YNot Racing

TAFC – MAPLE GROVE

September 16, 2024 /

When you’ve run 5.40s all weekend and leave on a final-round opponent who just blew the tires off in the semi’s and is about to run a 5.52, your odds are pretty good. They were, too – for about 10 feet.

Then Annie Whiteley’s car was enveloped in a cloud of tire smoke and she could only look on helplessly as Phil Esz disappeared in the distance for an easy win. “I left pretty low that time [6,400 rpm] and it still took the tire off,” she lamented. “I mean instantly –1.23 60-foot time. [Crew chief] Mike [Strasburg] and the guys wanted to lower the leave rpm just 100 because I was already leaving so low. Maybe we should’ve lowered it 500? I don’t know. All we wanted to do was repeat. Anything from .47 to .49 would’ve been fine…”

In her first appearance ever at world-famous Maple Grove Raceway in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania Amish country, Whiteley was locked in the 5.40s on two of three qualifying attempts and all three preliminary rounds. Nestled into the No. 3 spot with an aggregate best of 5.46/268.92 (top speed of the meet), she faced returning veteran Kris Hool, who hadn’t been seen at an NHRA event in years. She was out first with a .061 reaction time that was, by far, her slowest all weekend, and drove away to a lopsided win with another 5.4, a 5.49 at 266.85 mph.

“Annie’s gotten really good on the lights since we went to this two-step,” Strasburg said, “.030s and .040s all the time and .020s when she knows she really needs one.” Brainerd winner Bob McCosh learned that firsthand under the lights Saturday night in round two when Whiteley beat him, 5.49/266 to 5.46/265, with a .022 holeshot leave. Then Phil Burkart, making his only national event start this season for Jay Blake’s Follow A Dream team, narrowly fouled in the semi’s, sending the YNot team to its first NHRA national event final of the season.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever noticed the scoreboards when the other driver red-lighted,” said Whiteley, who’s up to fifth in the national standings. “I thought, ‘Hey, I just won.’ Then it hit the [rev-limiter] chip and I was like, ‘What the hell are you looking at? Shift!’ “

PRO STOCK – MAPLE GROVE

September 16, 2024 /

For a minute there, it looked like Cory “the Caveman” Reed might just get his first DNQ as a Pro Stock driver.

In Friday’s first qualifying session, Reed’s car made a hard move toward the wall and he had to lift, and a subsequent 6.59 got him in for the moment but left him just outside the field when qualifying resumed Saturday morning. “I wasn’t that worried,” said Reed, who reached his first NHRA final here as a Pro Stock Motorcycle rookie in 2016. “It wouldn’t have upset me that bad if we didn’t qualify. Spinning and shaking doesn’t upset me, either – that’s going to happen from time to time. This team has a qualifying game in place. You just don’t want to make a soft run, and we didn’t. When it got right down to it, I knew we’d squeak in.”

A clutch 6.57/208.62 early Saturday locked Reed into the field, and when he didn’t improve in last-ditch qualifying with a 6.60 at 208.49 mph he found himself stuck racing the driver he always looked up to as a kid in the first round: K-B/Titan team leader Greg Anderson, the winningest Pro Stock driver of all time.

“First round is so much easier when you qualify in the top half,” said Reed, who was No. 8 in Seattle in his Pro Stock debut and No. 6 in Sonoma, where he got all the way to the final. “Greg and [teammate] Dallas [Glenn, the early season points leader] probably have half a tenth on me right now, so I knew it was going to be tough. I honestly I thought if Greg went a .52 I, could go a .55.”

Instead, Reed ran another 6.60-flat that left him no chance when Anderson moved first and laid down low e.t. of the meet, 6.52. “A .020 light is my goal every time I go up there,” he said. “.060? That’s never going to be enough. So that was my fault. I got too much sleep. Sounds stupid, but it’s true. You know why? I was too relaxed. I’m never going to let that happen again.”

TAFC – MARTIN

September 8, 2024 /

Annie Whiteley qualified last and got beat first round at the Mid-West Drag Racing Series Funny Car Nationals yet walked away from historic U.S. 131 Dragway feeling good about her team’s immediate future.

