YNot Racing

TAFC – TULSA

May 15, 2023 /

Throughout Annie Whiteley’s career and especially lately, two things have always been true: she’s at her best in her old hometown, Tulsa, and she dominates rescheduled events. So when the Mid-West Drag Racing Series’ 2023 opener at Xtreme Raceway Park in Ferris, Texas, was postponed and rescheduled for Tulsa Raceway Park, victory was virtually assured.

With metronomic consistency and an overpowering performance, Whiteley prevailed once again, wheeling her Mike Strasburg-tuned J&A Service/YNot Racing “Shattered Glass” Camaro to a lopsided victory over MWDRS newcomer Mike Doushgounian in the final for her third career series win and an early lead in the 2023 Mid-West Top Alcohol Funny Car championship.

From the No. 2 qualifying position, Whiteley faced veteran Steve Macklyn in the first of two rounds of eliminations, advancing easily with a strong 3.72 at 208.88 when he faded with a shutoff 4.59 at just 146. Doushgounian won the other first-round matchup with a slightly quicker 3.70/209, defeating Jonathan Johnson, who was didn’t make it to the line in his first appearance back after a nasty top-end crash a couple years ago at Xtreme Raceway Park.

What shaped up to be a classic final did not disappoint. The blue Camaros of Whiteley and Doushgounian rocketed off the starting line almost simultaneously and were locked together side by side for the entire eighth-mile, with Whiteley emerging victorious by the almost invisible margin of 17-thousandths of a second. Even a .023 reaction time wouldn’t have been enough to win. With a low-.020 or anything slower, she would have lost on a holeshot because Doushgounian was more than on time with a killer .013 reaction time, but Whiteley had this one wire to wire with a telepathic .005 reaction time, the best of her career.

In one of the best races of this or any other season, she won, 3.70/209 to Doushgounian’s right-there 3.71/203, and the handwriting already is on the wall for later this season: The Throwdown in T-Town, set for the day after this race, was rained out and rescheduled for – you guessed it – Tulsa.

PRO MOD – TULSA

May 15, 2023 /

At the rescheduled Mid-West Drag Racing Series season opener, held at Tulsa Raceway Park in conjunction with the Throwdown in T-Town, talented driver/crew chief Brandon Snider, subbing for team owner and driver Steven Whiteley, did all a replacement driver could possibly do: he won.

Snider, a former NHRA championship runner-up who expertly calls the mechanical shots for Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing ’69 Camaro, ascended from the 16th and last spot in the field to win it all, single-handedly topping some of the biggest names in MWDRS Pro Mod racing in the process. The weekend, which ended with both Snider and Top Alcohol Funny Car teammate Annie Whiteley in the winner’s circle, got off to a harrowing start when Snider barely squeaked into the program, 16th of 17 entrants on the grid.

The car came to life in the first round of eliminations when Snider stormed to a 3.71 at 204.29 mph, a time good enough to have qualified in the top three, to easily dispatch No. 1 qualifier (3.66) Ron Muenks, who slowed to a troubled 4.99 at just over 100 mph. Veteran Ed Thornton was the next to go, falling in the second round the Atmore, Ala., driver’s torrid 3.71 with a not-bad 3.78. Snider left first by more than a tenth with a fine .039 reaction time that actually was his slowest of the event, and followed by taking out both track co-owners in the late rounds – Todd Martin in the semifinals and Keith Haney in the final.

Snider’s best reaction time of the event kept him in front from start to finish against Martin, who came closer to beating him than anyone did all weekend. Martin was right on time with a .026 reaction time, but Snider had him all the way with a clutch .012. The final was over quickly when Snider, who never trailed at any point in any round and got quicker and faster every time, trounced Haney’s aborted 4.91/104 with a smooth 3.68/205.

PSM – CHARLOTTE

May 1, 2023 /

Pro Stock Motorcycle star Joey Gladstone navigated the sometimes shark-infested world of four-wide competition at zMax Dragway and came out not victorious but at least unscathed. Qualified well into the top half of the program, he advanced to the semifinals only to be denied a final-round appearance by a fraction of a second. “This Four-Wide deal can be tricky,” he said. “The first guy stages and that clock gets going, and you know you’ve only got seven seconds to get in there.”

