team.

That was my thing. I never really cared too much for the drag racing thing until my dad actually brought me to drag strip. And I did, I did a little bit of road racing myself, motorcycles, sport bikes. So I know exactly what you’re talking about. One of the reasons why I ended up gravitating toward. Drag racing is because of the life expectancy, if you will, of a drag racer.

I got buddies who are 70 some years old that are still drag racing really fast cars. Cars fast enough that, let’s put it this way, if you’re not used to going that fast, I don’t care who you are. [01:01:00] You’re not going to jump in that old man’s car and run what that guy runs. It will scare you to death. You know, these guys are going over 200 miles an hour in the eighth mile, not the quarter mile.

These cars are literally capable of taking off like airplanes mid track, and it happens. You can crash. And if you can get your nerve back, you can keep on doing it because most of the time, you’re not going to get hurt. Drag racing is weird like that. Every once in a while, somebody dies. And it kind of freaks everybody out because it’s such a rare thing.

But it does happen and you have to understand that it can and it will happen. One of the more famous guys in drag racing these days, Lyle Barnett, he’s got a whole video on safety. He was in a real bad car fire going down the track. It burned through a carbon fiber. Firewall

and

just burn the guy from his toes to the eyebrows.

And lucky for him, he had a good fire suit on. He didn’t wear the sock over his head. So that burnt the area inside the helmet, the face shield was up. So it got his eyes that burn his, [01:02:00] his beard off and got his toes real bad. Either way, the guy got it pretty bad and he’s a huge advocate for safety equipment now.

And he’ll tell you a story that. When he’s done telling it, you’re not going to just jump in a car and be an idiot after that. And if you are, then, then you’re just an idiot, plain and simple. And if you’re smart about how you race, especially in no crap. There’s hero drivers and then there’s smart drivers.

A hero driver will stay on the gas way longer than they’re supposed to in hopes that they still win the race. And then everybody goes, Oh, that was so amazing. You’re such a good driver. You know, you were almost certainly going to flip the car over, but somehow you managed to pull it off. And that’s what a lot of these guys shoot for.

But I don’t, I’m not a hero driver. I’ve crashed a car before. Yes, I’ve made some sketchy passes. No doubt about it. You know, there’s probably people that would argue with me. Oh, bullshit, Bobby. We’ve seen you go through the finish line sideways. Yeah, that’s because something happened that I [01:03:00] didn’t expect, but bet your ass.

I was already out of the gas long before that happened. And that’s probably why I went through sideways and not upside down. Whereas other guys, you know, you let off just, I mean, a 10th of a second too late and it’s over for you, cars crashed, you’re done, you’re out, whatever much money it costs you to put in that car.

And you’re not going to be racing again in terms of how long you can keep doing this stuff. A lot of it depends on how smart you are. And I’m, you know, it’s the same way in the road race world. If you take it easy, you’re going to go a lot longer and you might even have a little bit more fun. But if you’re competitive like me, I would take nothing less than a GT3 cup car.

If I’m going to do road racing, I can’t, I can’t go slow. It’s gotta be fast. It’s gotta be dangerous. It’s gotta be, you know, top level, whatever it is I’m doing. So you don’t

Crew Chief Brad: want a GTI? Yeah,

Bobby Parks: I mean, it depends. Is it LS swapped and, uh, you know, got some super wide tires, all that?

Crew Chief Eric: Now looking back over all the years that you spent in the sport, what’s some [01:04:00] advice you would give somebody starting out?

The

Bobby Parks: biggest one, this is because of my many years of building cars for a living. Know what you’re going to do with the car before you even start, before you even think about getting into racing, be certain of what you want to do. Because even myself personally, I’ve run into situations where I’ll build a car or I’ll make a change based on what I think I want to do.

And then I ended up not doing that. And then basically the car is no good to me anymore. For example, the S10, that was one of my favorite cars. It was my fastest thing that I ever owned. It was incredibly fast. It was awesome. It was the highest quality, highest caliber vehicle I’ve ever owned. But it ended up being worthless to me because I couldn’t race in small tire class with it anymore.

So that pretty much killed that. And then I found that having your dream car is not all it’s [01:05:00] cracked up to be. If you can’t afford to race the car that you built. So even if you can afford to build a certain car. Take into account all the maintenance that’s going to be required, which I’m sure in the road race world is probably top of the list.

