Author: Todd Veney (Page 11 of 40)

TAFC – FERRIS 2022

March 21, 2022 / Todd Veney

Instead of opening yet another season utterly dominating the NHRA Belle Rose Central Regional, where she’s never been beaten (five wins in a row – 2017-21), Top Alcohol Funny Car star Annie Whiteley kicked off 2022 with a final-round finish at the Mid-West Drag Racing Series’ Xtreme Texas Nationals.

Coming off a down year beset with traction problems, inconsistency, and, as ever, bad luck, Whiteley wheeled her Yenko-blue J&A Service/YNot Camaro to the No. 2 qualifying spot at the revamped Ferris, Texas facility. With a 3.60-flat at nearly 215 mph on the eighth-mile Xtreme Raceway Park course, she had everybody covered except incoming favorite Sean Bellemeur, the reigning NHRA and MWDRS series champion. Bellemeur was No. 1 with a 3.578/216.08, followed closely by Whiteley, 2021 series runner-up Chris Marshall (3.647/211.57), the up-and-coming family team of Steve Macklyn (3.759/205.48), second-generation driver Bryan Brown (3.815/203.25), and Florida transplant Mark Billington (4.331/193.80).

When eliminations commenced, Whiteley had even Bellemeur under her thumb, laying down low e.t. of the entire opening round, a 3.613 at 214.59 mph, to oust Brown, who put up a competitive 3.701 at 207.18 mph in the loss, just missing the 3.60s. Without running quite that quick (3.702/208.72), Marshall advanced into the semifinals over Macklyn, and Bellemeur was the next-quickest (and fastest) of the round with a 3.626/213.78 single when Billington was unable to appear.

In the semi’s, Bellemeur got another single and Whiteley moved into her first final of the new season with a wire-to-wire decision over Marshall’s Oregon-based team. She had the quicker reaction time, .061 to .072, and pulled away from there for a 3.594/215, her quickest, fastest run all weekend, to take out his 3.649/209.59. Another solid reaction time in the under-the-lights final, a clutch .040, did Whiteley little good when she ran into trouble downtrack and slowed to a 5.29 at 93 mph while Bellemeur disappeared into the distance with a winning 3.560/216.66.

PRO MOD – FERRIS 2022

March 21, 2022 / Todd Veney

With a .008 reaction time on his first hit in years, Steven Whiteley made a triumphant return to Pro Mod at the Mid-West Drag Series’ Xtreme Raceway Park season opener. “It felt like I was in the car last week,” he said. “Not this car. This thing is an animal – it carries the front end 400 feet every time. This is gonnatake a little getting used to.”

The former NHRA national event champion, who will compete exclusively on the MWDRS tour from now on, qualified high and went rounds in his first outing since the final race of the 2019 NHRA campaign, the Dodge Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he locked down a Top 10 finish in the NHRA standings. “There was no ‘a-ha’ moment where I knew I was coming back,” Whiteley said. “I just knew I was never going back to NHRA. This Mid-West deal just fits. I can race with my whole family, and I love running the eighth-mile. Always have. I’ve done PDRA stuff, the Snowbirds, the Street Car Super Nationals, and the Bradenton season opener, and I’ve always loved this style of racing.”

After a few laps to “knock the cobwebs off,” as he termed it, Whiteley wheeled father Jim Whiteley’s Brandon Snider-tuned ’69 Camaro to three remarkably consistent qualifying times: 3.62, 3.61, and 3.61, all at from 207 to 209 mph. He qualified fifth for a record field that attracted 29 entries and dispatched Jerry Hunt’s fine 3.69/203 in the first round with a superior 3.66/206, then had to step off the throttle in the quarterfinals, nullifying what would have been a sure win over Taylor Lastor.

“The car was moving to the right,” Whiteley said. “It’s going, going, going, and the front end’s in the air, so there’s nothing you can do about it. There comes a point when you have to lift. It’s not my car – it’s my dad’s. That’s always in the back of your mind.” With two choices – lift and lose or plow into the wall, be disqualified, and lose – Whiteley took his foot out of the throttle, coasting to a 5.05 at 95 mph, while Lastor gratefully scooped up the round-win with just a 3.90, then broke on the burnout next round.

