Les Lovett

Leslie Lovett attended his first drag race in 1957, in his hometown of Fort Smith, Ark. He began his professional photography career in drag racing in 1963, shooting points meets for Division 4 Director Dale Ham and as the track photographer for Tulsa Int’l Raceway and Southwest Raceway.
Lovett always viewed the racing fraternity as his second family and enjoyed the pageantry of it all.
“To me, my work is like running away with the circus,” he said in a 1988 interview. “When drag racing first came to my small town, I wanted to see the big one. And then once I saw it, I wanted to see it again and again. My first love is drag racing, and when I found that photography was a way to go and stay there, I started working on my skills.”
In 1967, Lovett became the photo director for Eastern Publishing Co., in Alexandria, Va., shooting for Super Stock and Stock Car magazines. In August 1968, he met with Wally Parks in the grandstands in Englishtown and ultimately convinced NHRA’s founder that the company needed a full-time photo editor for its burgeoning publications.
Parks said of him, “Leslie Lovett, as a vital part of our NHRA family since the early 1960s, was more than just the keeper of NHRA’s photographic records. He also was everybody’s good friend. Among his many traits I’ll always remember is that sparkling eye — not the one hidden behind his camera’s viewfinder but the one always searching for that unexpected situation the others might have overlooked. Les never pretended, even to himself, that he was the greatest of portrait artists, preferring instead to look back on the facade, at the human relations that have made drag racing what it is today.
“Photography and fishing were two of his fondest passions,” Parks continued. “He left us while enjoying the latter, but his boundless reminders of where we’ve been will live for eternity in our very special files of Photos by Les — fitting tribute to the man who really cared.”
As the award-winning photo editor of National DRAGSTER and the National Hot Rod Association, Lovett’s work was widely known, and he received many honors, not the least of which was being the first inductee into the Motorsports Photographers Hall of Fame in 1988.
Lovett, whose compelling and exciting photographs have been on public display in countless publications the world over for more than three decades, was aboard a charter fishing boat in 1996 more than 100 miles off the coast of Mexico pursuing his other passion when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 53. (July 12, 1996 issue of National DRAGSTER)