Drag racer Mendy Fry was blessed with beauty, poise, and no natural fear of nitromethane. Sure, a lot of people have the first two, that’s what beauty pageants are for, but strap any of them into a multi-thousand horsepower nitro Top Fueler, and suddenly you separate the men from the boys. And the girls.

Mendy Fry is a cool, cool kitty, “Nitro Kitty” as it said on her car, and this new documentary, Time Trials: A Drag Strip Requiem, available on Amazon for just $4.99, details exactly how cool.

She was born into a racing family. Her dad Ron Fry was an engine and chassis builder in Northern California. The elder Fry really wanted a boy.

“He wanted a son and he got me,” Fry says.

So he molded her into a racer. She started in quarter midgets at age four. By the time she was in high school she was driving an eight-second, lightweight, full-fendered ’27 T roadster powered by an injected Rat motor at NorCal drag strips - and winning. They won all but two races they enetered over several years. Other families took vacation, the Frys went racing.

"The only thing that I knew was drag racing," she says.

So they raced. And raced. And raced. It was going well until the first big tragedy of her life hit when in 1995. Ron Fry died at just 51. Mendy dropped out of the sport, got a college degree in accounting, became a CPA, and that might have been that.

Until a chance visit to the track in 2000 lead to a seat, which lead to other seats, which ultimately lead to five different Top Fuel dragsters and three nostalgia Funny Cars, all running in the highly competitive NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Series Racing Series.

This is where the heart of the documentary takes off.

How did this story, which could represent the stories of so many drag racers, road racers, roundy round racers, anybody, come to be told and told so well? It was love.

The guy who wrote it, Cole Coonce, aka the luckiest man alive, was a journalist covering drag racing who did a story on Mendy Fry in 2005 and wound up marrying her.

Coonce had been hired to produce and direct race coverage of the NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series covering the Nostalgia Top Fuel class (aka “AA/Fuel Dragsters”), with the goal of streaming those shows on YouTube and on deep cable outlets like MAV TV and Fox Sports 2.

“Those shoots gave us total access to the teams while in the heat of battle and in unguarded moments," Coonce said. "As often as not, the production crew was ace lensman/drag-racing obsessive Les Mayhew (who kept the cars in focus for a 1/4-mile and another 1/2 mile while they slowed down), Whit Bazemore (retired 2-time US Nationals Funny Car champion and renowned still photographer), and myself. It was a guerrilla production whose budget wouldn't cover the cost of the catering at a network-produced race show."

But that crew was good, really understood drag racing, and knew when to shut up and keep the camera rolling. So much of the magic of this documentary comes when neither Mayhew, Bazemore, nor Coonce are saying anything on screen, they're just standing there, holding the red button and recording. In the best traditions of journalism, they recognize when something is happening and let it happen.

"Whit is the camera operator beyond the finish line who let those candid scenes play out -- as a Nitro Funny Car champion who had been set on fire more times than a methlab cook, he knew the intensity and emotional arc of those moments while the driver gathered up the parachute and gave the car owner a debrief on the run. Because of his history as a racecar driver, Whit's subjects felt comfortable around him and were comfortable letting their guard down -- that's why those scenes come off as natural rather than a contrivance."

So there was a lot of good footage that tells a story.

“With that said, we didn't know we were making a movie. We just thought we were shooting race coverage for the Internet and deep cable.”
Then, another tragedy, which I won’t spoil for you by revealing here, but it turns good video into a truly profound story that transcends mere racing coverage and spills into the realm of human struggle and, ultimately, triumph.

“It wasn’t until that awful moment occurred near the end of the 2019 racing season that I realized we had the makings of a film. I wish that awful moment had never occurred and that we didn’t have a movie—but that’s not how it shook out.”

Boy, do they have a movie. You can rent Time Trials: A Drag Strip Requiem on Amazon for $4.99. Or buy it for $9.99. It’ll be the best sawbuck you ever spent.

And then you’ll want to track down copies of Cole Coonce’s books on drag racing and land speed racing, particularly Infinity Over Zero and Top Fuel Wormhole Vol. 1 and 2. It’s as if he stole typewriters from Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac and channeled those guys into understanding racing. The documentary is not like the books, it’s straight up storytelling where the story does the telling. You must check it out.