Re-Posted with permission from DragRaceCentral.com
Adam Sorokin is nothing short of driven. The son of drag racer Mike Sorokin, of the storied Surfers Top Fuel team of the 1960s, was born with pretty big shoes to fill. He might have opted not to even try, but the desire to race was something he was never able to deny, and years of determination came to fruition when he found himself in the Top Fuel winner’s circle at the Bakersfield March Meet, an event his father had won 44 years earlier.
Sorokin, a regular competitor in the NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Series, drove his Champion Speed Shop Van Dyke Motorsports dragster to a 5.76 to 5.93 final-round victory over Howard Haight to earn his first March Meet trophy at historic Famoso Raceway.
Adam Sorokin runs a 5.764 at 241.64 at win the final round at the 52nd Annual March Meet.
His father’s life, punctuated by a voracious appetite for drag racing, was tragically cut short at Orange County Raceway in 1967, when Sorokin was just a year old. The elder Sorokin, who won the March Meet in 1966, wasn’t able to impress his appreciation for racing upon his son in person, but the gene was most certainly passed on, and replicating the Bakersfield triumph was what the younger racer called “a dream come true.”
“I wanted to win that race before I was ever even in a racecar,” said Sorokin. “I thought about it as a kid, but it was something so big that it was difficult to even conceive it as a possibility.
“It had been cold and cloudy all weekend, and right before we fired our cars for the final, the sun broke. I thought, ‘I sure hope somebody is up there looking down on me. I really want to win this.’ Winning that race was like winning the world series or the Daytona 500. It was huge.”
The journey that led to hoisting the March Meet trophy began before Sorokin even graduated kindergarten.
“I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I always knew I was going to be a drag racer,” said Sorokin. “When I was about four or five years old, my mom started taking me to Orange County Raceway to show me what my dad had done for a living, and meeting the drivers and seeing them in their helmets and firesuits sparked an interest pretty early for me.”
Sorokin’s mom, Robyn, handed out the Mike Sorokin Memorial Award to the track’s Driver of the Year, and Sorokin took over the honor in 1972. The regular trips to the racetrack and familiar warmth of the drag racing community fueled his interest in the lifestyle to the extreme, and the youngster visualized himself behind the wheel, bringing his visions to life in drawings of himself in stick figure form driving dragsters and Funny Cars. At 10 years old, he was the recipient of a monumental gift that exacerbated the dream; his mom gave him a box packed full of memorabilia from his dad’s days of racing.
“The box had every magazine article that my dad had been in, photo albums, 8×10 pictures, racing t-shirts, and even one of his helmets,” said Sorokin. “It was all given to me, and those 8×10 pictures were on my walls for years. I would just stare at them because they were the only way I knew my dad. I was in awe of him.”
The growing desire to walk in his father’s drag racing footsteps was countered by his mother’s strong wishes to keep him out of the profession. When Sorokin was 18, his world was changed by the news that his mother was terminally ill with stomach cancer, and in her final days, Robyn Sorokin gifted her son with a blessing to follow his heart.
Barely an adult and suddenly completely in command of his own destiny, Sorokin worked steadily towards his goal of becoming a racecar driver. Eventually, he had saved enough money to enroll in Jim Russell’s Racing School at Laguna Seca. Over the next few years, Sorokin tried his hand at everything from road racing to go karting, and in the late 1990s, he enrolled in a Super Comp course taught by Frank Hawley at Hawley’s drag racing school.
“That was the catalyst,” said Sorokin. “As soon as I got into a drag racing car, I felt like I was at home, and I knew it was what I should be doing.
“One of the reasons I wanted to drag race was because I hadn’t really known my dad, so I wanted to experience the things that he had experienced. Once I started doing it, I understood the man and why he had a love for it, and then I developed my own love. I wanted to do the work to be good at it.”
Sorokin returned to Hawley’s for an inter-school competition and tucked a slew of laps under his belt, all the while weighing out what his next step should be. Soon after, he got a glimpse of his future when Hank Bender, a close friend to his mom and dad, offered Sorokin the opportunity to take a few spins in his Junior Fuel front engine car. Gaining valuable and diverse experience behind the wheel was a plus, but Sorokin took a logical approach to his mission that might have seemed to some a step back.
“I knew that I really needed to show that I wanted to be there, and that just because I was somebody’s son, I didn’t expect that I would get to drive,” said Sorokin. “I realized that I needed to crew for somebody to get into the circle, so to speak. I did a few one-off deals, but I was a horrible crew guy. I could do what they told me to do, but I wasn’t mechanically gifted.”
Pushing through the self-described imperfection at the task, the aspiring driver put in his time with the wrenches and got lucky when a chance meeting eventually led to the opportunity to drive Dave Smith’s then-new alcohol Funny Car. With no experience in that type of a car, Sorokin made a phone call to Frank Hawley’s school and asked if they had a booklet that the students enrolled in the course used. The school was kind enough to send him a copy, and Sorokin studied it relentlessly, going through the procedures over and over again in his head.
When his firesuit was ready, he and the team headed to Los Angeles County Raceway in Palmdale, Calif., where he earned his license upgrade in three runs. The next week he was the No. 1 qualifier in his first race. Sorokin lost first round, but he was off and running as a drag racer.
In his first season driving for Smith, Sorokin earned the CIFCA Rookie of the Year award, and he won the championship the following season. When the Smith deal ended, Sorokin claimed a position as back-up driver for the CIFCA Funny Car of Jim Broome for a brief spell, and then a chance at driving John Blanchard’s Nostalgia Top Fuel car came around.
Sorokin drove for Blanchard for a year and a half before being offered a ride in the Brian Van Dyke-owned Champion Speed Shop Top Fuel dragster, a seat he has occupied for the past five years.
Working his way up to his dream provided Sorokin with appreciation for everyone who contributes to the program, from car-owner Van Dyke to co-crew chiefs Bob McLennan and Tony Bernardini and the entire crew, along with his girlfriend, Jenni, and his son, Mikey.
“So many people have been influential in my life,” said Sorokin, who recently was runner-up at the second NHRA Heritage Series event of the season at Firebird Raceway in Boise, Idaho. “Pat Foster has been like a dad to me, and guys like Tom Jobe and Bill Alexander, back when I was starting to drive, a lot of these guys would talk to me and let me pick their brains. There are so many guys who were involved in this in the 60s and 70s, more than I can name, who were all very helpful, and the value of what they’ve done for me is so much more than I could even say.
“I love driving, and all of the little nuances of what makes you good at it; it’s neat to always be a student. I truly enjoy being in a car, being strapped in, and knowing that the car is mine once it starts but that it’s about teamwork. You have to have all of these guys who are each very good at what they do to make the car go down the track. This is an amazing family, and I’m very fortunate to be a part of it.”
