Eagle Top Fueler: A Lost Legend is Found

The 1960s were arguably the heyday of racing in the Spokane area. Fans jammed the Fairground Speedway on a regular basis to watch a young Tom Sneva working his way through the ranks of short track racing on his way to Indianapolis.

The Miss Spokane and the Eagle Electric unlimited hydroplanes also represented the city on a national basis.

Perhaps forgotten was a top fuel dragster sponsored by a young entrepreneur named Dave Heerensperger, who founded an electrical and plumbing business called Eagle Electric.

Heerensperger would later parlay the modest Boone Avenue business into a multimillion-dollar empire of electrical, automotive and hardware stores. His most recent endeavor was the founding of the Eagle chain, which was sold in the past few years to the Lowe’s Corp.

With Frank Rupert at the wheel, the Eagle tore up the record books almost every time it was rolled off the trailer to roar down the many drag strips of the Pacific Northwest.

The car has been pieced back together from remnants scattered halfway across the country and will be part of a display of nostalgia drag racing vehicles at this weekend’s 42nd annual Spokane Auto Boat Speed Show that begins its run Friday at the Spokane Fair and Expo Center.

The Eagle restoration project was conducted by Bucky Austin of Kent, Wash., who has a lengthy drag racing resume over the past four decades,

Austin’s plunge into restoring race cars began when he pulled his old 1969 vintage Top Gas car, the original “Northwest Hitter,” out of mothballs and put it back into show shape to take advantage of the nostalgia craze that is sweeping through drag racing.

Austin’s next project was one that would ring a loud bell with old-time drag racing fans in the northwest, especially those from Spokane.

Austin traveled near and far to piece together the Eagle dragster.

The project came together from about as scattered of locations as possible. Austin put out feelers in the area and someone called to tell him there was part of an old car sitting out behind a barn at a Tri-Cities winery. More detective work unearthed the roll cage and chassis in a Kansas wheat field.

Austin traveled to the Tri-Cities and, sure enough, his source was right. There sat the distinctive tail section of one of the northwest’s best-known dragsters.

Tom Hanna, whom Austin called, “the guru of hand-formed aluminum,” was the man behind the tail section. The restoration took a year to complete.

“It’s a runner, just like in 1966,” Austin said. “The car is 70 to 80 percent original.”

In its former life as a real race car, the Eagle was one formidable runner, according to John Mead, who managed the operation of the car when it was making headlines across the northwest in the mid-1960s.

“Bucky did an outstanding job,” Mead said of the restoration that he was fortunate to occasionally oversee.

Mead was one of the founders of the Inland Empire Timing Association that helped launch drag racing in the area in the early 1950s. The North Central Class of 1951 car nut was the man behind the famed Thrifty Auto Supply car from Spokane, the first in the world to run nitro, according to Mead.

It was the Thrifty car, according to Mead, that actually hatched the Eagle Electric.

Heerensperger had just lost his lease to run the Eagle Electric unlimited hydro, so Mead proposed switching his sponsorship from a boat to car.

Mead proposed that Heerensperger put up $3,000, the cost of the car, for sponsorship. Mead recalled Heerensperger saying, “It won’t sell toilets, but it will sell car parts.”

One thing led to another. Along with a new top fuel dragster, soon Eagle Electric had a spin-off business, Eagle Automotive.

Taking off from an already lofty reputation with Thrifty, the Eagle car with Rupert at the controls set records at every track in the northwest, according to Mead.

The car would race at every opportunity, collecting anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 per night at tracks in Deer Park, Puyallup, Shelton and Arlington, among others.

“We raced every weekend,” Mead said. “Puyallup on Saturday and Woodburn (Ore.) on Sunday. And we’d be back at work on Monday.”

One weekend found the car in Puyallup on Saturday night and at Calgary, Alberta, on Sunday afternoon.

At one point, the team ran two cars that would match race each other. A promoter in Great Falls, Mont., once booked the cars in hopes of seeing what was then rare: a side-by-side, 200-mph pass.

“We ran for a percentage of the gate and paid for the second car with what we earned,” Mead said.

The Eagle car rarely traveled outside the northwest, but back then, with a dozen or more drag strips within a day’s drive of Spokane, there was no reason to go elsewhere. In 1965, however, the team packed up and headed for Indy for the U.S. Nationals, where Rupert set Low ET and Top Speed in qualifying before red-lighting in eliminations.

The Eagle Electric, the original Orange Crate, other nostalgia drag racing cars, plus several buildings full of rods and custom cars will be on display at the Auto Boat Speed Show starting Friday. Gates open at noon. Saturday show hours are 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday’s times are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Pit stops

Stateline Speedway gets the local racing season underway at 1 p.m. Sunday with its annual Racer’s Jamboree. The Jamboree is the track’s annual warm-up event that allows racers in all classes to get out to test and tune. The regular season begins next week with the first Wednesday Night Fever (6 p.m.). The regular weekend racing program begins April 3. … Another traditional season opener is the NASCAR Northwest Series, which opens a 10-race schedule on Saturday night at Evergreen Speedway in Monroe, Wash.