Time Trials: A Dragstrip Requiem is a new documentary by local filmmaker Cole Coonce that chronicles the extraordinary life and career of drag racing legend Mendy Fry, screens for free at Mojave Gold tonight, Sunday, June 1 at 7:00 p.m.
When relaying her professional career, drag racing legend Mendy Fry says she was a “teenage sensation,” her tone playfully tongue-in-cheek. Yet Fry continued explaining how drag racing is a serious, even dangerous business. The cars run on nitromethane, an explosive fuel propelling the driver to speeds and combustion that often ignite a vehicle into a searing blacktop comet.
Beginning her thirty-two-year career at age fifteen, Fry entered the male-dominated sport as the only woman in the Front Engine Top Fuel class, becoming the first woman to break speeds of 250 mph. Yet there is no female division in Top Fuel, Fry reminded Z1077:
“There’s no female division because it would be…empty.”
To this day, Fry still holds the world record for the quickest elapsed time in the AA/Fuel Dragster class: a quarter mile in 5.49 seconds.
Fry says her father, a car and engine builder, “wanted a son but got a daughter instead,” so she was raised in the sport whether she wanted it or not. But Fry wanted it, and by the time she started driving, she was surrounded with support despite racing’s “fairly misogynist environment.”
“I think that I probably got very desensitized to that. Whatever comments would come my way, I’d just kind of let them roll off my back… The thing is, that’s just the novelty, right? Like you actually have to get in and compete at the level that everybody else is competing, so nobody really cares what your gender is,” said Fry.
On her skill and ambition alone, Fry continued to dominate the sport until taking a six-year break half-way through her career.
In 1997, drag racing writer/photographer Cole Coonce was already a fan of Fry before meeting her at a Bakersfield race’s press section. Struggling to maintain his journalistic integrity, he was smitten with Fry, and the two soon became an item, and later, married.
Sixteen years after Fry returned to racing, Coonce put together a film crew to document her leading the national circuit. Coonce said, “As she dominated and then her car owner unfortunately passed, I showed the footage to a film distributor I knew and he said, ‘You’ve got a movie here.’”
Five years later, the result is Time Trials: A Drag Strip Requiem, a feature-length documentary chronicling Fry’s highs and lows during her decades of shattering speed records and gender barriers.
“This is really a movie about transcending one’s circumstances which I think is a universal theme and that’s what our protagonist ultimately did¾not once, but twice, really¾you can transcend your circumstances and then you still get set back, but that was a big part of what made me want to stick to this film and finish it because I felt it was a story worth telling,” said Coonce
Despite the close quarters of their marriage, Fry didn’t consult on the film at all and wouldn’t even allow herself to see the footage until the final product, which she says has been an emotional experience.
“Watching the film has been one of the most truly vulnerable times I’ve had in my life. I need to watch it a couple more times before we go see it with all these people in the room because like, I have to stop crying. And also, I can’t imagine what it’s been like for Cole! He’s been out in his studio working you know 10, 12-hour days (editing the film), and when he comes back in the house and he’s like, ‘Oh you again… I’ve been looking at you for twelve hours!” said Fry.
“There are worse fates,” added Coonce.
Time Trials: A Dragstrip Requiem screens tonight (Sunday, June 1) at Mojave Gold in Yucca Valley. Admission is free and open to the public.
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