Endless Summer

Drag Racing In England With Master Tuner Roland Leong

- Elana Scherr

ROLAND LEONG WAS bored. Bored and cold, despite it being unusually warm for July in England. He was huddled down in his seat on the Thames River tour boat, his personalized racing jacket pulled tight over a bright blue shirt that read, “Hawaii: Where my story begins.” While our fellow tourists marveled at the Tower of London, Leong stayed buried in his phone. I looked over his shoulder to see what could possibly be more interesting than Big Ben and the shining panels of the London Shard.

“Head gasket? Blower pressure? EGT?” Leong’s text read.

When you’ve spent more than 50 years tuning drag racing cars to faster than 300 mph, perhaps the pace of history feels like just a drag. Leong didn’t want to see the sights; he wanted to go racing.

As his T-shirt promised, Leong’s story started on a dragstrip in the Hawaiian Islands, but this chapter found the famed Funny Car tuner in the British Isles—there by invitation to help set up a 1971 Camaro flopper for an English racer named Tony Betts. Tuning a nitro Top Fuel engine is more than just loading a laptop program; it requires balancing the fuel, the clutch, gear ratios, and pulley sizes to keep everything on the edge of too much, but not over. It’s a tricky gig, and losing sight of a tune can mean years of testing to get it back. Leong loves the challenge, but there were several days to kill before the races, which meant he got to be bored on the riverboat, bored in a pub, bored in an Elizabethan village square, and bored at a train station, where we had to grab him when our train pulled up because he’d wandered off and was on the phone talking about exhaust gas temperatures.