Eddie Hill is fast. He’s so fast he once held simultaneous speed records on land and water. Once, when his boat crashed and he was pitched out, he beat the boat across the finish line-and was caught by the electric timer at 166 m.p.h.
Not even time can slow down Eddie Hill. He will be 58 in March, but next weekend in Pomona, Calif., he will begin defense of his NHRA top fuel drag-racing championship, and there is every reason he should be faster than ever.
“This will be the first year I’ll be racing the way I always wanted to,” he says, “not having to pinch pennies and having to race at less than our potential.”
That’s because a lucrative new three-year deal with his sponsor, Pennzoil, which will take him into his 60s, plus the money gleaned from his championship, at last will put him on more or less even financial footing against the likes of Kenny Bernstein and Joe Amato.
Hill was in Chicago last week, along with other racing champions, being honored for a crown that finally came 27 years after he had retired from his first career in drag racing.
“I’d always told myself,” he recalls, “that if I ever got afraid of a car, I’d never get back in it.”
Race drivers are brave by definition, but they are not necessarily foolhardy. Hill figured it was time to get out after his front-engine dragster caught fire at 200 m.p.h. at Green Valley Raceway near Dallas in 1966.
“That last fire really scared me,” he says now. “I could have died. I was racing on a track that ran into, well, I won’t call it a forest, but some really heavy-duty trees on both sides.
“The fire temporarily blinded me. I couldn’t see at all until after the car stopped. I thought I was drifting off to the right, and the tendency was to pull the car to the left. If I had obeyed that tendency, I would have hit those trees and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Because when I stopped the car and got out I saw that the wheels were already off the left edge of the track.”
There was one more race left in the season, but Hill walked away while he could still walk away.
Hill, who owned a motorcycle shop in his native Texas, spent several years racing bikes, and “I ended up with over 100 trophies, but nothing on a national level. I was using racing to sell what I was selling.”
By that time, “I thought I had pretty successfully kicked the natural methane habit.” But then he saw his first drag boat race.
“The first run I ever saw was a pair of blown fuel hydros-the fastest class. They were running side by side, and one boat flipped way in the air and pitched the driver out. His personal parachute opened when he was about 50 feet in the air, and pieces from the boat were flying around him and I thought he must be crazy.
“But I couldn’t get over the smell of nitro and the sound of thunder. In less than a month I had my own boat.”
He was successful beyond his dreams.
“I was lucky enough to win my first race,” he remembers, “and that sets the hook. It makes it tough to quit.”
Over the next 10 years he won every major race, some as many as five times, won two world championships, and set a record of 229 m.p.h. in a propellor-driven boat that stood until last summer. He also had three spectacular wrecks, the last of which nearly killed him.
One, at Lake Firebird in Phoenix, was the one where “I was pitched out and the timing lights got me instead of the boat at 166 m.p.h. through the finish line. I got the distance record, too. I went a quarter of a mile without the boat.” When he finally touched down, “they said I bounced nine times. I skipped across the water like a pebble.”
The final wreck, also at Lake Firebird, convinced him to get out of drag boats and into something a little safer.
“Basically,” he observes, “any boat going more than 200 m.p.h. is out of control. The safety design is inadequate for the speeds.”
On a day when he would clinch his second world championship, Hill nearly died after crossing the finish line when his boat went airborne and threw him through the hull at 217 m.p.h., breaking seven bones and causing eye injuries and a concussion. He couldn’t swim, but it didn’t matter.
“When they found me I was unconscious face down in the water,” he says. “I don’t recall any of what happened. I remember getting the starter’s signal to start the boat, and the next thing I remember is the light on the roof of the ambulance.”
It took him nearly a year to recover.
“I got over everything but the brain damage, which the doctors insist was a pre-existing condition or I wouldn’t have been in the boat,” he says.
All along he had been plotting a return to drag racing.
“I was setting records and winning big races, and I felt, man, if I could take any part of this technology and transfer it to asphalt maybe I’d be lucky enough to get a sponsor this time.”
While he was recovering, to lift his spirits, his wife Ercie bought him a drag racer for his birthday.
“We fished that boat engine out, dried it out and painted it wrinkled red to cover up the corrosion,” he says.
They installed it in the drag racer and went racing.
In the beginning it was just the two of them.
“You can’t do that in top fuel,” Hill says, “but we were so naive we were doing it anyway. We were the only team where there was just one gal left outside the car once the driver was in it. We did that for about a year. We were so broke and so poor, we didn’t have one spare piston. If anything at all went wrong, we were out of business.”
Hill struggled along by watching the pennies and saving his equipment and eventually caught the eye of Pennzoil, which offered to sponsor him.
“It made me wonder about them,” he says. “When they picked us up we had never won a race.”
He has won 11 since, including a record-tying six last year. But “it was only recently we stopped going through the pits the day after a race and picking up other teams’ discarded tires. The first race we won at Phoenix was on tires that had 14 runs on ’em.”
Ercie is still part of Eddie’s crew, which now has grown to seven, and she also serves as his business manager and public relations director. She has done everything on the race car except drive it.
“She’s too valuable to risk in something as dangerous as a race car,” says Hill.
For much of the season the entire crew lives in the Hills’ house, but now he hopes to have separate quarters for the crew.
“We’re going to get us a shop and pay our guys better,” he says. “Our crew chief has been with us for 11 years and has had many offers. He’s stayed with us out of loyalty. He’s always known if we ever hit it big-time we’d take care of him.”
It was only last year that Hill started paying himself a salary, and this will be the first year he will draw a paycheck from the start of the season. But quite obviously he’s not in it for the money.
“I get so much fun out of it it’s not like work,” he says. “If I won the big lottery and became inordinately wealthy, I’d still be doing what I’m doing.”
There are many dimensions to Eddie Hill, who has a degree from Texas A & M and sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and ponders philosophical questions.
“I ask why a lot,” he says. “Why do pistons burn and superchargers smoke. Why do drag boats flip at 217 m.p.h. Why do governments lose their way, and why do the planets stay in place. Why does the ocean clean itself up after we pollute it. I’ve been trying to become an adult-but it looks like I’ll die of old age first.”
