With a just handful of burnouts and a few runs to draw on, 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 of eliminations, 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 it, you know?”
Delayed hours by repeated rain delays and two crashes in the first round of Funny Car, Reed/Coughlin was the first pair of 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 (better) track conditions.
Completely inexperienced yet 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.”
All things considered, Seattle was a successful, rewarding debut. “I was about over the bikes,” Reed said. “We were going to start all over with our own engine program with K-B Titan, and you get to thinking about it and it’s like, ‘We’re starting all over – a this could take a while.’ I was talking to my dad, and he said, ‘What do you think about Pro Stock?’ We’re already right there with K-B and it’s like, ‘Hey, why not?’ And here we are.”