PSM – GAINESVILLE 2022

March 14, 2022 / Todd Veney

Joey Gladstone left Gainesville a career-high third in the standings after the finest season-opener of his young career – one of the few races ever run without any qualifying. Drying out from nearly six inches of rain in two days, the Pro Stock Motorcycles never hit the lanes till the sun was going down Saturday evening, and when they finally did, only four actually made a run. None of them counted.

One, by seven-time national event winner Michael Phillips, oiled the lengthy Gainesville Raceway strip from end to end, and by the time the cleanup was complete, conditions were unsafe – at least according to some. Others, including Gladstone, felt quite the opposite. “This is crazy,” he said of the decision to halt qualifying and seed the field based on final 2021 points standings. “There’s nothing wrong with this track. If you want to run, run. I do. If you don’t, roll up there and take the Tree. There’s only 16 bikes here – you’re in.”

Gladstone, who made his NHRA debut exactly 10 years ago this weekend, was slotted into the No. 7 position on the ladder based on his career-best eighth-place finish in the 2021 standings. But instead of a brutal first-round matchup with six-time world champ Andrew Hines, who’s just tuning for Vance & Hines racers this year and not riding, Gladstone got a much more favorable matchup with Kelly Clontz. He trounced her by half a tenth on the Tree, .066 to .113, and that was the difference in a much closer than anticipated race, 6.86/198 to 6.87/193.

In the quarterfinals, Gladstone drew not 2021 championship runner-up Angelle Sampey, as expected, but rather Marc Ingwersen, who’d upset her in the first round for the first round-win of his career. The Reed Motorsports Suzuki Hayabusa posted a fine 6.78, which was within six-hundredths off the incoming national record of 6.72 until eventual winner Karen Stoffer doubled it three pair later with a record-shattering 6.66. “Looks like we got our scooter back,” said Gladstone, who maintained his earlier 198-mph pace in the semifinals but slipped to a 6.88 and fell to Angie Smith’s 6.73/201. “Good weekend,” assessed team leader Cory Reed, hobbling around in a walking boot and thrilled to be back in action after his harrowing Charlotte crash Sept. 19. “I feel great. I’m getting around pretty good, and I feel a lot better than I did. But what really feels good is seeing those win-lights come on.”

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL 2021

November 8, 2021 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley wound up probably the most difficult year of her career right where it all began a decade ago, The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, trending in a positive direction for maybe the first time since the first race of this long season. When qualifying was complete, she didn’t just have low e.t. of the meet, she had low e.t., the second-lowest e.t., and the fourth-lowest e.t. – two 5.50s and a 5.51.

Running as close to the .40s as possible without actually running one, Whiteley claimed the top spot with a time of exactly five and a half seconds – 5.500 at 266.27 mph. The speed ended up second behind only the 266.48-mph charge of eventual winner Sean Bellemeur and the Bartone Bros. team led by Steve Boggs.

“Doug Gordon’s team really helped us with the clutch,” Whiteley said, “and I mean really helped us. It’s pretty unbelievable for somebody like them, a team that won the championship last year and just about won it again this year, to do something like that for somebody else, but that’s exactly what they did.”

In the first round against Alaska’s Ray Martin, like her one of the very, very few ever to win their first Top Alcohol Funny Car start, Whiteley drilled him on the Tree. She was out first by more than half a tenth, .080 to .131, and, despite coasting across the finish line at barely 210 mph, emerged victorious. “The blower belt broke,” she explained after narrowly advancing with a 5.71/211 over Martin’s fast-closing 5.75/252.

Sunday afternoon in the first pair of the semi’s, Whiteley’s luck ran out. Gordon put away No. 2 qualifier Terry Ruckman, 5.56/265 to 5.68/252, in the other pair, and she outran both of them – but, unfortunately for her, not the only one that mattered. She and Bellemeur, who locked up the national championship here last weekend, pre-staged simultaneously and staged almost at the same time, but the now three-time champ pulled steadily ahead of her for a 5.51/265 to 5.54/264 victory.

