: When you and Ronnie were racing in the 1960s and ‘70s, did you ever think you’d still be involved in 2008?
Martin: No, I had no idea. It was just one of those things we wanted to do and we were fortunate enough to do well at it. It just kept building and growing.
: How does the Mopar crowd treat you these days?
Martin: Oh, tremendous. They are without a doubt the most diehard fans out there. Of course, if you think about it, back when we were fortunate enough to be racing and winning and match racing and putting on the clinic program, we pretty much established and grew our fan base though that. There was very little drag racing on TV at that time, maybe once or twice a year on Wide World of Sports, so we had to perform in person and do our job in order to have the fans that we did and to have them still remember us is very gratifying to me.
There were years there when we were gone 300 days out of the year because back then we ran AHRA, IHRA and NHRA national events, plus we normally would match race two or three times a week and as many as five times a week. Then we started the clinic program in 1967 and we would do a hundred of those a year, too.
: What did the clinic program entail?
Martin: Well, at the end of 1966 when we decided to switch from the Funny Car and go back to Super Stock is when we started the clinic program. What we would do is we had an advance P.R. guy go into a city and they would have three or four or whatever Chrysler-Plymouth dealers and he would go visit them and whoever would agree to do the best promotion would get the clinic. Then we would go in with an extra rig that would be on the road with two cars and we’d put the cars in the showroom, we’d have movies, we’d have sponsored prizes to give away such as jackets and t-shirts, plus we would do a spiel about the mechanics of the cars, the safety of the cars and then have a question-and-answer session.
Like I said, we started them in ’67 and did them on up through 1971 and into ’72, they went over exceptionally well. We had as many as 3,000 people show up in a night for the clinic program. But what happened is the emissions came along and then the insurance industry got involved and started bumping up the price of insurance and all of a sudden the so-called muscle cars started to disappear from the manufacturers.
: Your team is often credited with being one of the first, certainly in the Super Stock ranks, to create and foster a truly professional image. Was that a conscious effort?
Martin: Not necessarily. My thing always was that maybe if your car didn’t run so good, if it looked good maybe people would still pay attention. So we just tried to keep things clean and neat and have the uniforms and all the other things that go along with it to look as professional as we could and do the best we could.
I always paid attention to the number of people the promoters put in the stands because I knew if the stands were full he had to have a good crowd and was going to want to have us back. So it was just kind of a way to ensure as much as possible that we continued to be able to go back to these tracks and run races and stay busy.
It was pretty much the same way with the sponsors; I always felt like if we could give them more than they gave us, then we’d be fortunate enough to keep our sponsors and thank goodness it did work out that way.