‘A racer’s mindset.’ Bradenton man takes 1st place prize after lifelong racing career
When he was a kid, Pat Nanney had a fascination with racing.
His desire to race anything, from bikes to go-karts to boats and cars, still brings the Bradenton native joy.
“If it’s got spark plugs and gasoline involved, I’m usually wanting to be in the middle of it,” Nanney said.
The 68-year-old recently won the U.S. Street Nationals 6.50 Index class at Bradenton Motorsports Park in East Manatee. The victory, which netted him $2,500, was the first time he’d won a big race since 2005.
“I’m going, ‘Will there ever be another one?’” Nanney said. “That’s a racer’s mindset. There’s always next week and there’s always another race. I always have another chance.”
Nanney’s journey to racing began as a kid in the Palma Sola area of Bradenton. He said after graduating from Manatee High School, he started fixing lawnmowers and then began working at a Dodge dealership in the early 1970s.
Decades-long racing career
Nanney said the guys that came in mentioned they were racing, and he wanted to get involved.
“Just started out there with a streetcar going to the drag strip,” Nanney said. “Doing that and then we started off stock car racing.”
For 28 years, Nanney raced stock cars. But the endurance, regimented skills and time led Nanney to change gears to a different form of racing.
So in 2010, he started drag racing.
“It got to the point, it’s like how old do you have to be to quit bouncing cars off the wall at 110 miles an hour?” Nanney said.
He added he knew he wasn’t as sharp as he used to be.
Nanney, who had always built cars and engines, was 55 when the shift to a different racing challenge began.
“In stock car racing, if you miss a corner or something goes on, you lose a position,” Nanney said. “You might have anywhere between five laps and 75 or 100 laps to make up for it. Where drag racing, you have to be picture perfect every round for every how many rounds it’s going to take to get through the field.”
Bradenton man wins drag racing competition
The margin for error in drag racing is slim, down to the hundredths of a second. It’s a mental chess game, Nanney said.
The car Nanney used to win was the culmination of 10 years of work, building the original version and then tweaking things to get his ride going the fastest.
“Who can build the best mousetrap,” Nanney said. “So you keep tweaking on it. You go out and try this. It’s like, was that good or was that not? ... It’s not always fireworks. Did that really make a difference or not? So sometimes you’ve got to do an adjustment, raise it for a couple times and it’s like, ‘No, that really wasn’t a step forward.’”
But on Sunday, Jan. 28, it all came together. And the adjustments were with his reaction time.
“You have to learn all the different ways to lose before you can win,” Nanney said.
This story was originally published February 5, 2024 at 5:50 AM.