The J&A Service/YNot Racing driver was fifth of five on the qualifying grid despite a more than competitive 3.69, then lost by the smallest possible margin, which, after the dismal weekend she’d endured to that point, didn’t seem all that bad. “That’s the most excited I’ve ever been to lost by a thousandth of a second,” she said of her .001-second loss to family friend Steve Macklyn. “After the way the weekend had been going, I almost didn’t care that I lost. But then I started thinking, ‘Point zero-zero-eight of a second … damn, I could have won.”

Both drivers cut uncharacteristic .100 lights and both ran 3.58s, but Macklyn, who eventually made it to the final, where he was trounced by Annie’s husband, event winner and team leader Jim Whiteley, was slightly quicker at both ends of the track. If either she or Macklyn cut any kind of normal light, they’d have won on a holeshot.

“The whole way down the track, I never saw him,” Whiteley said. “We got out and looked at each other like, ‘Hey, nice light.’ .104 to .109 – neither one of us was too happy. And we both said the same thing: it was like the quickest Tree ever. The second we staged the tree was falling. Normally, you’re on the chip for a while, but that time it wasn’t even a second and the Tree was already on. Neither one of us was ready. I’ll say this, though: I’ve never been so excited to lose by a thou.

“We struggled and struggled and struggled to get the car down the track all weekend,” said Whiteley, who barely made it into the 3.60s on the perfectly manicured U.S. 131 surface left with a 3.697 that left her last in the lineup. “Then, in the first round, bam, 3.58. I don’t think any of us expected the car to run that good. We moved some weight around, changed a few things, and it picked up the front end and carried it out there. And kept on carrying it. And I started thinking, ‘Oh, yeah – that’s why I love doing this.’ “

PRO STOCK – INDY

September 3, 2024 /

Pro Stock rookie Cory Reed entered the prestigious U.S. Nationals with a plus-.500 record in his short time on four wheels and maintained it with a hard-fought quarterfinal finish at the biggest race of the season. Runner-up in just his second start in Pro Stock, he won another round on a holeshot, beat veteran Jerry Tucker again, and, much to his dismay, was knocked out for a third straight time by title favorite Aaron Stanfield.

“I really want to beat that dude,” said Reed, who broke on his second-round burnout and never got a chance. “It was a little depressing, actually – I was so ready to get some revenge. I never want to be on the easy side of the ladder. I want to race the big guys. That’s the only way you’re going to win a race – beat the best guys out there.”

Having strung together one .030 light after another in qualifying, Reed, who beat Tucker in the Sonoma semifinals and the Brainerd Mission Challenge semi’s, got him again in the first round here. They were locked together the length of the quarter-mile: .982 to .987 at the 60-foot mark, 2.739 to 2.744 at 330 feet, 4.210 at 167.18 mph to 4.213 at 167.16 mph at half-track, and 5.480 to 5.482 at 1,000 feet.

They crossed the finish line with identical 6.553s and the win-light flashed in Reed’s lane because of his quicker reaction time, .048 to .051. “It’s pretty crazy that a .048 light was good enough to win on a holeshot,” he said. “If I keep cutting .040s, I’m not going to win this race.”

In the end, there were no more .040 lights or any lights at all – Reed never made it to the line for round two. “It stuck the tire on the burnout,” he said. “I went to give it a little more gas, and something popped. I thought, ‘What did I just break?’ It didn’t sound like a rod slapping around in there; it was more like a hammer hitting the firewall. I’m like, ‘Is it something in the clutch, maybe something in the tranny?’ I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it was backfiring and sounded like crap.”

It was a broken coil, the end of the road. Reed was pushed silently off the line and Stanfield got the best of him again, this time without a fight. “They wanted to drag it up there and try to make a run,” Reed said, “but I was like, ‘That’s it, man. It’s broke.’ “

TAFC – INDY

September 3, 2024 /

Jim and Annie Whiteley both reached the TA/FC quarterfinals at the U.S. Nationals with middling qualifying performances, hard-fought first-round wins, and disappointing second-round defeats. Annie, a three-time Indy finalist, wound up No. 6 and trounced Christine Foster, winning an all-female first-round match for the second race in a row, and Jim, the 2013 TA/D champ, upended No. 2 qualifier Bob McCosh in a weird one.

