Shawn Cowie has become the most successful Canadian driver in the history of drag racing
Reigning world champion top alcohol drag racer Shawn Cowie describes the experience as loading yourself into a cannon and shooting yourself out of it. Instead of a cannon, Cowie climbs into a 32-foot-long slingshot powered by a 4,000-horsepower supercharged methanol-burning engine at drag strips across the United States. He is slammed down a quarter mile track in a fraction over five seconds, accelerating to more than 500 kilometres per hour (275 mph). That from a standing start. The time it takes to cross the finish line is like blinking your eyes five times.
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“It used to be a blur,” he says during an interview at Mundie’s Towing and Recovery, the 50-year-old Burnaby company he took over after his father’s death. “Now I can pick out some features along the track in the few seconds before I activate the chute.” That’s the twin parachutes that brings his track missile to a stop.
Cowie grew up in Richmond and was a high school football star with his team winning provincial championships three years in a row. His father had an interest in drag racing and so his son began racing junior dragsters at Mission Raceway Park. And when the elder Cowie bought a drag strip in Prince George, so Shawn was soon racing on two tracks.
In 2000, he graduated to piloting a ‘top comp’ dragster his father Ron had purchased. That was his entry into the world of National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) drag racing which went all the way up the ladder in 2007, when his father purchased a top alcohol dragster and team from a retiring NHRA championship driver.
In the past 10 years, Shawn Cowie has become the most successful Canadian driver in the history of drag racing. He has always placed among the 10 best top alcohol drivers with three second places, three third places and now the 2024 world championship win. This, despite a frustrating year of chasing a stubborn electrical problem that would shut his dragster down eliminating him from some competitions.
“We couldn’t find the gremlins, so we tore everything out and completely rewired the car and replaced everything with new parts” he says. He now drives the fastest supercharged top alcohol car in existence
His accomplishments are nothing short of a Cinderella story of epic proportions. While traveling between events in 2011, Cowie and a friend were driving their Harley Davidson motorcycles back to their race trailer after an evening visit to downtown Nashville. He was hit from behind by a drunk driver.
“I didn’t even see it coming,” he recalls. He was thrown a total of 150 feet off a highway overpass and broke more bones in his body than he didn’t. “I had a broken back, neck and pelvis. My right ankle had to be fused and my knee rebuilt. I almost lost my right leg.”
Insurance paid the $1million in medical costs in Nashville and he spent a further three months in hospital once he returned to Vancouver.
“Doctors here wanted to amputate my leg, but I wouldn’t let them,” he says. After more than two years of rehabilitation, Shawn had the itch to try racing again.
He decided to test in his top alcohol dragster for a run in Woodburn, Oregon in 2013 to see how his body felt. It went so well he went on to win that event in his class that weekend. Then he traveled to Seattle and won there. From then on, he just kept on winning with faster times.
He describes the experience of driving at the highest level of drag racing as being part of a big family. “Everybody helps out when there are problems. They all pitch in,” he says.
He cites an event in Las Vegas where a competitor he was racing against blew an engine and would have been eliminated if the car didn’t get fixed to make the next round. Cowie’s Mundie’s Towing & Recovery team supplied an engine and 30 members of competing teams worked in between rounds to get his dragster back on the track later that day.
“I’m very competitive but we want to win on our own merits, not at the expense of others,” he says.
He has the support of his wife Taylor, whose father was a celebrated drag racer. His team includes himself, Marc Heritage and his wife Heidi. There are no big sponsors behind this unimaginably expensive sport other than his towing company and a few Vancouver-area companies.
He is very emotional when talking about his world championship trophy which he won on points earned by being the first to finish races that sometimes see four top alcohol dragsters lined up beside each other at the starting lights.
“I wish my dad had been there for the trophy presentation,” he says. “He got me started and was with me all the way.”
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and a partner in a Vancouver-based public relations company. [email protected]
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