Ed “The Ace” McCulloch
He Never Won the Championship. He Just Kept Winning the Race Everybody Wanted Most.
Ed McCulloch came out of the Pacific Northwest with the sort of reputation that tended to arrive before the transporter did. He was fast, mechanically sharp, stubborn about losing and not especially interested in being pushed around.
Drag racing supplied him with the nickname “The Ace.” Indianapolis supplied the evidence.
McCulloch won 22 NHRA national events — 18 in Funny Car and four in Top Fuel. He never won an NHRA world championship, which normally leaves a fairly noticeable hole in a great racer’s résumé.
McCulloch filled his with six U.S. Nationals victories. Five came in Funny Car. The sixth came after he went back to Top Fuel.
If the championship trophy was going to keep avoiding The Ace, he seemed perfectly willing to keep taking home the trophy everybody else wanted most.
The Ace Started in the Long Cars
Like several great Funny Car drivers of his generation, McCulloch started in Top Fuel. He and brother Dan McCulloch built a Chevrolet-powered dragster in 1964. On its second outing Ed crashed it hard enough to announce that his driving career was over.
That retirement did not prove especially durable.
McCulloch soon became involved with Jim Albrich and the Chrysler-powered Northwind dragster. By 1965 the team was good enough for McCulloch to knock Pete Robinson from the top of the influential Drag News Mr. Eliminator list.
He could tune the machinery, understand the clutch and make the decisions as well as drive the thing. That mechanical sense followed him through the rest of his career and eventually became nearly as useful outside the cockpit as it had been inside.
Then Somebody Handed Him a Funny Car
In 1969 McCulloch teamed with Art Whipple, who had a new big-block Chevrolet-powered Camaro Funny Car. McCulloch was supposed to make some test passes.
Instead he qualified No. 1 and won the event. Whipple had found his driver, and McCulloch had found the kind of car that suited him.
Funny Cars were short, loud, difficult to see out of and considerably more interested in changing lanes than a Top Fuel dragster. McCulloch later made no secret of which one demanded more from the driver.
That suited The Ace just fine.
Indianapolis Started the Habit
McCulloch and Whipple hit the match-race circuit hard in 1971 and arrived at the U.S. Nationals with a Barracuda that knew how to win. McCulloch qualified second and worked through Sammy Miller, Jim Dunn and Connie Kalitta before beating Dale Pulde in the final.
It was McCulloch’s first NHRA national-event victory.
Of course it happened at Indy.
Then came 1972. McCulloch opened the season by winning the Winternationals at Pomona. Shortly afterward he and Whipple split, leaving plenty of people convinced the winning was about to stop.
McCulloch and brother Dan went to Gainesville without Whipple and won. Then they went to Columbus and won there too. By the end of the season, McCulloch had put together a remarkable 24-3 national-event round record and won Indianapolis for the second consecutive year.
The fellow who supposedly couldn’t run the car without somebody else had misplaced the memo.
The Revellution
Revell, the model-kit company, became a sponsor and the Funny Car became the Revellution. McCulloch was among the early racers to receive real sponsorship money from Revell rather than simply royalties from model sales, part of drag racing’s transition from racers selling model kits to companies buying serious space on race cars.
The Revellution name stayed with McCulloch’s cars through 1977 and became nearly as recognizable as the driver. The victories, however, became harder to find.
McCulloch lost the 1973 Indy final to Don Prudhomme, reached the 1974 World Finals final and was runner-up three times in 1976 — every one of those finals lost to Prudhomme.
There are easier ways to make a living than racing Funny Cars while The Snake is treating national events like private property.
Eight Years Later, Indy Again
Eventually the match-race grind, the cost of professional Funny Car racing and the shortage of sponsorship money caught up with McCulloch. He sold his operation.
Then Ed Pink called.
McCulloch climbed into the Super Shops Funny Car for 1980 and promptly won the U.S. Nationals, beating Tom Ridings on a holeshot in the final. His previous NHRA victory had been Indy in 1972.
