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GURSS: Heavy Metal Thunder - Rockers Who Raced
Written by: Jade Gurss   
06/09/2009
Mooresville, NC
 
The fan hoopla in the racing world this week was centered around an unfortunate attempt to destroy a perfectly good Gibson Les Paul guitar with custom design and paint by Sam Bass. The attempted destruction was carried out by Kyle Busch, which is one of the reasons many fans are so upset. Kyle was channeling his inner Kurt Cobain or Pete Townshend, but he was blissfully unaware of the sturdiness of a nice Gibson. Kyle, take a lesson from Kiss and the others: break the cheap stuff or have the prop guitar ready for the maximum faux-vandalism effect.
Faster. Louder. The weekly column on SPEEDtv.com by Jade Gurss. (Harold Hinson Photo) ยป More Photos
So much has been made of the incident, it was hard to think of anything new to add to a race car driver wanting to act like a rock star – until I realized there has been little written about rock stars who had been real racers in the past 40 years.

We all know Sammy Hagar can’t drive 55, but he’s a frequent attendee at NASCAR races and his tequila brand sponsored AJ Foyt’s Indy car team a few years back. Gene Simmons of Kiss brought his marketing firm to the Indy Racing League to conceive and write the imminently forgettable “I Am Indy” theme song and ad campaign. The quiet Beatle, George Harrison, was a huge fan of Formula One and traveled the globe to many an F1 race after his Beatle days.

But what about rockers who actually got behind the wheel?

In the earliest days of the Los Angeles glam-metal scene, Motley Crue would perform with John Force’s Top Fuel Funny Car on stage. The band’s lead singer, Vince Neil, went on to form his own race team and eventually made a few inauspicious starts in the Indy Lights category in the early 1990s.

Nick Mason, best know as the drummer and founding member of Pink Floyd, owns a massive fleet of classic cars and raced at a level high enough to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Mason is so car crazed, he even wrote a book, “Into the Red” about his car collection. The drummer for ZZ Top, Frank Beard (ironically the only member of the trio who doesn’t sport a beard) competed in sports cars and once finished second place in class at the 24 Hours of Daytona.

Another drummer was John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. Long known as having the heaviest right foot in rock and roll, “Bonzo” often put that heavy right foot to use in a dragster. During the fantasy sequence of the movie “The Song Remains the Same,” the late Bonham is seen running a rail dragster through its paces down the dragstrip.

Though they were more folk than rock, the tandem of Dick and
Tommy Smothers – aka The Smothers Brothers – were big auto racing fans and during the heights of their successful variety show on American television in the late 1960s, the brothers dabbled behind the wheel in a variety of drag racing and sports cars.

Most notably in NASCAR, country star Marty Robbins – he of the Grammy-winning, number one fame of “El Paso” in 1960 – had a lengthy career as a part-time driver in what was then known as Winston Cup. Robbins competed in the Daytona 500 and raced when he could fit it into his touring and recording schedule. He last competed at Atlanta in a Junior Johnson-built car only a month before his death in 1982 following heart surgery.

Those are the notables, but use the “comments” section for any I’ve missed who combined loud guitars with loud cars.

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel

Jade Gurss is the owner of fingerprint, inc., a sports publicity company. He has written two New York Times Best Sellers, including what is believed to be the biggest-selling motorsports book in American publishing history (Driver #8 with Dale Earnhardt Jr.). His two decades of publicity and marketing experience involves nearly every category of motorsports, including nine innovative seasons as NASCAR publicist for the Budweiser brand and Earnhardt Jr. His blog can be seen at: http://fingerprint.typepad.com

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