Raymond Beadle
He Took the Blue Max, Ended the Snake’s Reign, and Kept Winning After the Quarter-Mile
Raymond Beadle was born December 16, 1943, in Spur, Texas. He graduated from Texas Tech, worked for the Texas Department of Agriculture and spent his weekends racing fuel dragsters around Texas.
The sensible career lasted until 1974. Professional drag racing won the argument.
Beadle became one of the biggest Funny Car stars of the 1970s and early 1980s, drove the Blue Max to three consecutive NHRA Funny Car championships, won three IHRA Funny Car championships, collected 13 NHRA national-event victories and turned one of drag racing’s most famous names into a business as recognizable as the car itself.
Then he wandered off into NASCAR and won a championship there too.
That was Beadle. He understood that a race car had to do more than run quickly. It had to win, draw a crowd, keep sponsors happy and leave enough money in the operation to come back next weekend.
The Blue Max Was Famous Before Beadle Got There
Raymond Beadle did not invent the Blue Max. Texas racer and owner Harry Schmidt had created the operation years earlier, and drivers including Jake Johnston and Richard Tharp had already made the name familiar on the match-race circuit.
The car was fast, handsome and well known before Beadle ever climbed into it. Then he joined Schmidt as driver in 1975, and the combination worked immediately.
At the U.S. Nationals that year, Beadle reached the Funny Car final against Don Prudhomme. The Blue Max developed a small oil leak after the burnout, the crew dealt with it at the starting line, and Beadle calmly went up and beat the man who was in the middle of building one of the most dominant runs Funny Car had ever seen.
That was not a bad way to introduce the new management.
By 1977, Beadle had taken over sole ownership of the operation. The Blue Max was now his car, his business and, before long, his calling card.
He Understood the Part That Happened Between Races
The easy version of Raymond Beadle’s story is three championships and a famous blue race car.
The better version includes the parking lot.
Funny Car racing in the 1970s was built heavily around match races. A popular car could run an exhausting schedule, hauling from track to track because promoters paid appearance money for names that put people in the seats.
Beadle understood that business unusually well. The Blue Max looked right. The transporters looked right. Sponsors such as English Leather, NAPA Regal Ride, Old Milwaukee and Schlitz got a professional operation carrying their names. Fans got a car they could recognize from the grandstands and a driver who understood that they had paid to see more than an anonymous helmet disappear down the quarter-mile.
And then there was the merchandise. Beadle sold Blue Max shirts, hats and souvenirs in quantities large enough to get NHRA’s attention and help change the way merchandise sales were handled at national events.
That is usually a sign somebody has figured out the business model before the people writing the rules have.
Kenny Bernstein later turned sponsor presentation into nearly a corporate science. John Force turned personality into an industrial operation. Beadle was already proving that a Funny Car could be a race team, a touring attraction and a brand at the same time.
Then the Blue Max Started Eating Parts
The championship years did not arrive smoothly. The 1978 season became a mechanical nightmare as the Blue Max went through an extraordinary amount of equipment while the team chased fuel-system trouble that refused to identify itself politely.
Eventually the problem was traced to the fuel-tank ventilation system. Once it was fixed, the car remembered what it was supposed to do.
At the 1978 U.S. Nationals, Beadle ran 5.98 seconds, becoming only the second Funny Car driver to enter the five-second zone after Prudhomme. He closed the season by winning the NHRA World Finals at Ontario, his first NHRA national-event victory since Indy in 1975.
Just as important, former Funny Car driver Dale Emery had joined the team. Emery had been badly injured in a 1977 crash that effectively ended his driving career, but as crew chief he brought the Blue Max combination under control and helped develop hardware and tuning ideas that included dual-magneto drives and down nozzles in the cylinder heads.
The expensive education of 1978 was about to start paying dividends.
1979: Somebody Finally Knocked the Snake Off the Throne
Prudhomme had won the NHRA Funny Car championship in 1975, 1976, 1977 and 1978. Four straight.
For most of that stretch, beating the Army car for one race was an accomplishment. Beating Prudhomme for an entire season required something closer to a change in the weather.
