Jungle Jim Unscrews His Own Red Light
When the Christmas Tree Suddenly Lost a Bulb
Jungle Jim Liberman had a problem with the Christmas Tree.
It had a red light on it.
Most drag racers accepted this as part of the arrangement. Leave too early, the red light comes on and everybody knows somebody got a little ambitious with the starting line.
Jim Liberman was not most drag racers.
By 1969, Jungle Jim had turned Funny Car match racing into equal parts competition, mechanical violence and traveling road show. Long smoky burnouts, wild wheelstands and enough starting-line theater to make sure the people in the grandstands remembered who they had paid to see were all part of the package.
So when Jungle found himself standing beside a Christmas Tree with a red bulb conveniently within reach, he did what any responsible professional driver would do.
He started thinking about removing it.
The Tree Had a Very Simple Job
By the late 1960s, the Christmas Tree had taken much of the argument out of starting a drag race. The amber lights counted the drivers down. Green meant go. Red meant somebody had left before he was invited.
There was not much room for interpretation. A driver could argue about traction, tuning, lane choice, clutch setup and whether the other fellow had been given some mysterious advantage by the track operator. A glowing red bulb was considerably harder to negotiate with.
That seems like exactly the sort of thing Jungle Jim would notice.
In August 1969, Liberman was at Cayuga Dragway in Ontario for a match race involving his pair of 1969 Novas. Before the racing started, the drivers gathered near the starting line for the usual interviews and introductions.
The crowd was watching the racers.
One of the racers was watching the Tree.
Jungle Needed a Little Cooperation
According to fan Paul Wilson, who was 13 years old and attending his first drag race that day, Liberman slipped away from the interview line and headed toward the Christmas Tree.
Then he recruited a grandstand full of accomplices.
Jungle motioned for the crowd to keep quiet. Most racers spend their careers trying to make a grandstand louder. Jungle Jim could get one to shut up because he was about to tamper with the starting equipment and did not want anybody spoiling the surprise.
The crowd cooperated.
Jungle reached the Tree, went to the bottom light in his own lane and unscrewed the red bulb.
Not the other fellow’s red light.
His.
There are racers who spend years improving reaction time.
Jungle Jim went after the warning system.
No Red Bulb, No Problem
The beauty of the stunt was that everybody understood it immediately. No engine needed to be torn down, nobody needed a wiring diagram and there was no rulebook paragraph requiring a committee meeting.
Red light bad. Missing red light better.
Of course, unscrewing the bulb did not magically rewrite the starting rules or guarantee that the timing equipment could no longer detect an early departure. Jungle was not secretly defeating the electronics.
That would have been too sophisticated.
He was letting the entire grandstand watch him eliminate the one visible piece of equipment specifically installed to announce that he had done something wrong.
Subtle it was not.
That was rather the point.
The Crowd Was Part of the Act
Match racing depended on personalities in a way championship racing rarely does. A promoter was not merely paying for two fast cars. He was paying for people who could fill the stands and make sure those people had something worth repeating Monday morning.
Liberman understood that job unusually well. He could turn a burnout into an event, back a Funny Car with enough enthusiasm to keep people watching and make the time between runs part of the entertainment instead of dead air.
Unscrewing a light bulb fit the program perfectly.
The car had not even made a run yet, and Jungle was already entertaining the place.
Better yet, he made the spectators participants. Thousands of people knew exactly what he was doing while the people conducting the interviews were supposed to be paying attention somewhere else.
The secret had an audience.
Only Jungle Jim Would Pull This in Front of Everybody
Plenty of Racing Shenanigans depend on hiding something. Somebody disguises a modification, conceals extra plumbing or waits until an inspector looks the other way.
Jungle’s version worked backward.
He walked up to the starting system in front of the paying customers and removed the part most likely to embarrass him. Then he trusted several thousand people not to give him away.
Whether the missing bulb changed one competitive result almost misses the point. Match racers lived on bookings, crowds and reputation, and Jungle had just created a story before anybody fired a Funny Car.
Paul Wilson was thirteen years old when he watched it happen.
He was still telling the story decades later.
That is a pretty fair return on one light bulb.
The Tree Never Had a Chance
The Christmas Tree had been designed to settle arguments. Amber lights counted things down, green started the race and red announced that somebody had become impatient.
Perfectly simple system.
Right up until somebody put Jungle Jim Liberman within arm’s reach of it.
The Tree had rules.
Jungle had fingers.
For a few minutes at Cayuga Dragway, that was enough to settle the argument.