IHRA: Throwback Thursday - The IHRA moves to Waco

It was one of the best-kept secrets in all of drag racing: At the end of 1987, 33-year-old Funny Car racer Billy Meyer bought the IHRA from founder Larry Carrier. But those who knew Meyer weren't surprised – it was the sort of thing he'd done his whole career.

Meyer, son of Paul Meyer, the Waco, Texas-based head of Success Motivation Institute, used the power of positive thinking he inherited from his millionaire father to envision, and then build, the Texas Motorplex, located 37 miles south of Dallas in the town of Ennis.

As the first all-concrete strip, it was the drag racing showplace for the U.S., and the site of multiple world records. Meyer was also planning to build a comparable track south of Detroit, but that didn't happen.

Meyer had a lot of plans for the IHRA.

"I have spent 17 years in this sport as a driver, car owner and track operator and I feel strongly that we need a single focus," Meyer told the Los Angeles Times. "I feel it is too fragmented, with too many factions pulling in different directions.

"The sport has reached a plateau and it needs to move on. To reach the next plateau, it needs some new ideas and new direction. I hope we (the NHRA and IHRA) can move on together, but if we can't, I'm prepared to take the necessary steps myself."

The purchase of the IHRA caused some raised eyebrows at the NHRA, since the California sanctioning body had a deal with Meyer for the Texas Motorplex through 1990. But Meyer pressed on. Carrier had based the IHRA in Bristol, Tennessee, but Meyer moved the organization to his hometown of Waco.

Meyer did have a history with both sanctioning bodies. He won 12 NHRA Funny Car national events, 11 in the IHRA and that sanctioning body's 1980 world championship. "My whole concept was I wanted to take care of the racers, sponsors and spectators because nobody had ever done that," said Meyer in an interview with Racintoday.com. He even attempted to buy the NHRA, but was turned down by the board.

Operating under IHRA sanction, the Texas Motorplex continued with business as usual. On April 9, 1988, Top Fuel driver Eddie Hill recorded drag racing's first 4-second quarter-mile pass at 4.990-seconds and 288.55 mph during the inaugural IHRA Kroger Texas Nationals (BELOW).

Soon, though, Meyer became disillusioned with owning a sanctioning body. Top events had been rained out. He had made some unpopular decisions, such as a complete restructuring of the sportsman classes, and the move to Waco was a corporate distraction. At the end of 1988, one year after taking over the IHRA, Billy Meyer shut it down.

Ted Jones and his partner, Bristol's Jimmy Ruth, took over the IHRA and brought it back to life, thus ending the Billy Meyer era, one of the shortest but strangest in IHRA's long history.