Riding team owner Cory Reed’s Precision Service Equipment Hayabusa, Gladstone recorded a 6.87 in the first of four qualifying sessions, good for the No. 2 position at the time, improved to a 6.85, and ultimately settled into the No. 6 spot with an aggregate best of 6.82/197.94. “It feels good to be on my own stuff again,” said the 2022 championship runner-up, who spent his off time early this season twirling wrenches for the Greg Anderson/Dallas Glenn Pro Stock team. “I loved working on the Pro Stock car, but I can’t juggle both – Pro Stock and Pro Stock Motorcycle run too close together. I really learned a lot working for them, though – stuff I can apply to our program.”

Gladstone unwittingly became embroiled in the weirdest quad of a weird first round that ended with two of the four bikes quietly pushed off the starting line. John Hall got timed out, Jianna Evaristo never left, and Gladstone and drag bike stalwart Steve Johnson posted identical times right down to the thousandth of a second, matching 6.840s. Even that wasn’t close, though: Gladstone managed his emotions, focused his concentration, and left on Johnson by literally a second.

No one was ready when the Tree came down because all four drivers weren’t staged when the timer hit the seven-second mark, but when it flashed green Gladstone was gone long before anybody else let go of the clutch handle. “I saw Steve go in, and those other two were taking their time over there,” Gladstone said. “So I just counted to five and put it on the chip,” he said.

With a clutch performance in the semifinals, Gladstone shot off the line with a near-perfect .002 reaction time and narrowly missed making yet another final. Eddie Krawiec was out of reach with a winning 6.78, but Gladstone came painfully close (12-thousandths of a second) to beating Johnson on a 6.86-6.80 holeshot.

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL

April 24, 2023 /

Top Alcohol Funny Car veteran Annie Whiteley, a winner at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in her rookie season of 2012 and in ’13 (at both regionals – spring and fall), ’15, and ’19, went out early this time. Following a surprising first-round defeat here last week at the Four-Wide Las Vegas Nationals, she disappointingly was swept out of the race in the opening round for a second week in a row.

Whiteley didn’t make into the field until the last of three qualifying sessions with a 5.56 at 256 mph that positioned her well up toward the top in the No. 3 spot. She and everyone else lagged behind reigning world champion Doug Gordon, the only driver in the 5.40s, jam-packed from No. 2 (a 5.55 by three-time world champ Sean Bellemeur) and No. 8, the 5.63 of bubble qualifier Hunter Jones.

Though Whiteley, a 17-time winner in Lucas Oil Regional competition, held lane choice and a slight performance advantage, she was thwarted once again by recent nemesis Ray Martin, who had upset her in the Phoenix semifinals en route to victory, his first anywhere in six years. He and Whiteley actually have something in common: both are among the very, very few Top Alcohol Funny Car drivers ever to get their first win in their first start.

But while Whiteley as gone on to dozens of regional and national event titles since that 2012 breakthrough win, Martin remained winless from the time he won the 2017 Gainesville Eastern Region opener until Phoenix a couple months ago. Whiteley got the J&A Service/YNot “Shattered Glass” Camaro off the line in good shape with a .072 reaction time but dropped out around the 60-foot clocks with a shutoff 10.64. “Stupid tire shake,” she said. Martin was fortunate to advance with a 5.66 – a full tenth of a second behind her qualifying time.

TAFC – LAS VEGAS NATIONAL

April 17, 2023 /

The once-friendly confines of The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway were anything but this year for Annie Whiteley, who lost the absolute last way she or any driver would ever want to: on a holeshot. This one was particularly frustrating – the dreaded “double holeshot.”

Either of her Saturday qualifying runs would have been more than enough to run down Randy Parker and Jake Guadagnolo, and any other light she had all weekend would have eliminated the need for any come-from-behind heroics in the first place. It wasn’t that the sometimes-confusing four-at-a-time format at NHRA’s Four-Wide Las Vegas Nationals confounded Whiteley, nor were there any staging shenanigans on the part of her competitors.

