John Card sees a bright future for Sassy Engines.

Just over a year ago, Card moved the veteran builder of truck and tractor-pull engines from its longtime location in Concord, New Hampshire, to Brownsburg, Indiana, and into what he calls a “collaborative partnership” with Don Schumacher Racing (DSR) and its retail and manufacturing branches. Financially, Sassy Engines remains a separate entity, but sharing building space and engineering resources with DSR Performance and DSM Precision Manufacturing creates synergy and possibilities that didn’t exist in New England.

Already, DSR has released new forged Hemi connecting rods for tractor pulling, engineered with Card’s input. “And we’re working on cylinder heads and blocks,” Card added. “Right now, in alcohol drag racing, in monster trucks, and in alcohol-series tractor pulling, there are only three manufacturers who make the key components. Two of them are in California, one is in South Carolina, and they are all overwhelmed. They can’t keep up with what’s going on in the industry. By bringing my engineering experience and my tractor-pulling experience out here to DSR/DSM, we’re going to make another BAE [Brad Anderson Enterprises] or AJPE [Alan Johnson Performance Engineering] in the Midwest. If we build 10 more motors a year, that’s awesome, but I see the future in making our own products.”

Sassy Massey & The Country Girl

Listen to Card carefully, and you’ll hear traces of a New England accent—no surprise when you learn he was born in Rockville, Rhode Island. A self-described gearhead, he built a four-wheel-drive pulling truck while he was still in high school. After school, he pumped gas at his uncle’s Getty station in Hopkinton.

When he graduated, his uncle finessed him a job at Hoxsie Buick-Pontiac in Westerly. For the next seven years, Card worked his way up from floor sweeper to service manager, while earning a degree in automotive science from the GM Training Center in Dedham, Massachusetts. His truck-pulling career moved up from county fairs to the US Hot Rod Association’s indoor circuit.

Needing a change, he parked the truck in 2000 and quit the dealership business in 2003 to drive a log truck. Around 2006 he took a “side gig” with an Alcohol Funny Car team. They needed Hemi parts, and from his pulling days, Card knew a guy named Brian Knox.

Brian’s mother was Rodalyn Knox, who drove Funny Cars in the 1970s under the nom de guerre “Country Girl.” Only the fourth woman to receive an NHRA Funny Car license, Rodalyn set track records at the New England Dragway in Epping, New Hampshire, and at the Oxford Plains Dragway in Oxford, Maine.

Beginning in 1979, Rodalyn and husband John campaigned a series of ever-more-powerful pulling tractors helmed by a succession of hired drivers. Pulling was surging in popularity, and Brian was learning to build engines. Initially, the tractors were named “Sassy Massey”—presumably a reference to Massey Ferguson—but the family’s latest six-Hemi behemoth was rechristened “Country Girl” in 1990 as Rodalyn returned to the wheel. She clinched the NTPA Unlimited 7,600-pound Grand National Championship in 1995, 1997, and 1998 before retiring for the second and final time to manage a new Knox family enterprise initially called Sassy Racing Engines.

Eight years later, John Card walked through their door, seeking supplies for his Funny Car team. “So John [Knox] and me are BS’ing, and I said, ‘If you ever decide you’re going to retire, I’ll take your job’—laugh, joke. Two days later, John calls me up and asks when I can come in and talk.” By 2014, Card was president of Sassy Racing Engines. When Brian retired in 2019, Card bought the business.

Pulling Up Roots

Then COVID-19 hit. “It was tough,” Card recalled, but even the Pandemic wasn’t the toughest challenge he faced. “In the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, there was a lot of money in pulling”—but not so much anymore. “You have to be versatile and do other things.”

Furthermore, Sassy’s New England location proved less than ideal. “If we needed a fitting on a hose, we had to call XRP in California. And if we were in the middle of a job and needed to get it done, we had to pay $100 to overnight a $12 fitting. We had to send our blocks to Brad Anderson in California and wait weeks or months to get them repaired. We had to send our cylinder heads to Noonan in South Carolina and wait weeks or months. Not that they were doing anything wrong—these are great companies and great people. They just have so much to do. We were getting bigger and bigger, and generating more work, and had no one to do it. That was slowing down cash flow tremendously.”

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