Drag Illustrated Issue 113, September 2016 | Page 32

Dirt By Brandon W. Mudd I f there’s an emotion to be had in drag racing, there’s a better than average chance Rahn Tobler has experienced it. In more than 40 years of being part of the sport at every level at tracks all over this country, Tobler has seen the highest of highs and lowest of lows. But the businesslike exterior we see from him at the track on race weekends when he’s leading the Don Schumacher Racing Funny Car team driven by fellow SoCal native Ron Capps is not who Tobler is at his core. In a chat Drag Illustrated had with him at Sonoma in July, we found that core included some interesting things, like a love of hip-hop music and an even bigger affection for wine country and wine. What’s a good wine for Rahn Tobler? A good wine for Rahn Tobler is a nice Jordan, a nice Belle Glos pinot noir, you know, a Caymus cabernet, something along those lines. I like a Flowers pinot noir as well. Anything Central California works for us. We’ve heard quite a lot of wine gets consumed when you and (Jack Beckman crew chief) Jimmy Prock get together on your boat. You know, wine gets consumed pretty much anywhere we’re at. You can see we have a wine fridge in (the lounge of the team hauler). We’re getting stuff chilled for tomorrow evening. We have a gathering every Saturday night of crew chiefs and friends who come by and drink wine with us. Every Saturday night we have a little get together. It really doesn’t matter if it’s Jimmy or whoever we’re with, there’s going to be some nice red wine consumed. You also have a love of hip-hop music. How did that come about? You know, I’m not really sure. (laughs) I grew up in Inglewood (California) for the first 15 years of my life, so maybe some of that has rubbed off on me. I lived in the San Fernando Valley in the early ‘90s when Dre’s The Chronic album came Air Assist allows racers ability to lock the suspension for the initial launch and release it when needed out and it really kind of started all that and I started listening to it back then. Now with the advent of Pandora and all those things where you can get a genre of music, because you can’t get it on the radio all the time, although there are a lot of cities now that have stations dedicated to that. We’re mainly old-school West Coast ‘90s, 2000s, Straight Outta’ Compton type of stuff. That’s what we like to listen to and we have a good time with it. Turning to racing, since moving from being Jack Beckman’s crew chief early in 2012 to the NAPA team with Ron Capps as your driver, even if you don’t win the race you two almost always have a strong presence on Sundays. How did that bond between you develop? With any driver you get with it takes a while and I really haven’t been associated with that many drivers in drag racing. Although I’ve been involved in drag racing for 40-something years and you hear about (Lee) Beard, who’s been with 17 drivers. I’ve only been with, you can probably count them on one hand. So we tend to get close. When we got with Ron, we were thrilled because he’s a great veteran driver who knows a lot about the race cars, which helps us tremendously. A lot of times, he’s able to come back and give us feedback we may not be able to see on computer data. It was a good match from the start. When we got together, we went to six straight finals in a row. Obviously, we had the disappointment of losing the championship by two points at the end of that year. Another time national-record points hurt me in winning a championship. But we’ve done great together. We’ve won 16 races together in four short years (Note: The number increased to 17 when Capps earned his CALL MARC SMITH FOR MORE INFO AIR ASSISTED DOUBLE ADJUSTABLE 32 | D r a g I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com Issue 113 PHOTO: NHRA / NATIONAL DRAGSTER Q&A: Rahn Tobler