“I don’t know what the hell it was,” Whiteley said. “Nobody really did anything to mess me up, and it wasn’t a long Tree or a short Tree or anything like that. My light really didn’t feel that bad – definitely not a .180-something. I knew it wasn’t a .020- or .030-something, but I damn sure didn’t think it was over .100.” But a .180 came up on the reaction timers nonetheless, leaving Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro – recently redubbed “Shattered Glass” in honor of her late father Don, who loved the Brad Paisley hit song of that name – third in a three-car race.

She blew the tires off Friday morning on her first of four qualifying attempts – one in each lane. Sneaking up on the combination from the back side after that, crew chief Mike Strasburg delivered a decent 5.60-flat at 263 mph Friday afternoon and picked up from there, to a 5.56/262 and a 5.53/264 on Saturday that left the team a solid fourth in the final order.

In the first round, Whiteley shook the tires off the line, short-shifted to get out of it, and set sail after Parker, who hadn’t gotten down the track all weekend, and Guadagnolo, who was on the same track as her, just out the side window to her right the whole way down. “I knew I wasn’t going to catch him,” she said, “but I hoped maybe Parker was somewhere behind me on the other track. What a crappy end to a crappy weekend. Losing on a holeshot is even worse than red-lighting. When you red-light, it’s almost like, ‘Well, at least I tried.’ “

TAFC – POMONA

April 3, 2023 /

Annie Whiteley pounded out some of her best runs in years en route to a respectable quarterfinal finish at the NHRA Winternationals, which, this year, wasn’t actually run in the winter. At would more accurately have been termed the “Springnationals,” the six-time national event champion laid down a 5.45 in qualifying, improved to a 5.44, and knocked off Nick Januik before falling in the quarterfinals to eventual runner-up Shane Westerfield.

Whiteley, whose lone final-round appearance at Pomona came at the 2017 World Finals, where she was runner-up to John Lombardo, began eliminations from the lofty No. 2 qualifying position, behind only world champ Doug Gordon, who ran a mere two-thousandths of a second quicker than her 5.441 with a 5.439.

Pitted against former national event winner Januik in the first pair of the first round, Whiteley advanced easily with one of the quickest and fastest runs of the entire weekend, a 5.460 at 267.27 mph. Januik blew the tires off early and was left in the dust with a shut-off 11-second time.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro launched just as hard in the quarterfinals against the notoriously quick-leaving Westerfield, who was driving the late Rick Jackson’s car for possibly the final time. She left right with the 2017 world champ, but in the middle of the course the car hunted around, straying perilously close to the centerline and stubbornly camping out there until she finally lifted.

“It shook the tires, I pedaled, and here came the centerline,” Whiteley said. “I pedaled it again, but it went right back over there. I kept bringing it back but it just kept going to the right, and finally I just said, ‘Nope, that’s enough,’ and shut off. It’s too bad, too – the car was trying to run good all weekend.” It was doubly bad, actually: the winner of that round had a bye to the final.

PSM – GAINESVILLE

March 13, 2023 /

Coming off by far the best year of his career, Pro Stock Motorcycle star Joey Gladstone stumbled to a second-round loss at the season-opening Gatornationals. Before a jam-packed house, Gladstone, runner-up for the 2022 NHRA championship with three victories in six final-round appearances, rode Cory Reed’s Precision Service Equipment Hayabusa to the middle rounds of eliminations despite qualifying just 15th.

Gladstone, who won Sonoma, Topeka, and Reading last year, managed a decent 6.84 on his first official run of 2023, fell off on the next two, and broke on the last one, leaving him in a precarious position going into eliminations. “We were a little conservative initially, but when it spun in Q2 and especially in Q3, I knew we just had to calm it down for the last session,” he said. “Bad runs like those can be really hard on parts. It hurt the shift forks, but we have the new billet cases, so it was fixed in like 10 minutes, and I knew the bike would run good first round.”