Don’t get into a class that you can’t even afford to replace the tires and brakes every time you go out, you’re going to cause yourself more problems than anything. And then even though you’re going fast. It’s not fun at that point, when you’re spending every dime you have when you’re homeless, just to be able to keep doing what you love to do.

It’s not fun anymore, you know, then it loses all the fun. One example I like to give my customers is you ever drive go karts? You ever go to, you know, Ocean City or, or anywhere really and ride around on some go karts and maybe bash into each other a little bit. It’s fun, right? I mean, it’s hard to not have a good time.

When you’re doing something so cheap with so little consequences. So, I mean, you can crash those things. You’re [01:06:00] probably not even gonna get hurt real bad and you’re out there doing it for dollars. When you start upgrading and go faster and faster and faster, you start to outrun your wallet. And as soon as you start out running your wallet, this stuff sucks.

It becomes depressing. It goes from fun to miserable, almost immediately. You know, I got rid of the truck. And went through a little state of depression for a while between my back being hurt, money situation and COVID hit at the exact same time. So it was like a snowball effect, but yeah, if I could give anybody advice.

Know exactly what you want to do before you do it. Cause it’s going to save you a ton of time and money and aggravation and get with somebody that’s done it, whatever it is that you want to do, go find somebody who’s doing it. And if you want to be competitive, don’t talk to somebody at the bottom of the barrel.

Go talk to one of the top tier guys that are doing it. Ask them what it takes, ask them how much [01:07:00] money it’s going to cost and see if it’s something that’s feasible for you. Don’t worry about what everybody else is doing. You go and try and outrun these rich guys. Like I did for years, for years and years, all I wanted to do was outrun these rich guys.

Cause I got a sense of pride of taking something that, you know, costs half what their car does. And, and I, you know, they live, in big fancy houses and they come with double stacker trailers that cost more than the place I live. And if I beat those guys, it was just incredible to me. But when you keep trying to keep up or you don’t, as they say, stay in your lane, it ruins, eventually it’s going to ruin the experience for you.

And that’s where a lot of these guys get out of it. You know, in road racing, drag racing, you start racing over your head, you get a little bit too competitive, and then it just sucks. And then you get out of it. And I see it all the time. I, oh, you know, this sucks. And it’s like, no, this doesn’t suck. You made it suck.

You know, you went into something that you weren’t ready for. You’re in over [01:08:00] your head. And of course it sucks. You know, you’re trying to compete on a level you should never be in. And that was one of the mistakes I made. So that would be the best advice I could give to get into it.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s actually really sound advice.

And I think it’s applicable to multiple disciplines. So thank you for that.

Bobby Parks: Thinking

Crew Chief Brad: about getting it. So what is the future of the black nasty? We talked about electric motors and electric, the future of drag racing as a whole, but what’s the future of the black nasty old, I’ll tell you

Bobby Parks: what. I know I’ve been talking about this Tesla stuff a lot lately.

And if I stay in no prep, I would highly consider doing an electric based, no prep car, and I think it would end up getting outlawed pretty fast if, and when that were to happen, I would start my own drag race league with electric motors, which there is one already. It’s just small. It’s not very popular.

There’s not a lot of guys involved. I do think that the [01:09:00] electric based vehicle is something that I want to dabble in. I just don’t have the money for it right now. I do think that I could do big things with it. There’s already controllers for this stuff after market controllers. I mean, for traction control, there’s huge things that I could do with that stuff.

Obviously when this roadster deal comes out, I wouldn’t be able to just buy it and go to a race and win. It’s not going to happen, but I do believe that if I were given one, Elon, if you’re listening, he’s our number one listener. He’s our, our biggest Patreon. I hope so, man. Please give me one of those roadsters.

I will make that car about the most popular car on the planet within about six months. I promise you. See, I’d rather see you do it

Crew Chief Eric: with a Mach E honestly. Hey, I mean, Ford built that crazy equivalent to 1400 horsepower version of that thing. So it’s doable, right? Yeah, exactly.

Crew Chief Brad: I I’d rather see Bobby in a Chevy Bolt.[01:10:00]

Bobby Parks: Hey man, I’ll make something happen. I promise you one way or another, figure out how to make it fast.

Crew Chief Brad: We talked about some of the sponsors and stuff that you’re getting equipment from. Do you have anybody that you want to kind of plug or thank?

Bobby Parks: Yeah, absolutely. I got a guy who’s a, is more a friend than a sponsor.

