On Being a“ Gunslinger”
“ It was during one of those calls, in the dark, when he said,‘ Well, buddy, you’ re the last of the gunslingers.’ Those were words I took very close to heart coming from him and still do to this very day.”
— BRIAN LOHNES
IT WASN’ T UNCOMMON FOR KEPNER TO ANNOUNCE A RACE
ONE NIGHT AND COMPETE IN ANOTHER EVENT DOWN THE ROAD THE NEXT NIGHT. HIS RENTAL CAR EXPLOITS FREQUENTLY RESULTED
IN WINNER’ S CIRCLE PICTURES.
a huge amount of impact and influence on me.
Once I got to know him, he became a great and brutally honest coach and mentor. In one particularly memorable coaching session at a Waffle House at about 2 a. m. one morning after an exceptionally long night at the U. S. Nationals, he was quite direct with me about the use of personal pronouns and how I was heading into lessthan-good waters with not only overusing them, but using them at all in my work. His message, blunt as it was, landed where it needed to and I can count on one hand how many times I have slipped up in this respect, about a decade later.
Earlier in my career, when I was really daisy chaining events and other work together, even more than now, I’ d often be on the phone with Bret late into the night or very early into the morning on banzai drives. It was during one loved to shoot photos, with a library of his work totaling over 200,000 photos. Bret is immortalized in several Hall of Fames such as the East Coast Drag Racing Hall of Fame, the St. Louis Gateway Hall of Fame, and in 2021, the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame inducted Bret.
Kepner prided himself in being a great spectator, and Jones labeled him as drag racing’ s greatest fan because Kepner was averaging 140 races a year, with the all-time high of 167 events in 1998. Kepner announced for 42 years, did TV for 33 years, raced for 36 years, and attended drag racing events for exactly 50 years. Kepner came up with the name Pro Modified. He never did anything without researching it first, and always wanted to know facts about what classes and series he would be announcing. Bret always saw it as it as his duty to sell T-shirts and concessions for the track while announcing during the event. Every year for the NHRA U. S. Nationals at Indy, Bret would go to the 1,000-
foot mark and set up with his notebooks. His friends joined him and they tagged it as the 1,000-Foot Club. Those notebooks contain the history of each race from before the internet let us share immediately.
Brian Lohnes of NHRA on FOX, co-founder of Bangshift. com, and former race director of New England Dragway, shared the following. Bret has been a highly influential figure in my career and the development thereof. That influence has come in very different ways. As a guy coming up, I studied video of guys like Bret and his contemporaries in various motorsports, be they Army Armstrong, Jack Arute, Paul Page, and more. It wasn’ t about studying to copy them. It was studying to understand things like timing, delivery, tone, and inflection. If I was going to be a watch maker, I’ d want to study with the best watch maker, not to copy his watches, but to see how he executed his craft. Long before I ever met Bret Kepner, the work Bret had exerted had
July / August 2026