It did. Gladstone posted a solid 6.81 at 196 mph but didn’t need it when No. 2 qualifier Steve Johnson, perhaps intimidated by Gladstone’s renowned starting-line reflexes, threw away his qualifying advantage on a red-light start. A round later, it was Gladstone who nullified a sure-win with a foul start opposite Angie Smith, who moved on with just a 15.90.

“It’s not like I was trying too hard – I saw yellow,” Gladstone insisted. “It felt normal, but I knew it was red when I went by the Tree. I was going to shut it off because at that point it didn’t matter, but about halfway down I thought, ‘What the hell? This is a good run and we’re not racing again for a while,’ so I stayed in it to get more data.”

It turned out to be a 6.79/197, the team’s best E.T. of the new season. “Not that long ago, a .79 was killer,” Gladstone said. “Now, that’s not enough. Everyone is stepping up. This class just keeps getting tougher and tougher all the time.”

PRO MOD – BRADENTON

March 6, 2023 /

In his first appearance of 2023, in one of the most highly anticipated events in class history, Steven Whiteley was part of a swarm of drivers who descended upon Orlando, Fla., for the prestigious Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod. Runner-up at the inaugural event and a past NHRA national event champion, he made it all the way to the final round – sort of.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing team actually fell short of the 32-car bump, but this was it was OK to not qualify: where else is there a whole other race for teams that miss the cut? Only the World Series of Pro Mod features the Chicago-Style Second Chance Shootout, and Whiteley qualified No. 2 for that field and opened an early lead on Melanie Salemi in the final.

“This whole deal is fun,” Whiteley said. “It’s a lot bigger than the first World Series [in Denver in 2017, where he made it to the final]. There’s more fans, more hype, more everything. I just like outlaw stuff like this, always have.”

With 60-some Pro Mods in the Bradenton Motorsports Park pits, trying to make the lineup was, as expected, absolutely brutal. Less than six-hundredths of a second separated the entire field, from No. 1 Johnny Camp’s 3.626 to the 32nd-best 3.682 of Spencer Hyde, who, against all odds, made it to the $100,000 winner-take-all final against Kurt Steding and won it.

Whiteley landed a disappointing 36th in the final order, only eight-thousandths of a second but a full four spots outside the field. “We didn’t do any good here in qualifying,” he said. “We sucked, actually. That’s the simplest way to put it: we sucked.”

Granted a rare reprieve by the special format, Whiteley’s team did anything but in the Chicago Style Second Chance Shootout. Only the two quickest drivers in the one-shot, last-ditch session would run for the money, and Whiteley ended up second with a 3.69, behind only Salemi’s 3.66. He was one of four drivers to run 3.69 but was the quickest with a 3.690, thousandths ahead of Joe Albrecht’s 3.691, Steve King’s 3.696, and Mike Decker Jr.’s 3.697.

Opposite Salemi in the $10,000 finale, Whiteley was halfway through low gear when the third member gave out. “We had what we thought was a .65 in the car,” he said. “I had her by a couple [hundredths of a second] on the Tree and she ran a .64, so a .65 should’ve been good enough to win, but who knows? We thought we were going to qualify in the top 32, too. It definitely would have been a good race, though – that I can say for sure.”

TAFC – PHOENIX

February 27, 2023 /

Annie Whiteley opened the 2023 season not at Louisiana’s No Problem Raceway, where she’s run roughshod over outmatched Top Alcohol Funny Car teams for half a decade now, but rather in the Valley of the Sun. At Wild Horse Pass Raceway in suburban Phoenix, her weekend didn’t end in victory as it had five years in a row on the Louisiana bayou, but it didn’t turn out badly either, with lots of low 5.50s at nearly 270 mph and a late-round finish.

At Wild Horse, the latest track to be strong-armed out of existence by an ever-encroaching surrounding community, Whiteley just missed another final-round appearance, falling to Alaska’s Ray Martin in the semifinals by the invisible margin of seven-thousandths of a second.

