And not even any uncertainty of the Rick Jones-built GXP they debuted at Gainesville has them frazzled. On the contrary. In a most un-Gliddenish way, Glidden said, "We got finished (testing at Bradenton) early, and I’m already in my hotel room (at Gainesville). I think this car is really going to be good for us. Justin looked confident and was really driving good."
So who is this young fellow who has Glidden humming along, figuratively and literally?
Well, he used to be a bit of a punk, maybe not a scofflaw, but certainly a hip gearhead who did nothing really to discourage illegal street racing. He didn’t start out that way, though.
At age 16, he accompanied his friends whose families were active in drag racing to the local track and got a revelation.
"I never realized you could take the car you drive everyday to the race track and go make runs," Humphreys said. "I eventually took my lowered S-10 out there and beat on it a little bit. It ran 16.80s back in '94. I went and bought a 5-litre Mustang, put nitrous on it, did a bunch of stuff, and ended up at my local track just about every weekend we could get out there. It ran high-10s, low 11s, which was really fast back in '96. I got the itch then and opened up a performance shop in '99 with one of my friends. He had an import car, a Toyota Supra, that we worked on. We finally got that thing down to running mid-8s in early '99-2000."
Bob Glidden and Dick Maskin
That, he said, piqued his interest in imports, "which I never was into," he said. "I built a twin-turbo Lexus with an inline six-cylinder, made 1700 hp and went over and ran the import series for four or five years. Won both championships my first year, wrecked the car once, learned a lot from wrecking a car, It was a good learning experience. A lot of good drivers over there taught me a lot. The sport wasn't going the direction I thought it needed to go. What better a place to go than battle with these guys over here, the best of the best?"
Ah, but in the meantime, he liked to show off his car. In the process, he hung around some truly foolish racers who indulged in a dangerous games. Taking the scandalous chance that they might not live to see the sunrise -- or worse yet, they thought, that they might get busted by the cops -- these throttle psychos lined up in Washington, D.C., on V Street in the wicked dark and laid down anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 for the glory of being the best of who lived that night.
"Back when I was young, I had 15-20 friends that all had Mustangs and would all go down there and goof off," Humphreys said. Typically, the police would make the scene and the miscreants would scatter. But, of course, they'd gather again somewhere, keeping the cops on the chase until about 1 or 2 a.m. Mostly Humphreys watched. Undeniably, it was entertaining to see these new-millennium James Dean wannabes with their willful ways, their wads of cash, and their wild women and wilder hot rods slapping dead presidents on the hoods of cars. The scenes reeked of bravado and boneheadedness.
But with no desire to attract the attention of the authorities, Humphreys eventually tired of that act and stuck to the legitimate track. A widely publicized incident in which eight spectators were killed in Accokeek, Maryland, while watching such a spectacle confirmed his smart decision. Now he's advocating stepped-up police patrols in targeted areas and stiffer penalties for drivers arrested for illegal street racing.