BACKGROUNDER - Mike Thomas

After years of skyrocketing his way through many levels of amateur and professional drag racing. Mike Thomas has reached the pinnacle of his sport, with a factory-supported engine development program designed to put him up with the greats of pro stock racing.

In the off-season Thomas started an engine company, Finish Line Enterprises, in Newark, Ohio, to develop his own pro stock racing engines. He enlisted three top racing engineers, Jimmy Oliver, Tom Roberts and Terry Adams, to build the engines. Oliver and Roberts had worked in the same capacity for driver Larry Morgan, and Adams served last year as driver of Thomas's second car.

In the last three years he has struggled in pro stock ranks, learning hard lessons about the most competitive class of racing in the hot rod world. Finally, in 1996, he qualified in 12 of the 20 championship events he entered, and even reached the second round of competition at the NHRA U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis.

Thomas first showed up to race in Pro Stock at Indianapolis in 1992. He was bumped from the field during the last qualifying round. Two races later, at the Texas Motorplex, he reached the first round and lost to Bruce Allen. At Pomona, Calif., in the Winston Finals, he won his first round against Mark Osborne but lost when his engine broke in the second round in a race with Jerry Eckman. Thomas continued to improve in 1994, qualifying in all but three races, finishing the season 11th in points, fourth best in reaction time at the starting line, ranking ninth best in top speed and qualifying in the top half of the field six times.

In 1995, his toughest season on the circuit, he drove, his way through three race cars, frustrated by the different teething problems they all presented him. Unable to overcome the mechanical jinx, Thomas started fresh with another new car after the season ended and was able to test it as 6.97 seconds before heading off to Pomona, Calif., for the first race of 1996. The jinx was broken there, as he qualified 16th for the NHRA Winternationals in his Gumout Olds Cutlass. It was the first time he had qualified for a national championship race since 1994.

Mike Thomas was born September 25, 1952 in Battle Creek, Mich., and moved with his family at an early age to Cookeville, Tenn., where he grew up the son of an Exxon dealer. He learned the auto service station business first hand from an early age. After graduation from Baxter Upperman High School, where he was a two-way end and played on one Upper Cumberland Conference championship team, Thomas attended Tennessee Teach and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration majoring in accounting.

Soon after leaving college in 1974, he took his first step toward establishing the business enterprise he heads today. He established his first auto service center in 1976 and started cloning it in 1980. His centers feature self-service gasoline pumps, oil change centers, car washes and convenience stores. He now has 20 of them located in Tennessee, Georgia and Kentucky.

Incorporating on the last day of 1992 he soon merged his chain of auto service centers with a shell corporation, United Petroleum Co., acquiring 96 percent of the stock. The company also holds mineral rights on 61,000 acres in eastern Kentucky, and Thomas has signed a contract with Enron Oil & Gas Co. to drill for natural gas.

Thomas got started with his brother in a '57 Chevrolet at local tracks in middle Tennessee in 1969. "We destroyed it getting hands-on experience," said Thomas. He laid off from racing during his college years, 1969-1974, but got restarted by buying a used SS Nova in 1983. He used to drive it to Music City Dragway in Nashville and then enter it in races with no break out rule. (A break out rule is supposed to equalize competition between cars of different capabilities. Using an elapsed time index, a car which goes faster than that time is disqualified, even if he wins the race. A car normally faster than the index dials in his own time, and that acts as a handicap against the slower car..)

Thomas and Pritchart developed an engine with which Thomas set three national records in SS/I. His Chevy II was first into the "nines' with a 9.91-second run at Baton Rouge in 1988. That year he reached the quarter-finals of the NHRA Gatornationals and NHRA Winston Finals. He followed in 1989 with introduction of what may have been the first front-wheel-drive car in Super Stock, a Beretta. On a 10.73-second index he ran 9.71 and proceeded to win his class Atlanta, Memphis, Indianapolis and Winston Finals, racing the quarters at Indy and semi-finals at Pomona. Earlier in the season he had won his class at Houston and Gainesville while he was still driving the Chevy II. Thomas began a transition in 1992, starting in the GT class upgrading to Pro Stock, and the rest of his short career has shown an upward curve.

In August, 1994, at the Mile-High Nationals, Thomas and his fiance, Hope Richard of Denver, celebrated the first anniversary of their relationship by getting married. They now live in Knoxville.