Well before Jim approached the starting line, McCosh unintentionally double-bulbed when a teammate inadvertently stepped into the beam, leaving him sitting there fully staged at a dead idle, totally defenseless. “I thought, ‘You’re in trouble now, Bob,’ as soon as I saw the Tree, but I tried to give him plenty of time to back out,” Jim said. “When he didn’t, I still waited a long time before I staged. He apologized on the top end but obviously he didn’t do it on purpose.”

A distracted .197 reaction time wasted McCosh’s fine 5.54, allowing Jim to win comfortably with a much slower 5.63. Meanwhile, Annie claimed a more conventional win over Ms. Foster, one half of Top Alcohol Funny Car’s otherhusband/wife team, drilling the Tree for a .029 reaction and driving away with her best run of the weekend to that point, a 5.51 that covered Foster’s distant 5.74.

It was in the second round that things fell apart. After Jim fell to 2012 Indy winner Chris Foster, 5.49 to 5.56, Annie found herself a car-length behind returning veteran Stan Sipos right off the line. What seemed like an instant after Sipos’ pre-staged light flickered, all four staged lights were on, the Tree came down, and she was caught flat-footed. “I thought, ‘Oh no,’ when I left,” she said. “Whenever you see the other car out ahead of you that early, you know you’re in trouble.”

Annie set sail after him and made her quickest and fastest run all weekend but couldn’t run him down. “I was thinking, ‘Come on, smoke the tires, smoke the tires,’ but he never did,” she said. “We upped my launch rpm for that run, and the clutch pedal pushed my foot off it when I went down on the throttle. I went right back down on it so the car wouldn’t didn’t roll through the beams, and, naturally, that’s right when the light came on.

“Maybe I didn’t have the pedal all the way down or maybe the air gap wasn’t enough for the increased rpm, but when I went to go back down on the clutch, I knew I was screwed right then. I seem to get behind when I roll in second – the quicker I get on the throttle the better my light is, and he got in there before me that time.” With a 5.48 at 266.11 mph, Annie was a hair slower than Sipos, who is making a comeback this year after more than 30 years away from the sport. “As soon I got out of the car, I asked [crew chief] Mike [Strasburg], ‘Is this going down in history as a holeshot?’ ” she said. “He said, ‘Nope. 5.480 to 5.481 – he was quicker, t

PRO STOCK – BRAINERD

August 19, 2024 /

At the Lucas Oil Nationals in the remote resort lakes region of northern Minnesota, Cory Reed suffered his first real setback as a Pro Stock driver, losing the last way any driver would ever choose: on a holeshot.

Qualified in the back half of the field for the first time in his new career, Reed drew the toughest possible opponent right now – Aaron Stanfield, the hottest driver in drag racing with the possible exception of Funny Car sensation Austin Prock. With the second-quickest run of the entire event to that point, a 6.60 that would have put him on the pole had he run it during qualifying, he fell to Stanfield’s slower 6.61.

“I still make mistakes sometimes,” Reed allowed. “I mean, really I haven’t been doing this that long. For some reason, I wasn’t totally sure I had it in 3rd gear when I went to do the burnout. I stopped, went back through the gears, and I was in 3rd. I didn’t even need to do that, and all of a sudden it was like, ‘Get going – don’t make him wait.’ I swapped feet really quick – no line-loc. Then Joey [Gladstone] dropped his radio and I started laughing in the car. Then, I’m like, ‘You just screwed yourself, this is taking too long, but it’s still not too late. Get it together. Drive the car right.’ “

He did – after the launch. Reed’s reaction time came up .093, and Stanfield got him on a holeshot with an unspectacular .040, well below his season average (and, for that matter Reed’s). The rookie kept the car right down the center of the groove and nailed every shift but couldn’t overcome Stanfield’s head start or the behind-the-line shenanigans that ultimately proved his undoing.

“After all that, most people would stage wrong or red-light or drive the car like an idiot,” Reed said. “I was like, ‘OK dude, just relax. Think logically. Don’t try too hard on the light, and make sure you get a good run no matter what.’ And I did. My focus wasn’t totally on cutting a light or winning the round like it normally would be. I just concentrated on hitting my shift points and keeping the car perfectly straight.

“Down the track, that was probably the best I’ve ever driven, but I was pressing down so hard on the clutch pedal on the line that no matter what, I was going to be late,” he said. “That was probably a .040 or .050 light, actually – not great, but not terrible. But when you press down that hard, you’re screwed, especially against somebody like Stanfield. That guy’s not going to leave you a chance.”

