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If you were a nitro-racing fan back in the 1970s, the term “Think Pink” was probably familiar to you, and it was omnipresent in the Top Fuel and Funny Car ranks on the fleet of race cars whose prowess began with an Ed Pink powerplant. We lost Ed last Sunday, April 27, at age 94, and a lot of us are Thinking Pink this week.

The list of drivers and teams who relied on Pink Power is like a Who’s Who of the sport: Don Prudhomme, Don Schumacher, Tom McEwen, Raymond Beadle, Ed McCulloch, Shirley Muldowney, Pat Foster. The list goes on and on.

Drag racing was the meat in the sandwich that was Ed Pink’s very full life in motorsports and, like any sandwich, it was the most tasty. Before drag racing, Pink was a dry lakes racer, and after his 1970s heyday in drag racing, he got into building Cosworth IndyCar engines and Porsche road-racing mills.

Pink’s name will forever be enmeshed with a lot of people, starting with Lou Baney, who employed a young Ed Pink as the shop floor sweeper and go-fer at Hot Rod Heaven. Pink soon had a fuel-powered Ford lakes car, but there wasn’t enough of that activity going on to suit Pink. After he and Fran Hernandez went to the Goleta Dragstrip to check out the newer sport of drag racing, he was hooked. Deployment in the Korean War sidelined that endeavor, and by 1956, he had left dry lakes racing to concentrate on drag racing.

With the backing of Ansen Automotive, he built a Top Fueler in the early 1960s and put Tommy Dyer behind the wheel, racing on weekends while operating a tune-up shop in Los Angeles, but his desire to develop new equipment for drag racing led him to concentrate on that, and Ed Pink Racing Engines was born.

His early clientele were three big names in the sport — “Big John” Mazmanian, Tony Nancy, and Tommy Ivo — and as his reputation grew, his dragsters became a rolling test bench for his theories. He partnered with a fledgling chassis builder named Don Long, and that car bolstered both of their reputations.

With Mike Snively at the wheel, they were runner-up both days at the 1965 March Meet and were rewarded with the coveted Outstanding Performance of the Meet award. When Snively went to drive for Roland Leong in 1966, Connie Swingle took over the wheel of the Old Master’s car and won the Mickey Thompson 200-mph meet in Fontana, Calif.

Before long, Pink’s old boss, Baney, came knocking and asked Pink to build engines for his Tom McEwen-driven dragster, and “the Mongoose” quickly went out and won the Hot Rod Magazine Championship at Riverside Raceway. (The car is instantly recognizable for the cowl bumps to accommodate the driver's bent knees.)

When Baney landed the Brand Motors Ford deal, reuniting him with old pal Fran Hernandez, who was at Ford, he brought Pink his first SOHC Ford engine in 1967 to build the next few years. Don Prudhomme replaced his old pal McEwen in the car, and they headed east to the NHRA Springnationals in Bristol, Tenn., and won the race with the sport’s first official six-second clocking.��

“I didn't really know those guys before that. Ed Pink had more of a reputation as a Bonneville guy,” recalled Prudhomme this week. “But both Baney and Pink wanted to win, and Baney was always critical of ‘Mongoose’s’ driving, was always breaking his balls, so when they built this new car, they bounced Tom out of it, put me in it, and I didn't. I didn't know Pink that well, but Baney man used to break his balls, fired him, and hired me.

“Ed did all the tuning. I wasn't that interested in that tuning stuff in those days, I just wanted to drive, but you couldn't take the cylinder head off easily because they had a goddamn timing chain wrapped around it," he added. "It wasn't a real practical engine for drag racing, and [would] never make it today, where they take the cylinder heads off every run, but it was a hell of a good engine, very powerful. When he built that car, it was a Don Long car, very lightweight, and it had an aluminum bellhousing and aluminum heads, and it hauled, yeah, it hauled ass.”