Actually two of them, Chewy over Chewy’s performance in Mount Airy. He hooks me up with a lot of stuff. He’s been sponsoring me now for a long time. So he’s one of the original guys that believed in me, sponsored me all the way back into the 2012 era when I won world cup finals for the first time. And then a mutual friend of ours, Conrad Aschenbach.

Sponsors me through front Royal Ford. So he hooks me up and I also have a guy, David Gates, who does all my transmission work, literally the only thing I don’t do in my vehicles is build my own transmissions. And that’s because this guy, David is on top of my shit. You know, if I break something, he comes, he grabs it.

He’ll literally pick it up from my shop, rebuild the whole thing and drop it back [01:11:00] off the next day. If I break at the track, he will come to the track. And fix my shit there at the track so I can make next round. If it’s possible, I got some pretty amazing people. That had my back and hopefully I can pick up a few more this season and next season, but the no prep thing is kind of hard sponsorship wise.

Cause you know, it’s not a sanction event, but it’s kind of, like I said, Mad Max style, it borders on illegal. If you didn’t know better, if you showed up at the track and saw what was going on, you would think some of this stuff is illegal, but it’s not. So, you know, the sponsorships in that world is a little bit more difficult, but since we won literally the biggest.

Small tire, no prep race ever put on it, dig or die. It’s opened up a lot of doors for me. Uh, you know, honestly, I would have never had the opportunity if it wasn’t for that race and winning that race. Congrats to you. I got the black nasty page on Facebook and it’s the underscore black [01:12:00] underscore nasty on Instagram that West Virginia airport race that’s coming up.

I want to say it’s, um, May 15th, if I remember correct. And that one’s going to be for a hundred thousand dollars. And they’re bringing a famous starting line guy. They call him limpy. He’s been on street outlaws numerous times for the cash days. So they’re bringing him out to be the flagger. And that race is going to be for a hundred thousand dollars at the West Virginia airport.

Crew Chief Eric: Where is that in West Virginia? How far is it from summit point?

Bobby Parks: Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. So it’s close. It’s right over the border

Crew Chief Eric: of.

Bobby Parks: Lake Hagerstown to West Virginia area. Okay.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That’s not far at all.

Bobby Parks: Just past Charlestown, I guess.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh yeah. So not far from Summit Point. Yeah.

Bobby Parks: Great.

Yeah. It’s actually real close. Very

Crew Chief Eric: cool. Yeah. We’ll definitely have to come check that out.

Bobby Parks: That one will be like one of the more, I hesitate to say well put together, but it’ll be organized. It’ll have some level of safety. So you won’t see too much crazy, crazy, like just junk piles going down the track.

[01:13:00] So it’ll probably be something right up y’all’s alley for in terms of seeing a, a really legit first note. It’ll give you a really good idea of what it’s all about.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, Bobby, it’s been a pleasure talking with you today and delving into the world of drag racing and learning more about the black nasty and no prep NHRA, and just all the various different aspects of drag racing and street racing.

You’ve done some exciting things over the last 20 years, personally. Can’t wait to see what’s next. I wanted to wish you good luck this season and, uh, You know, moving forward and, uh, just thank you for coming on.

Bobby Parks: Yeah, thank you guys. I really appreciate it. It’s been fun talking to you guys. Absolutely.

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Instagram at GrandTouringMotorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, You can call or text us at 202 630 1770, [01:14:00] or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag.

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Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Break Fix Podcast
• 00:35 Meet Robert Parks: The Man Behind Black Nasty
• 01:45 Early Days and Inspiration
• 02:35 The Rise of the LS Engine
• 03:33 Building and Tuning Drag Cars
• 04:59 The Origin of Black Nasty
• 06:19 From Camaro to Mustang
• 11:01 No Prep Racing Explained
• 16:36 Challenges and Triumphs in No Prep Racing
• 25:29 Favorite Tracks and Memorable Races
• 28:50 Advice for Aspiring Drag Racers
• 36:00 Electric Vehicles and Modern Drag Racing
• 39:41 The Racer’s Perspective on Car Brands
• 40:04 Tesla’s Potential in Drag Racing
• 42:30 Safety Concerns in No Prep Racing
• 43:43 The Reality of No Prep Racing Events
• 49:11 Personal Experiences and TV Appearances
• 01:03:56 Advice for Aspiring Racers
• 01:08:20 Future of Drag Racing and Electric Cars
• 01:10:09 Sponsors and Upcoming Races
• 01:13:09 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Bonus content available as a #PITSTOP mini-sode.

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