The J&A Service team’s weekend got off to a promising start when Whiteley matched reigning world champion Doug Gordon stride for stride to half-track in Q1 before being forced to shut off to a 5.78 at 188 mph. She was actually faster than he was at the half-track mark – 211 mph to 210 – and he recorded a fine 5.48, so she clearly was on one.

Fifth in a six-car field going into last-shot qualifying opposite newcomer Hunter Jones, Whiteley delivered an excellent 5.54 at 263.26 mph to catapult the team to the No. 2 spot. Jones ended up fifth with a career-best 5.57/263 and nearly duplicated that in the first round with a similar 5.58/261, but she had him all the way with her best run of the weekend, a superior 5.50/265 mph, the quickest and fastest non-Gordon run of the race.

Whiteley’s brand-new YNot Racing Camaro approximated that performance in the semifinals, but still she narrowly lost to Martin. Hardly late with a .081 reaction time, she flew across the finish line with a 5.51 that left her just behind Martin’s 5.56. Naturally, no other run Martin made all weekend would’ve been enough to beat her, and, needless to say, any other light he had all weekend wouldn’t have been enough.

“Why does that always have to happen?” asked Whiteley, exasperated. “It never fails. Just about any other run we made would have been enough to win – or any other light I had or any other light he had, but it just had to happen, didn’t it?”

Even a killer .031 light would have left Martin a few feet shy of Whiteley’s quicker, faster car in the lights, but he pulled off a telepathic .023 light at just the right time, nudging her out at the stripe by a scant three feet to advance to the final, where he upset Gordon for his first win in years.

PSM – POMONA 2022

November 14, 2022 /

Joey Gladstone and team owner Cory Reed finished the Auto Club Finals just like they wound up the year: number 2. Which is a lot better than they possibly could have imagined when the season began. “If anybody had told me a year ago that we’d be in a battle for the championship right down to the last day of the season … who wouldn’t take that?” he asked. “Matt [Smith] was a shoo-in to win the championship – everybody knew that. He’s been doing this a long time. He’s the best. So just to have a mathematical shot at it on the last day of the season is amazing.”

Gladstone personally knocked Smith out in the semifinals, and in the most gratifying possible manner: on a holeshot. Had he not, he’d have finished third, because the rider best positioned to overtake him for second in the final standings, Matt’s wife Angie, won the event. She edged Gladstone in a tight final-round race, 6.74/199 to 6.73/199, but not before Gladstone had locked up second place by upsetting Matt on a holeshot in the semifinals, where they ran identical e.t.s right to the thousandth of a second, 6.757 to 6.757. “That’s right up there with biggest rounds of my life,” he said. “Beating the world champ? That’s a hard thing to do to.”

Mired at the bottom of the qualifying order after a pair of shut-off efforts Friday, Gladstone wasn’t even in the field going into the final day of qualifying. “The team kept me from being depressed for very long,” he said, “and I really have to thank Vance & Hines for giving us the power to win. Anyone who doesn’t believe they give you everything … I don’t know what to tell you. They do.”

That was evident when Gladstone wheeled Reed’s Diamond W/Fatheadz Suzuki Hayabusa to the No. 3 spot with a career-best 6.72 Saturday morning. He kept his dwindling title hopes alive with a 6.76/198 to 6.97/197 first-round win over Hector Arana Jr., who was infinitely harder to beat than most No. 14 qualifiers. He’d just won the last two races, Dallas and Las Vegas. Three pairs later, Matt Smith put the championship mathematically out of reach with an uneventful 6.77/200 to 7.03/187 first-round decision over drag bike godfather Michael Phillips, who was instrumental in Gladstone and Reed’s success all season.

Maintaining focus and finishing strong, Gladstone defeated national record holder Karen Stoffer in the second round and Smith in the semi’s. “That might have been a little redemption,” said Gladstone, who amassed six final-round appearances, three wins, and a career-best 31-12 win-loss record over the course of the 2022 season. “To have a shot at the championship on the last day of the season was dream come true.”

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