The very thought of Prudhomme partnering with Pink shocked a lot of people, as Prudhomme had long been associated with Pink’s biggest rival, Keith Black. After all, it was Black who was the maestro of the dominating Greer-Black-Prudhomme dragster of the early 1960s and Black who taught Prudhomme and Roland Leong the ropes in 1965 in their , but Prudhomme remembers Black not being overly hurt, even when he ran Ed Pink power through his dominating mid-1970s championship run.

“Keith was just great to me; he was wonderful,” Prudhomme reminisced with me. “But he got to the point where he wanted to be a manufacturer of blacks and cranks, and he didn't want to go to the drag races anymore, and Ed came out with his own block that was so nice. Keith didn't pay too much attention to the detail stuff, like painting the inside of the block like Ed did, where everything was real sano [that’s some ‘70 shorthand for sanitary, or clean, well-built]. He had the best running 426 stuff, as far as I was concerned.”

“Pink had the better block,” said Bob Brandt, Prudhomme’s right-hand man throughout his 1970s glory days in Funny Car. “It was a later version of what Keith Black came out with, but the Pink stuff was just so much nicer and different.”

Another factor in Prudhomme’s decision was location. Prudhomme lived in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, while Black's shop was in South Gate, a daily and sometimes tortuous hour-plus drive over the sometimes-congested Mulholland Pass into the South Bay. Pink’s shop was practically right around the corner.

Other Top Fuel teams turned to Pink, but as Funny Cars began to rise to challenge the dragsters for popularity, Pink began building flopper engines.��

Although Gas Ronda was one of Pink's first Funny Car customers, it was Don Schumacher who really opened the Funny Car door for Pink with his deep pockets and fleet of cars.

Few Funny Cars in the early 1970s were more successful than the Pink-powered driven by Pat Foster, who at the time also worked for Pink. Before long, all of the big-name Funny Car drivers — including Prudhomme, McEwen, McCulloch, and Gene Snow — were Thinking Pink.

For a while there in the 1970s, 14612 Raymer Street in Van Nuys, Calif., was the place to be if you liked your nitro brewed beneath fiberglass. Right behind Pink’s shop were garages for Prudhomme and so many others, and it became a hangout whenever flopper royalty came to town to race at Lions Drag Strip, Orange County International Raceway, or Irwindale Raceway.

“It was the kind of place where everyone kind of gathered when they were in town, especially out in the parking lot in the back,” recalled Brandt. “A lot of times, we helped people out. You’d bring yourself over there. We would help them as well.”

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But as cool as that all was, it also caused problems, because everyone had the same stuff, and your shopmate might be your biggest rival.

“Pink would build you the engine, and he’d say, ‘Run this pump and these nozzles,’ and blah, blah, blah,” recalled Prudhomme. “That's why guys would go to him. You would go to him and buy a complete engine and tune, ready to go. But your secrets became his secrets, too, to share with everyone else, which is why Bob and I just dug a little deeper.

“Bob and I had come on to some stuff with the car that really helped, and we didn't want to tell Pink because he'd tell the Blue Max, so we went a long time with secrets," he said. "Dale Emery with the Blue Max was the same way. It got so bad that Bob built us our own flow bench so we could flow our own fuel pumps because before we'd have to take them up to Pink’s flow bench, and he would run them, and he'd know everything about your pump. So we had different nozzles. We had all kinds of stuff going, and Pink and I used to go round and round sometimes, because it would bug the shit out of him.”

McCulloch was another superstar Funny Car driver of the 1970s who looks back fondly on his relationship with Pink, one that maybe went a little deeper than the others.

“When Art Whipple and I had our first Funny Car in 1970, we first went to Keith Black because we were new kids on the street," McCulloch said. "I admired the guy because he would make you answer your own question. You'd have a problem, and you'd go in there and say, ‘Keith, here's what's going on. What do I need to do?’ And he wouldn't say, ‘OK, do this, this, and this.’ He would say, ‘What do you think about that or this or that?’ When Art and I split in '72, guys were sort of trending towards Pink. I went over there, and he became really hands-on, helped me a lot, gave me the answers, and really helped me financially.