Eight years later, the drought ended at exactly the same race.
The place was becoming ridiculous.
Larry Minor Put The Ace Back in the Fight
After the Super Shops deal ended, McCulloch spent most of 1981 through 1983 away from national-event competition. Money was tight enough that he went back to driving a truck.
Then Larry Minor added a Funny Car to his nitro operation and offered McCulloch the seat. The first years were not easy. The new car was winless in 1984 and 1985, and the 1984 Cajun Nationals brought something considerably worse than losing.
The Cajun Nationals Crash
At Baton Rouge, McCulloch’s Oldsmobile got loose, crossed the centerline and collided with John Collins. Both cars were destroyed, but both drivers survived without serious injury.
McCulloch had spent his career taking pride in being able to control a Funny Car when it did something stupid. Crossing the track and collecting another racer bothered him far more than replacing bent tubing and fiberglass.
He came back anyway.
See the 1984 Cajun Nationals crash in Walked Away
By 1986 the Minor operation was winning. McCulloch took the Gatornationals and Atlanta, then won at Dallas in 1987 and finished third in the standings.
He was also in the other lane when John Force finally won his first NHRA national event. That turned out to be a historically inconvenient fellow to help get started.
Indianapolis Wasn’t Finished With Him
McCulloch returned to the U.S. Nationals winner’s circle in 1988, beating Kenny Bernstein in the final on a holeshot. He came back in 1990 and won it again.
Five U.S. Nationals Funny Car victories.
The 1990 season was also his strongest championship run. McCulloch won five races in nine final-round appearances and finished second in points behind John Force.
No championship again. Indy again.
Some drivers build their legends around season titles. McCulloch kept showing up at the biggest race on the schedule and taking that trophy instead.
Then He Went Back to Top Fuel
In 1992, after spending most of his career wrestling Funny Cars, McCulloch returned to Top Fuel in Minor’s McDonald’s-sponsored dragster. The switch put Cruz Pedregon in the Funny Car and The Ace back in the long cars where he had started almost three decades earlier.
His first Top Fuel national-event victory came at a familiar address: Indianapolis.
The victory made McCulloch one of the rare drivers to win the U.S. Nationals in both nitro categories and gave him six Indy wins overall. He won twice more that season, finished fifth in points and collected his 22nd and final NHRA national-event victory at Houston in 1993.
That same year he ran 301.70 mph at Dallas and joined the 300-mph club. The Ace had started in Top Fuel, spent decades becoming a Funny Car legend, then returned to the long cars and proved he could still win there too.
Then The Ace Started Tuning Them
Retiring from driving did not remove McCulloch from nitro racing. It moved him to the computer.
McCulloch came from a generation that learned tuning by reading spark plugs, bearings, clutch dust and whatever the car had tried to tear apart on the previous run. He adapted when data systems changed the way professional teams understood the same problems.
He worked with Connie Kalitta and Doug Kalitta, then later joined Don Prudhomme’s operation and helped tune Ron Capps to six wins in 11 final-round appearances and a second-place points finish in 2000.
The driver who had always understood what the machinery was doing eventually made a second career out of telling other drivers how to make it behave.
McCulloch was inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 2011.
The Bottom Line
There is still that missing world championship. It looks considerably smaller sitting next to 22 national-event victories, wins in both nitro categories, a 300-mph Top Fuel run, a successful tuning career and six U.S. Nationals trophies.
Indianapolis is where the whole McCulloch story comes into focus. He won there for the first time in 1971, repeated during his monster 1972 season, returned after an eight-year NHRA drought and won again in 1980, then added Funny Car victories in 1988 and 1990.
Finally, The Ace climbed back into Top Fuel and won Indy there in 1992 too.
Different cars. Different teams. More than twenty years. Same fellow showing up at the race everybody wanted most.
The championship trophy never found Ed McCulloch. Indianapolis knew exactly where to look.
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