Bob Skinner, Tom Jobe and Mike Sorokin
In early 1964, when a trio of young guys wearing shaggy hair, Pendleton shirts, and deck tennies unloaded their brand-new fuel dragster at Lions Dragstrip, old-timer Don Madden immediately branded them “The Surfers”. Looking like they just stepped off a Beach Boys album cover, using a yellow and white ’55 Chevy tow car with a good luck twig on the hood ornament, that nickname was a natural. They didn’t win much at first, but the cackle of their Chrysler made it obvious to anyone that someday this would be a team to reckon with. In just over two years, the trio of Bob Skinner, Tom Jobe, and driver Mike Sorokin (who lived on their race cars winnings while attending college) had established themselves as perhaps the greatest and most popular independent team in top fuel history. After winning top fuel purses at all the southern Californian tracks in 1964 and 1965, including Mickey Thompson’s $2500 “200 MPH Club”, the Surfers were able to defeat a field of 102 fuelers at the 1966 Bakersfield March Meet. The team would bank $5560 to set a world record 7.34 second ET. They were short on money but long on talent, and their outlook on racing was definitely refreshing. They had apparently learned the secret to running straight nitro because, engineering student Jobe reasoned, “we were tired of replacing those expensive hydrometers”. Their first engine lasted a year “because it had to”. Their car had a 157″ wheelbase because “that’s what would fit in the garage”. In the summer of 1966, they toured successfully from coast-to-coast and once even at two different match races at the same track on the same day. That fall, having had their day in the sun, Skinner and Jobe put everything up for sale. Sorokin lost his life in a top fuel clutch explosion and crash at Orange County in December 1967.