Whiteley’s final scorecard for the 2021 season: a win (Belle Rose), a runner-up (Martin on the Mid-West Drag Racing Series tour), three semifinal finishes (this weekend in Las Vegas and the Ferris and Tulsa MWDRS events), 11th place in the NHRA standings, fourth in the MWDRS, and a positively un-Whiteleylike overall win-loss record of 10-14.

PRO MOD – LAS VEGAS 2021

November 1, 2021 / Todd Veney

Laser-focused on the burgeoning Mid-West Drag Racing Series all year, Jim Whiteley simultaneously pieced together a successful season in his infrequent appearances on the NHRA tour. Whiteley, who barely missed winning the 2021 MWDRS Pro Mod championship, finished just outside the NHRA Top 10 despite skipping nearly half the races (5 of 11).

On his first qualifying run at the 11th and final event of this year’s NHRA series, the Dodge NHRA Nationals in Las Vegas, Whiteley’s sleek ’69 Camaro shook hard and coasted silently across finish line at 100 mph. Saturday afternoon in the second and third sessions, he pounded out two runs as close to each other as any two runs have ever been: .968-.970 at the 60-foot mark, 2.574-2.574 at 330 feet, 3.857-3.855 to half-track at 192.11-192.30 mph, 4.957-4.954 at 1,000 feet, and 5.886-5.882 at 242.06-242.36 mph across the finish line.

The first one, recorded early Saturday afternoon, put him eighth in the order, and the follow-up, recorded in the gathering gloom of dusk that evening, was truly a thing of beauty. Wheels up, charging hard through the middle of the course, it was, barley, his quickest pass of the weekend, but it still didn’t improve his standing in the final lineup. He wound up ninth in the final order, matched against teammate Brandon Snider in the bright sunlight of Sunday morning’s first round of eliminations.

Once again, Whiteley made his quickest run of the entire event, but Snider did him one better at both ends of the dragstrip. Whiteley cut a .042 light, but Snider nipped him with a slightly quicker .031, and when Whiteley picked up considerably from his best qualifying time (four-hundredths of a second and 2 mph, from 5.88/242 to 5.84/244), Snider picked up even more (four-hundredths and 3 mph, from 5.83/244 to 5.79/247) to win by a car-length.

“We’ve got some big plans for next year,” Whiteley said. “All kinds of plans. With all kinds of people and all kinds of cars. That’s all I’m going to say right now. But trust me, it’s gonna be good.”

PSM – LAS VEGAS 2021

November 1, 2021 / Todd Veney

Back on the line just an hour after teammate Cory Reed’s devastating crash, Joey Gladstone upset championship contender Steve Johnson in the Charlotte semi’s to reach the brink of his first major title. An hour or so later he had Angelle Sampey covered until a disastrous, once-in-a-lifetime mechanical glitch muzzled his bike and denied him his first NHRA victory.

Since then … nothing. It’s been one early exit after another. Dallas: out first round. Bristol: out first round. And, now, Las Vegas: out first round. None was more disheartening than this latest setback, at the Dodge Nationals in Vegas. This time Gladstone didn’t have a chance – he took himself out with a red-light start, and right when Reed was there to watch.

Confined to a wheelchair since September and probably into the first month or so of next year, minimum, Reed, bored to tears watching from the sidelines at home, found his way back to a racetrack for the first time since his catastrophic crash. “It sucks not being out here,” he said. “You’re stuck at home, you get all excited about finally having something to look forward to – watching the livestream of the race – and then it starts, and it’s not the same at all. You’re there, but you’re not racing. Your team is. Not you – you’re just watching.”

With his team leader and best bud looking on intently, Gladstone opened Dodge Nationals qualifying with a 7.09/193 that positioned him sixth at the time, followed with a much better 6.95/191 that got him right back up to sixth, and entered eliminations in the ninth spot after rolling through the beams on his third and final qualifying attempt.

In the first round, opposite returning veteran Chris Bostick, who qualified just ahead of him in the No. 8 spot, Gladstone narrowly fouled. It was a crusher – his best run of the entire event, a 6.939 that tied Bostick’s qualifying time right to the thousandth of a second, and right when Bostick stumbled to a 6.98 but won anyway.