“He always took care of me," he shared. "He always had a blower for me even when Schumacher would roll into town and almost wipe out his inventory. I didn't always have the money to pay for it right at the time, but we'd go match race and run, and I'd send him a check. I'd get a little bit behind, and he'd call me and say, ‘Ed, this bill's getting a little bit behind; we gotta get it picked up here,’ but he never, ever threatened to cut me off. I always paid my bill, but he really looked after me.��

"A lot of people don’t know this, but when [Don Alderson] came out with the Mildon [engine], it was not that popular, and Ed picked that up and helped him develop that, and that’s the engine . That was not my motor. That was theirs.��

Ed McCulloch was one of the many former clients turned "roasters" who honored Pink at his 80th birthday party back in 2011.

"When Ed phased out of drag racing and went into other forms of motorsports, we stayed in contact and did a lot of things together," he said. "We traveled together with our street rods, up to Victoria, B.C. It was more than just a business relationship; it was a true friendship. We became very, very good friends off the track. Our families did a lot of things. Our families would go snow skiing in the wintertime, we'd go dirt bike riding out to Jawbone [Canyon] with the guys and camp out.

“He was a very, very, very knowledgeable man and very sincere in what he did. It's a big loss, and it's really a sad thing to lose your mentors.”

Harry Hibler, who did everything from racing in Top Fuel to managing famed to an executive at Petersen Publishing, was one of Pink’s closest friends for more than 60 years.

“I really knew him from when Baney and McEwen held the UDRA meetings that I would go to for San Fernando. Ed was always kind of a buffer between me and some of the other people, because running San Fernando independent of NHRA, there were always issues. Ed was just always a champion for me for some reason," Hibler said.

Hibler, who also ran a construction business, repaid that kindness many times, helped remodel and add a dyno room in Pink’s shop in Van Nuys, and even did work at his later location.

“He just really cared to do the right job, and helped so many people," he shared. "The thing that I found really interesting and helped me out at Petersen was the fact he did engines for USAC cars and sprint cars, and being at Hot Rod magazine and Car Craft all the years that I was, I got involved with every form of racing, and got to know so many of the different racers and engine builders through him. Ed was always the gentleman everywhere you went. I never heard anybody badmouth him in all the years that I worked with every form of racing. We remained good friends. We tried to get together as often as possible, maybe a couple or three times a month, we would try to have lunch. He was just a great guy."
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Sadly, Pink's longtime shop, that emotional hub of the 1970s fuel world, is destined for the wrecking ball, according to Brandt, who says it soon will be demolished along with neighboring buildings to make way for a transportation hub for the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles��

That will hurt because Brandt has such fond memories not just of the building but of the man, and a long relationship with “the Old Master,” and one that continued after Pink sold the business to Tom Malloy in 2008 and until Pink’s passing. (Malloy is relocating the business to the Santa Clarita area, so the name will live on.)

Pink moved to another shop in in Newbury Park, Calif., and he asked Brandt if he’d be interested in helping out, and invitation led to a two-and-a-half-year stint working on a variety of engine projects that kept them both young, even as Pink’s health began deteriorating due to Parkinson’s Disease and other ailments.

“We stayed in touch all the time; we were like family,” he said. “We did everything together. We had a lot of lunches with all the guys; once a month, it would be guys like Bobby Spar, Steve Gibbs, Spider [Razon]; we’d meet out at a little side street café in Newbury Park. All the guys would come out. It was kind of nice. Even when he got sick, we talked to each other at least twice a week.”

Even with his extensive knowledge of engines, Brandt always listened and learned from “the Old Master.”

“He was always like a big brother," he said. "Even when we worked out of a shop in the back in the 1970s, he used to have me come by in the evening, after everybody else had gone home, and he was working on some of the stuff himself, and he taught me a lot of stuff — stuff he never really showed anybody else.��

“Ed was always someone you could learn something from, all the time.”

Brandt, like a lot of people whose lives he touched, are feeling blue about Thinking Pink.

Phil Burgess can be reached at��pburgess@nhra.com

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