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You can read the 2015 TDA Preview Introduction, here.
You can read my Honorable Mention Favorite Drivers here.
I’m going to preview the 2015 season by counting down my five favorite drivers that I’ve seen and written about since I became involved with the TDA. A couple of notes:
1) This is NOT a list of the best drivers—oh my God, is it not a list of the best drivers—but rather a list of my favorite drivers. Some of the drivers are exceptionally good—first ballot Hall of Famers—one could well be the worst driver the league has ever seen, but all are wildly worth writing about.
2) I never saw Steven Scarbro race. Technically, I guess I did see him race, but I never was able to put his name and car number together in order to appreciate his inimitable style.
3) I removed all of the drivers who raced for Reckoning in 2010 from this list. I hung out with them all season and love all of those guys, Chris McGuire, Steve Gursky Jr., Brian Anderson, Nick Ritter and “Speedy” Steve Vollbrecht. In the interest of fairness, I excluded them from this list. But, suffice it to say, all of them are scholars and gentlemen and favorite drivers of mine.
5) “Crazy” Art Scarbro
Being able to look forward to things is truly one of the joys of life. Studies have shown that people actually enjoy looking forward to going on vacation more than they do going on the vacation itself.
One of my biggest complaints with the TDA has been the lack of promotional hype for the individual team and driver matchups. There are often times where I don’t learn until the next day that driver X was driving for one team or another. And I hate that. Particularly when “Crazy” Art Scarbro is involved.
If you close your eyes and imagine a badass demo driver, chances are pretty good he will resemble Scarbro. Scarbro cares a lot about the sport and goes hard on the track in a way that seems unique to the older generation of drivers. And Scarbro races even harder against opposing teams that feature certain drivers that came up with him at Santa Fe.
In 2013 (I think), Scarbro started out the year racing for Orange Crush. Orange Crush pulled Damage, Inc. in First Night’s first race. He was in the first spot in line for Orange Crush and “Sneaky” Pete Ryan was in the last spot in line for Damage, Inc. When the green flag dropped, Scarbro turned around as quickly as he could and went hunting for Ryan. It was the perfect race to look forward to! And old school rivalry between drivers that spanned three and possibly four decades.
…Except I had no idea that Scarbro was driving for Orange Crush prior to the race. I believe that Orange Crush had six drivers at the time and team owner, Kenny Kasper, was choosing his lineups just before the races.
It was a distinct shame because there are so few drivers like Scarbro in the league that I want to appreciate them when they do race. Maybe a Scarbro app on my phone to alert me. Something. Because Scarbro racing is appointment viewing. His cars keep going and he hits hard.
One thing to look forward to in 2015 is that Scarbro will be racing full time for a team with a set roster in the Chicago Hitmen. It will be nice to look forward to seeing him kicking ass on a team challenging for the championship.
4) Mel Noble Jr.
Mel Noble Jr. comes from good TDA stock. His father, Mel Noble, and his uncle, Wayne Noble, were the long time owners and drivers for the 2005 champions, Stranglehold. STRANGLEHOLD!!!! That’s the team where Noble Jr. got his start. However, that’s not why Noble Jr. is on this list. He’s on this list because he’s blind. That’s right; he’s Mel Noble Jr.: the Blind Demolition Derby Driver (he’s the one without a helmet to the left).
When people first found out about Noble Jr.’s lack of eyesight, jokes would always fly. The theme of the jokes would always be about ways to take advantage of a blind demolition derby driver. None of the jokes were ever funny, telling them was just the first, almost protective reaction everyone had to hearing about one of the most unusual scenarios you could imagine: a blind demolition derby driver.
If you want to be specific, Noble Jr. can see shapes. For whatever reason, I always assumed that being blind meant just seeing black all the time. This is not true. Noble Jr. can differentiate between colors… ish. And he can see shapes… ish. He has a smartphone that he uses, but he has to literally push it against his face to be able to make out any of the large type information on the screen. Noble Jr. absolutely, positively cannot drive a car in his day-to-day life. But on the track? He’s free to go crazy.
And go crazy he does.
There is a fine line between courage and stupidity and Noble Jr. is so firmly in stupid territory, it’s almost comical. Not only is he driving the demolition derby while blind, but he is also a crusher. However, what plants Noble Jr. so squarely in ‘amazingly awesome stupid territory’ is that he once had his helmet fly off after a hit… and kept on racing. He not only kept racing, but—by choice!—pulled a head on hit against Ryan Decker. If you’re keep score at home, that’s a blind guy racing demos without a helmet proactively seeking out a head on collision against a guy nicknamed “The Wrecker”. You can see a photo of this here. Good God damn!
I am willing to take suggestions, but as of now, I’m going to label Noble Jr.’s race against Mean Green Machine (where he entered the helmetless head-on), the most fantastically ridiculous moment in TDA history.
When I scrape together enough money, I’m going to buy Noble Jr.’s life rights and see what I can do to make a movie about him.
3) Phil Matlak
If I had enough time, I’d interview everyone who was racing (or involved with the TDA) during the 2009 and 2010 seasons and ask what Phil Matlak stories they had. Because I love Phil Matlak stories. I collect them and trade them with my friends. They are as high a form of entertainment as there is.
First, some history.
Phil Matlak was the owner of what I think most people would feel quite comfortable calling the worst team in TDA history, Smash, Bash & Crash. Smash, Bash & Crash entered the league in 2009 and Matlak was unusually heralded by then-TDA owners, Jan and Teresa Gabriel, as the “future” of the TDA. The future of the TDA never won a single race and, 17 months later, was ultimately kicked out of the league for comical levels of sub-par performance.