“The bike’s not really running we think it should right now,” said Reed, bound to a wheelchair with pins sticking out of him but equally bound and determined to get back on the quarter-mile by early next year. “This was never going to be easy – I never expected it to be. We want to do better, and we will, but nothing really looks completely out of whack right now. Nothing’s screaming ‘fix me,’ so I don’t know why it’s not running better. If we find something in testing, we’ll be at Pomona for the Finals. If we don’t, we won’t.”

TAFC – LAS VEGAS NATIONAL 2021

November 1, 2021 / Todd Veney

With a promising performance at the penultimate race of a largely forgettable 2021 season, Annie Whiteley might just have turned the corner heading into the 2022 campaign. Plagued by one thing after another from the time she left Belle Rose, La., with a victory in the season opener, 2021 was the very definition of a down year. This second-to-last weekend of the season was anything but.

From a decent 5.60 at 263 mph on her opening hit, Whiteley got only quicker every trip back under The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway arch. She posted a significantly better 5.54/264 Friday afternoon and an incrementally quicker and faster 5.53/265 in last-shot qualifying Saturday morning for the No. 6 spot in the 16-car Top Alcohol Funny Car field.

That afternoon in the first round of eliminations, as she had on almost every other run, Whiteley laid down her best pass all weekend, leaving on former national event winner Kris Hool and outrunning him to boot. Her right-down-the-groove 5.52/265 wasted his aborted 9.65 at 113 mph and improved her all-time head-to-head record against the Wyoming veteran to a tidy 6-3. It wasn’t just her quickest run of the event; it was all 16 drivers’ quickest run of the first round, including championship contenders Sean Bellemeur (5.58) and Doug Gordon (5.66).

That night, immediately after the nitro cars wrapped up qualifying for Sunday’s race, Whiteley faced quarterfinal opponent Chris Marshall, who, like her, split his time this year between the NHRA and MWDRS circuits. They left, and her car, as if pulled by some giant magnet buried under the centerline, strayed inexorably to the right until she finally relented somewhere in high gear.

“It pulled me over toward the centerline, and I had to pull it back,” Whiteley said. “Then it did it again, and I pulled it back again, but when it tried to pull me over there again in high gear I thought, ‘Nahhhh … that’s enough,’ and shut it off.” Marshall collected the round-win with a 5.56/264, while Whiteley, despite clicking it early and coasting across the stripe at only 222 mph, still recorded a 5.64.

PRO MOD – FERRIS 2021

October 25, 2021 / Todd Veney

Of all the lousy ways to lose a championship, having your car accidentally shut itself off halfway through an in-the-bag win is way up there. Jim Whiteley’s longshot bid for the 2021 Mid-West Drag Racing Series Pro Mod title officially disintegrated in the very first round of the last race of the year when his normally bulletproof Leahy safety system inadvertently silenced the car, handing the championship to young Joey Oksas.

Up to that point, everything was shaping up for a deep run into eliminations for Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing team – he led all Xtreme Texas World Finals qualifiers with an outstanding 3.69 at nearly 203 mph (Oksas was No. 2) and thus drew the slowest driver in the field, Todd Moyer, in the first round. If he made it through that one – and there was absolutely no reason to think he wouldn’t – he’d have a second-round bye run straight into the semifinals.

Oksas had a commanding lead coming into the event, sure, but the opportunity for a last-ditch championship run was still on the table for Whiteley. He killed the Tree with a .020 reaction time, gaining a noticeable early lead Moyer’s sleepy .105 … and then looked on helplessly when his car quit on him. “It was perfect,” he said. “The front end was up, the car was hauling ass, and then it just went dead.” He slowed to a 6.26 at only 73 mph, dragging the chutes across the finish line long after Moyer had sailed past him to a winning 3.79/200.

It cost Whiteley the round and maybe the race – almost certainly the race – but, honestly, probably not the championship. Only some Hail Mary would have kept Oksas, safely ensconced on the far side of the ladder, from another late-round appearance, and nothing Whiteley could have done, including winning the event, would have been enough to overtake him.