TAFC – BRAINERD

August 19, 2024 /

In the scenic resort lakes area of northern Minnesota, Annie Whiteley had herself a solid if unspectacular weekend at the Lucas Oil Nationals, one not unlike several others this season: she may not have won, but she went rounds, knocked off a top contender, and left buoyed by a highlight that hints at better things ahead.

For the 13-year Top Alcohol Funny Car veteran, who reached the first national event final of her career here as a rookie in 2012, that highlight was a huge first-round win over drag racing’s fastest-rising new star, Maddi Gordon, who has already established herself as a good leaver in her short time behind the wheel. Gordon, who won her first major title, the Northwest Nationals, just weeks earlier, was more or less on time with a respectable .070 reaction time but Whiteley had her all the way with an outstanding .027 for a 5.51 to 5.50 holeshot win.

“I almost felt bad about it,” Whiteley said. “I didn’t want to see her lose that way. I didn’t even want to race her. I love her – her whole family, really. Who doesn’t?”

Neither team had much to go off of for the first round. Top Alcohol Funny Car and Top Alcohol Dragster teams sat around all day Friday and never did get to run, delayed repeatedly by oil downs from the fuel cars. Saturday they got just one shot, in which Whiteley laid down a 5.56 at 264.91 mph, and then the first round got pushed back to Sunday morning.

Momentum from the huge win in the all-female first-round match ebbed in the second round, where Whiteley’s once promising afternoon was cut short by tire shake opposite eventual winner Bob McCosh. Again, she was off the line first with an outstanding reaction time (.030), but this lead was short-lived. The car went up in smoke almost immediately.

“I wonder if NHRA’s prepping the track the same on Sunday as they do earlier in the weekend,” Whiteley said. “No way did we expect the car to do that. It’s weird. Sometimes my brain says, ‘Pedal it,’ and other times I just hold the pedal down like it’s somehow going clean up. Uh, it’s not. But that time my brain just didn’t compute it that way.”

PRO STOCK – SONOMA

July 29, 2024 /

Already a national event finalist in one professional category, Cory Reed reached the Sonoma final in just his second start ever in Pro Stock. Reed, who came within a round of winning Maple Grove in 2016, his first season astride a 200-mph Pro Stock Motorcycle, came within a whisker of his first major title, falling 6.54 to 6.55 to Aaron Stanfield, who’s won more races this year than Greg Anderson or Erica Enders or anyone in Pro Stock.

“The car ran good and I was driving pretty decent,” Reed said. “It was just one of those days when everything goes your way. Between Joey [Gladstone] and me, we’ve always had good luck at Sonoma. Joey won his first NHRA national event here [in 2022], and I guess it’s just one of those tracks that seems to like us.”

Powered by a KB-Titan 500-inch big-block and crewed by trusted allies from his two-wheel glory days, Gladstone and Dave Kuschke, Reed claimed his first Pro Stock round-win when veteran Deric Kramer’s car went silent right off the line, sending the sleek, immaculate J&A Service Camaro to a runaway 6.53 win. Teammate Eric Latino was the next to go, falling on a second-round holeshot, 6.58/208 to 6.56/208.

“It’s not like I was cutting .020 lights or anything,” Reed modestly said. “It was more like .040s and .050s, actually, but I wasn’t floating the pedal or trying too hard and upsetting the chassis. I had that pedal slammed to the floor and wasn’t trying to squeeze it and cheat, making it push back and release too soon and upsetting the car. You’ve got to be right on that threshold, where it’s not kicking back.”

Superior starting line driving carried Reed through the semifinals, too, when Jerry Don Tucker turned it red – right when Reed really could have used a break. “I didn’t know he red-lighted,” Reed said. “It didn’t feel like I was late, but when you see the other guy out there that early, you think he Tree’d you and start cussing yourself. Then I looked up and saw the scoreboard, and it’s a good thing he went red because after I got behind I short-shifted and only ran a .64.”

