ROCKINGHAM — Outside of the late Lee Shepherd and Bill “Grumpy” Jenkins, both multi-time NHRA race winners and Pro Stock world champions, there are few drag racers more closely associated with the Chevrolet bow tie than Charlotte’s Charles Carpenter.
For more than 35 years, Carpenter has been racing Chevrolets at tracks like Rockingham Dragway — where he will compete this weekend for the Pro Mod championship at the annual Super Chevy Show.
While Shepherd and Jenkins constantly traded up to whatever was the hot ticket Chevrolet of the next model year, Carpenter found a Chevy he liked — and stuck with it.
As a kid, he went to the races with his older brother who drove a 1955 Chevy. At age 14, he got his chance to drive the same car in the Top Sportsman class where he remained competitive until the late 1970s when smaller, more aerodynamic models — like the Vega and Monza — began to dominate.
“It got to where my car was not competitive and then they allowed us to use nitrous oxide — that was in the early ‘80s,” Carpenter recalled. “And when we started using the nitrous, it suddenly caught me up with (the later model vehicles).”
Carpenter’s success was the first step in the evolution of Pro Mod — a category that today is one of the most popular in country, regardless of sanctioning body, because it pits cars like Carpenter’s ’55 against late models like the 2015 Corvette of Pittsboro’s Jason Harris.
“The media loved that a ‘shoebox’ — a big, boxy car — was out there racing with these sleek little aerodynamic cars,” Carpenter said.
As the unofficial “Father of Pro Mod,” Carpenter was inducted into the Carolina Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2010.
In addition to winning the overall Super Chevy Series title in 1988 and 1989, he was the United States Super Circuit champ in 1992 and remains competitive in a safety-enhanced version of the same ’55 “shoebox” — in which he also won on the old ADRL circuit.
Nevertheless, it hasn’t been all butterflies and bow ties for the Carolinian. He has survived a pair of horrific crashes including one in 2009 — in Houston, Texas — that left him with a fractured vertebrae among other injuries.
“I think I am a lucky man,” Carpenter said of that accident. “It’s a testimonial to what we do. I have preached this for years: if you wear your safety equipment and you stay in the car and the car stays within the confines of the race track, you walk away 90 percent of the time.”
In addition to Carpenter and Harris — the latter a second generation racer who was the 2015 Pro Nitrous champion in the Professional Drag Racers Association series — the Super Chevy field also will include 25-year-old Lizzy Musi, Randy Weatherford of Danville, Virginia and others.
Three rounds of Pro Mod qualifying Saturday (11 a.m., 12:15 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.) will set the field for three rounds of eliminations starting at 2:30 p.m.
Adult tickets are $20 on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets for kids 6-12 are $5 per day or $10 for the weekend. Children under six are free when accompanied by a ticketed adult and parking is free in Rockingham’s main lot.
Charles Carpenter, of Charlotte, will compete for a Pro Mod championship this weekend in the Super Chevy Show at Rockingham Dragway.