Oksas, qualified No. 2, directly opposite Whiteley on the grid, drove his Jeff Pierce-tuned Mustang to another final, where he was upset by, of all people, Moyer, who’d never won a race until this weekend. But finishing the season with five straight final-round appearances left Whiteley, who wound up second in the final standings, no room for error. “It would’ve taken a miracle,” Whiteley said. “He was too far ahead of me. Good for him. He’s a good kid – he deserved it.”

TAFC – FERRIS 2021

October 25, 2021 / Todd Veney

The only good thing about Annie’s 2021 Mid-West Drag Racing Series season is that it’s over. A solid reaction time and a competitive run at the Xtreme Texas World Finals only got her another first-round loss, her third straight in what’s turned out to be the most disappointing year of her long, successful 10-year driving career.

Things got off to a promising enough start at Xtreme Raceway Park in tiny Ferris, Texas, just outside Dallas, when Whiteley clocked a 3.71 at 210.58 mph in the second Funny Car session and a steady 3.72/209.89 in the third. Both speeds held up as the fastest of the entire session, but her 3.71 E.T. was good for only the No. 6 spot overall – not bad, usually, but, in this case, not that great: there were just six Funny Cars in attendance.

Instead of No. 1 vs No. 6, 2 vs. 5 and 3 vs. 4 in the first round as with a traditional six-car NHRA ladder, No. 1 qualifier Sean Bellemeur and No. 2 qualifier Chris Marshall soloed in the first round under the MWDRS’ unconventional format, and the semifinals featured a full complement of four cars. Unfortunately for Whiteley, her J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro wasn’t one of them.

She charged off the line with her best reaction time of the race, a more than respectable .070, and dipped into the 3.60s with her quickest run all weekend, a 3.69, but Bill Bernard, clinging to an outside shot at the championship, nipped her in the lights in a rematch of last month’s U.S. 131 Nationals final. He clocked a 3.67 to win, then lost in the semifinals to Sean Bellemeur, who clinched the title and subsequently topped second-place Marshall in the final to win a second crown going away.

PSM – BRISTOL 2021

October 18, 2021 / Todd Veney

This year, for the first time since Cory Reed and Joey Gladstone were elementary school kids, the premier Pro Stock Motorcycle teams in the country descended upon Bristol Dragway in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. Until now, the two-wheel set had never been part of an NHRA national event here, so no one really had any idea what to expect from the legendary but, to them, completely unfamiliar track.

They just knew it was going to be bumpy. Really bumpy. Knock-your-hands-right-off-the-handlebars bumpy. Everyone was anxious about exactly what was going to happen when they let the clutch handle fly, unleashing their 200-mph missiles on Bristol’s notoriously uneven surface, but Gladstone, more than most, seemed unfazed. “You just have to be ready for it,” he said. “At a place like this, you just need to make sure you’re ahead of the bike the whole time.”

He was. After rolling off the trailer with a 6.98 at 193 mph Friday evening, Gladstone hung within hundredths of a second of that time all weekend, with a 6.96/190 Saturday afternoon and a 7.01/192 later that evening that positioned him ninth in the final lineup, locked into theoretically the closest race of the first round. It couldn’t have been closer than No. 8 vs. No. 9 anyway, but this one figured to be even tighter than ever because both Gladstone and Eddie Krawiec qualified with the same E.T., right down to the thousandth of a second – not just matching 6.96s, but identical 6.966s.

Krawiec, the 2008, 2011, 2012, and 2017 Pro Stock Motorcycle champ, had his choice of lanes because of his faster qualifying speed (196.36 mph to 190.75) and appeared to have the upper hand, but it was Gladstone who actually had the better head-to-head record coming in. “All we have to do is get down the back half of the track as good as we’ve been getting down the front half,” he said, “and this thing should run in the mid-.80s.”

It didn’t. With Reed convalescing and watching the nhra.tv livestream from home, Gladstone got the drop on Krawiec at the Tree, .030 to .040, but it was the last time he’d hold the lead. Instead of them both running the same e.t. they had in qualifying and Gladstone winning on a slight holeshot, he slowed from 6.96 to a 6.99 while Krawiec capitalized on the cool air and tight, tacky track to advance with by far his best run all weekend, a 6.89.