Reed picked right back up to a 6.55 in the final but fell to Stanfield’s slightly quicker 6.54. “I just wanted to prove to myself that Seattle wasn’t fake, that I can really do this,” he said. “Stanfield’s hard to beat. He’s a savage. If he ends up doing this long enough, he’ll be one of the best to ever do it. To be honest, I was already a fan of his before I started doing this. He’s a badass – that whole family is.”

TAFC – SEATTLE

July 22, 2024 /

It was one 5.46 after another for Annie Whiteley at the NHRA Northwest Nationals, where she won in 2015 and nearly did again last year. The first one, a 5.469, came right off the trailer Friday morning, and she got only quicker from there with an even better 5.465, her quickest run all year, at 270.05 mph (top speed of the meet) that afternoon.

Following a shut-off 10.48 at 114 mph on an aborted shoot-for-the-moon blast Saturday morning in last-ditch qualifying, Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing team was right back in the 5.40s with another 5.46 that evening in the first round – right when it didn’t matter. It came on a bye she earned by qualifying No. 1, so any ol’ run would have been enough to win.

Sunday in the semifinals, where all four cars ran in the 5.40s, Whiteley missed what would’ve been a fourth 5.46 by the closest possible margin, one-thousandth of a second, with a 5.470 that left her just short of Brian Hough’s nearly identical 5.48. Nine-thousandths of a second quicker at the Tree or on the quarter-mile and Whiteley, who finished second to outgoing world champion Doug Gordon here last year, would’ve been part of the first all-female final round in Top Alcohol Funny Car history. (Gordon’s daughter, rookie phenom Maddi Gordon, went on to beat Hough in the final and became the 100th different woman to win an NHRA national event.)

With an .088 light Whiteley wasn’t exactly late, but if she’d had another .077 like she did on her first-round single, or Hough had had another .121 like the one he had last weekend at Woodburn, where she left on him and beat him in the first round, and she’d have been in her 22nd career national event final. “With this two-step, you really want to get in there first,” she said. “Hough always used to want to stage last, but now he always wants to go in first – everybody with a two-step does. That’s a crappy way to lose, but the guys really have this car running good.”

PRO STOCK – SEATTLE

July 22, 2024 /

With a just handful of burnouts and a few runs to draw from, Cory Reed, already an accomplished racer in one category, made his debut in another and looked like a pro doing it. At the Northwest Nationals at picturesque Pacific Raceways, the former Pro Stock Motorcycle racer shot to No. 1 on the Pro Stock grid with an outstanding 6.53 on his first full run ever.

In the first round, Reed might have been even more impressive – in a losing effort. An in-the-bag win over two-time 2024 tour winner Troy Coughlin Jr. dissolved in the last few hundred feet when the loose, dicey conditions forced him to lift. A lesser driver might have crashed.

“You hate to get out of it when you don’t see the other guy, but I didn’t want to wad this thing up in my first round in Pro Stock,” Reed said. “Troy was like, ‘Man, you had me,’ but the car was spinning the tires hard, and I really didn’t want to crash.”

Delayed hours by repeated rain delays and two crashes in the first round of Funny Car, Reed/Coughlin was the first pair down the track in Pro Stock. After Reed’s brush with disaster, the other 14 Pro Stock teams returned to the pits, NHRA officials immediately went to work on the track, and the remaining seven pairs were run way later under drastically different (and better) conditions.

Utterly inexperienced but encouraged after licensing, Reed and the J&A Service team made their official debut at the furthest track from K-B/Titan headquarters in faraway North Carolina. “It shook on the first qualifying run – I may have done a few bone-headed things because I’m still learning – and that 6.53 in Q2 was the first full pass I ever made in a Pro Stock car,” he said.

“Before we went to Seattle, I did six burnouts in the burnout car, wore the transmission out, then did a few more burnouts in Darlington. The first test pass at Rockingham, I destroyed the transmission, and for a minute there I was thinking, ‘Do I really want to do this? What are these guys thinking about me?’ But after running a 6.59 without even taking it all the way to the finish line, I felt a lot better about it.”

All things considered, Seattle was a successful, rewarding debut. “I was about over the bikes anyway,” Reed said. “We were going to start all over with our own engine program with K-B Titan, but you get to thinking about it and it’s like, ‘This could take a while.’ I was talking to my dad, and he said, ‘What about Pro Stock?’ We’re already right there with K-B and it was like, ‘Hey, why not?’ And here we are.”

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