What separated Smash, Bash & Crash from the other bad teams the league has known, like the 2013 and 2014 iterations of Damage, Inc. or the 2012 and 2013 versions of Seek-N-Destroy, was that Damage, Inc. and Seek-N-Destroy were at least aware of what they were supposed to be doing. Smash, Bash & Crash never gave off the impression that they had any clue what they were doing. It was precisely what made them so entertaining. It’s one thing to have issues with your tires’ traction, it’s another thing entirely to try to race with street tires, which Smash, Bash & Crash’s cars often did.
The rules for drivers stated that they needed to wear helmets, Matlak occasionally wore a hockey helmet, complete with a face guard. A lot of drivers don’t run brakes on the track; Matlak’s crew not only ran brakes, they didn’t cut the brake lights. During several races, you could see whenever a Smash, Bash & Crash driver was braking because his brake lights would light up. One Smash, Bash & Crash driver drove onto the track with the radio in his car playing.
At the time, the criteria for getting paid was that four cars would get to the starting line. This often proved problematic for Matlak’s team. Cars would sometimes die out in the staging area or having just crossed onto the track. My favorite story in this regard came when the third Smash, Bash & Crash car in line died out 25 yards short of the starting line. Intent on getting paid, Smash, Bash & Crash used its fourth car to push the third car—which was completely dead, mind you—into place. In the process of this act, the fourth car died out before it hit the starting line. This meant that Smash, Bash & Crash was down two cars before the drivers had even finished lining up!
Finding enough cars was also a major issue with Smash, Bash & Crash. Opponents rarely hit Smash, Bash & Crash’s cars, A) because the Smash, Bash & Crash cars often stayed in place at the starting line, and B) because the one time a team did hit Smash, Bash & Crash’s cars, (Reckoning, Fifth Night of 2009), Matlak couldn’t figure out how to get more than two cars built over the course of the next eight months.
Helping nothing in this regard was the fact that first Smash, Bash & Crash car towed into the pits was a BMW. You can see this car in the above picture. Given that drivers are only supposed to use American cars, no one was quite sure whether the BMW could have even been raced. Ultimately, it didn’t matter because no one ever tried to use the BMW. It was simply towed into the pits, often arriving first and then towed out after the evening of racing finished.. It was truly spectacular.
What made the whole thing even better was that Smash, Bash & Crash was essentially a one-man team. As far as I know, Matlak was the only guy building cars for the team. I have no idea who the other drivers were; neither does anyone else. Rumor had it that a woman named Crystal was supposed to be driving for Smash, Bash & Crash one night, but that didn’t happen because, according to the story that went around, Crystal got drunk in the pits and was thrown out.
I loved following Smash, Bash & Crash and watching them do their thing. It was probably best for the sport when Teresa Gabriel kicked Matlak and Smash, Bash & Crash out after the July race in 2010, but not a season goes by where some part of me doesn’t hope to see Matlak and his crew return. These stories are fantastic!
2) Rob Stahulak
When not waxing poetic about the demolition derby here, I write about film (you can read my stuff here) and am a fashion photographer (you can see my photos here). This means that I spend my week interviewing celebrities and hanging out on set with models. I long ago stopped being star struck. However, I made an exception in Rob Stahulak’s case. When I met him at Chris McGuire’s wedding, I was like a little girl who just got an autograph from Channing Tatum. Friends would ask, “How was Chris’ wedding?” And I’d respond, “I met Robbie Stahulak!” Good friends would then follow that up by saying, “Holy shit, you must have been excited!” And I was. Because Rob Stahulak is the driver who pulled me into the demo world.
I’ve written about this at length, but from 2004-2009, I attended as many demos as I could. I loved seeing the cars crash and go fast and sometimes there was fire! I knew nothing about anything in regards to the sport itself. Up until sometime in early 2009, I thought the cars were just regular cars. Like street cars. Seriously. I had no idea that they were modified in any way. If push came to shove, I could have named four drivers; three with memorable nicknames, “Booger”, “Speedy” Steve and “Crazy” Art Scarbro, and Rob Stahulak.
Stahulak was at the forefront of my mind because all he did was win. With the teams changing hands, names, colors and drivers as often as they did in those years, it was impossible to cheer for any one team for very long. There were no programs to keep track of the teams, I didn’t know what any of the drivers looked like and half of them ended up losing in the first round. One driver who never seemed to lose in the first round was Rob Stahulak. I’d hear his name announced as the cars pulled onto the track, I’d hear his name again when he won the race, a third time when his team pulled onto the track in the second round, a fourth time when he won the second race and a fifth and possibly sixth time in the finals. Teams came and went, but one thing was as sure as taxes: Rob Stahulak was going to be racing somewhere and he was going to win.
I’m sure I could have kept going to TDA events and cheering for the crashes and hoping things would catch on fire, but that type of fandom is incredibly shallow and not made to last. There’s simply nothing there to tie people to the results or the next race. Every night of racing was a one-off night of racing. It was fandom in a vacuum. Stahulak pulled me out of that vacuum. He got me appreciating more than just the cars hitting each other and sometimes lighting on fire and got me more interested in the sport as a whole. (I guess another way to look at this would be that Stahulak is the reason I’m now writing about the demos… so you now know who is to blame!)
For this reason, Stahulak is unquestionably one of my two favorite demo drivers of all time. Unfortunately, Stahulak’s last full season of racing was 2010 for Damage, Inc. Just as I was getting into the sport, he was getting out. Rumor has it that he may make an appearance or two this year and I for one am incredibly excited at the prospect of this.
My favorite driver will be revealed tomorrow…