Drag racers light up the weekend in Eddyville

Aug. 2—EDDYVILLE — Tim Cullinan surprised his son one day at the shop two years ago, first with a joke.

"He told me he got me a 1970s Camaro," Cullinan said. "I asked him why he would get me a 1970s Camaro?"

When he got to the shop, however, he found out the real surprise was a Funny Car that just needed some work put into it.

"This is a total outlaw car," the elder Cullinan said. "My son is going to start doing his licensing runs. I just wanted to take it somewhere to shake it down and try it out, make sure it's going straight before my son starts driving it.

"The last thing I would have thought is that we would have won."

The 'Irish Car Bomb' would be one of four Funny Cars to make it back to the victory lane at Eddyville Raceway Park by the end of two wild nights at the eighth-mile drag strip surrounded by southern Iowa farmland. Cullinan won the 'B' class title edging Chris Snyder by one-half of one-tenth of a second, 4.12-4.17, on Saturday night at one of the featured stops of the 2022 Funny Car Chaos championship tour.

"This is the first outing for that car. We've only had five passes on it, two in qualifying and three in the eliminations," Cullinan said. "I run a top-fuel dragster. That's my main thing. I wanted to do something for my son. I didn't want to put him in a dragster and follow all the rules, because the rules will kill you.

"That car is my combination. There's not another one out there. We came up with it. It's user-friendly. We never tore a motor apart all weekend. We just kept creeping up on it all weekend. It doesn't get a whole lot better than this."

Cullinan and his son made the trip to Eddyville from their home just outside Chicago in Franklin Park, Illinois. After avoiding the cornfields just beyond the edge of the Eddyville drag strip after a failed parachute deployment during a winning quarterfinal-round win on Saturday over Texas native Chuck Loftin, Cullinan easily beat out the 'Detroit Tiger' Steve Timoszyk in the semifinals running 164.84 miles-an-hour down the strip to set up a showdown in the finals with Snyder.

"Not in our wildest dreams did we think we'd come here and race for a championship," Cullinan said. "The plan was to come here and test it to get my son ready for him to start running it. My son is my crew chief. He's been working hard tuning it. We work well together. I have a great team here."

Cullinan won the closest final of the night, edging Snyder at the line to claim the B Class title. Both Tim and Timmy Cullinan celebrated with the rest of the Irish Bomb crew in victory lane as son and crew chief looks forward to getting his chance at running a winning car.

"It was supposed to be a close test session. We liked the format at Eddyville. It's kind of laid back, so there really wasn't any pressure going into the weekend," Timmy Cullinan said. "We just kept winning round after round. It just kind of went well. The old man drove pretty well.

"Hopefully, I'll actually be able to get the keys from him. He may want to run this even more after this weekend."

Over 30 professional teams from across the country traveled to compete at the southern Iowa drag strip in 200 miles-per-hour side-by-side drag racing. The nationally touring Funny Car Chaos Championship series racers will be competing for over $30,000 in purse money and series points.

Fans flocked to Eddyville to see some of the thrilling action, which included wild rides deep into cornfields that both Neil Gerot and Dave Gallegos were able to walk away from while the cars themselves were both rescued from deep within the fields on Friday. Kirk Williams, making the trip across the state from Glenwood, was able to narrowly able to avoid that same fate on Saturday making the sharp turn to the pits at the end of the strip after making a pair of winning 200-plus mph runs to advance into the 'A' Main finals.

"One of my parachutes during the second round didn't come out, so it was a little hairy for a second," Williams said. "Fortunately, I got it stopped. I was not going into the cornfield."

Williams avoided picking corn, instead picking up the win in the finals topping 205 miles-an-hour to beat Jeff Cameron earning the top prize of $6,000 while racking up 63 points, increasing his Funny Car Chaos championship lead over Cameron and Tom Furches to a 54-point edge (284-230) with the series heading to Kearney, Nebraska next weekend.

"We kind of consider this our home track. This is the closest drag strip that we race at," Williams said. "This is huge for us. We're going to walk out of here having padded the lead in the points. Hopefully, by the time we get to Dallas, Texas, we'll have won the national championship."

— Scott Jackson can be reached at sjackson@ottumwacourier.com. Follow him on Twitter@CourierScott.