Mendy Fry is a bad ass. No two ways around it. A woman who has lived basically her entire life in drag racing, she has amazing abilities behind the wheel and a genuine love of the sport that was instilled in her by her late dad. She has been racing fast stuff since she was a kid and between alcohol cars and nostalgia nitro burning equipment, her resume is among the most impressive in the sport.
Fry is the back-to-back NHRA Heritage Series Top Fuel Champion and while 2018 was a romping, stomping good time, 2019 took a horrendous emotional turn when High Speed Motorsports team owner and leader Tom Shelar passed away unexpectedly in August. This left the group with many questions. Should they continue the season? Who would tune the car? Could they actually do this without their spiritual, emotional, and mechanical leader? Knowing Shelar like they all did, sitting on their hands would have been the wrong thing to do. Their solution? Finish the season in the same dominating fashion that they had been running the last two years in.
Following Shelar’s passing, Troy Green and Shawn Bellemeur (two guys who Tom loved and who had worked very closely with him) took over the tuning duties. They went to Tulsa and crushed them all. That left one race, the season finale of the Heritage series which happens to be the NHRA California Hot Rod Reunion at Bakersfield. The result? Another win and the completion of a two year run of performance and dominance rarely seen in any form of drag racing, let alone one that is predicated by the success of nitro burning front engine dragsters.
Mendy is awesome and Lewis Bloom conducts this interview in a great fashion, taking Mendy through her life both in and outside of drag racing and giving us all a long and colorful window into the woman who will go down as one of the best drivers of the last 50 years. (She’ll never own up to that fact, but wheeling some of the most unpredictable and hard to handle machines the sport has ever known buys you that credential.)
Enjoy this video and Mendy’s story, it’s fantastic.