In 1979, the weather changed.
Beadle and Emery put together the season that finally ended Prudhomme’s championship streak. The Blue Max reached multiple final rounds, won at Englishtown and Seattle, and finished the year with Raymond Beadle as NHRA Funny Car world champion.
Beadle had gone from being one of the stars chasing The Snake to being the fellow who finally replaced him at the top.
Then he did the impolite thing and stayed there.
Three in a Row
Beadle defended the NHRA Funny Car championship in 1980 and won it again in 1981. Three consecutive titles put the Blue Max into very select company, and the 1981 season included another victory at the U.S. Nationals.
He also won IHRA Funny Car championships in 1975, 1976 and 1981. Racers of that period did not live inside one tidy championship schedule. Major NHRA races, IHRA events and match-race bookings all competed for the same calendar, equipment and attention.
The Blue Max was expected to be quick everywhere. Usually it was.
Beadle finished his NHRA driving career with 13 national-event wins in 28 final rounds. That total looks modest beside later careers built around longer schedules and more national events, but three consecutive championships explain the period much better.
NHRA eventually ranked Beadle No. 20 among its first 50 greatest drivers.
Even the Crashes Had Showmanship
A fuel Funny Car occasionally reminds the driver that popularity has nothing to do with physics. At the 1982 Gatornationals, Beadle barrel-rolled the Blue Max in a violent crash while the crowd waited for the wreckage to stop moving.
Then Beadle climbed out through the escape hatch and raised his hands over his head as though he had just won something.
That was Raymond Beadle: calm enough to handle the car, sharp enough to understand the crowd and never particularly interested in wasting a good entrance.
See the 1982 Gatornationals crash in Walked Away
He continued competing through the middle of the decade, and the Blue Max remained a winner even when somebody else was driving it. In 1985, John Lombardo Jr. drove Beadle’s car to another U.S. Nationals victory with Dale Emery still turning the wrenches.
That is a useful test of a race team. If the owner gets out and the car still wins Indy, the operation probably consisted of more than one talented fellow with a steering wheel.
Then He Went Stock-Car Racing
By the early 1980s, Beadle was already looking beyond drag racing. His Blue Max Racing organization entered NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series in 1983, initially with Tim Richmond in the No. 27 car. Richmond won races for the organization before moving on, and Beadle put Rusty Wallace in the seat for 1986.
Three years later, Beadle and Wallace won the 1989 NASCAR Winston Cup championship.
That deserves more attention than it sometimes gets in a drag racer’s biography. Moving from nitro Funny Cars to NASCAR Cup racing is not changing lanes. It is changing the entire road system — different cars, engineering, schedules, sponsors, people and politics.
Beadle still ended up with a championship.
He also fielded a World of Outlaws sprint car for Sammy Swindell because drag racing and NASCAR had evidently left a few unused weekends on the calendar.
The Blue Max Was the Real Legacy
Raymond Beadle died October 20, 2014, at age 70. Earlier that year he had been inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, adding to honors that already included the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame.
The trophies make the case easily enough: three straight NHRA Funny Car championships, three IHRA championships, two U.S. Nationals victories as a driver, another Indy win with somebody else driving his car and a NASCAR Cup championship as an owner.
But Raymond Beadle’s place in drag-racing history is bigger than the arithmetic.
Harry Schmidt created the Blue Max name. Beadle took it over and made it his own without pretending the history had started when he arrived. He understood the match-race crowd, the sponsor, the souvenir trailer and the importance of hiring somebody smarter with a wrench when the car needed it.
Then, when the quarter-mile career wound down, he proved those skills worked somewhere else too.
Plenty of famous race cars have had famous drivers. Very few driver-and-car combinations became so tightly tied together that saying one name automatically supplied the other.
Raymond Beadle. Blue Max.
For a generation of Funny Car fans, there was never much reason to explain the difference.
Beadle and the Blue Max were part of the promotional machinery that made 1970s Funny Car racing as much a show as a competition.
➤ See Bill Doner’s promotion story in Racing Shenanigans
↑ Back to the Top, Before the Blue Max Gets Another Booking