Author: Todd Veney (Page 12 of 40)

TAFC – DALLAS 2021

October 11, 2021 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley was doing fine at the NHRA Fall Nationals, right up until she wasn’t. Half of the quickest side-by-side race in history at the Texas Motorplex in 2017, still the fastest Top Alcohol Funny Car driver of all time (276.18 mph) in 2018, and survivor of a nasty sand-trap crash here later that year, she was gone early this time.

Heading into final qualifying, Whiteley was No. 2 on the provisional grid with a 5.51, second only to the 5.47 of eventual winner Doug Gordon. But one good run gets you only so far, and when she failed to improve in the pivotal third and final qualifying session, other teams did step up – way up.

With invaluable assistance from Sean Bellemeur’s crew chief, mechanical genius Steve Boggs, Aryan Rochon ran a career-best 5.47 for the No. 2 spot; 2017 world champ Shane Westerfield made his best run all season, another 5.47, for No. 3; and Matt Gill, who joined the ranks of national event champions earlier this year in Atlanta, slipped ahead of the J&A Service/YNot Racing team’s 5.516 and into the No. 4 position with a 5.510.

It just served to push Whiteley from No. 2 down to No. 5 and made surviving the first round of eliminations that much more unlikely a proposition. There wasn’t a single pushover in the entire field (every team in attendance ran at least a 5.50-something), but drawing perennial top-three driver Brian Hough first round called to mind what happened here two years ago: Whiteley qualified in the top half of the field, got stuck running Hough first round, and lost.

This was different – neither one of them ran any good. Hough’s crew chief, multi-talented Jonnie Lindberg, acutely aware of just how fast Whiteley’s car might run, had his car way too hopped up, and Hough stumbled downtrack to a backpedaling, off-pace 5.88. Problem was, Whiteley’s car leaped off the ground the instant she swapped feet and swung a hard left, leaving her no choice but to lift. With plenty of time to think about what might have been, she was left to idle downtrack to a 12-second time with “5.88” and the win-light shining on the scoreboard in the other lane.

PRO MOD – DALLAS 2021

October 11, 2021 / Todd Veney

At the NHRA Fall Nationals, site of some of the most unforgettable days of Jim Whiteley’s long, prolific Top Alcohol Dragster career, he qualified the highest he has all season in Pro Mod – sixth, the same spot he landed at Indy but with a run a tenth of a second quicker. Only this time, he didn’t parlay that performance into success on race day, instead being upset in the first round by No. 11 seed Chad Green.

Whiteley, who shut off to a 9.40 on his initial attempt, lowered the boom Friday night with a 5.80 at 246.39 mph that catapulted him straight to the top of the order at the time. Crew chief “Stevie Fast” Jackson kept Whiteley’s immaculate ’69 Camaro in range for the duration of the event, but the car trended in the wrong direction, slowing ever so slightly each time down the Motorplex quarter-mile. Following a competitive 5.81/245 Saturday (coincidentally against Khalid alBalooshi, who tied Whiteley’s 5.806 right to the thousandth of a second but nipped him for the No. 5 spot with a better speed), Whiteley remained consistent on his next and last attempt with a steady 5.83/246.

In the first round against Green, a former national event champ who’d never beaten the YNot/J&A Service team, Whiteley fell backward another hundredth of a second and dropped a couple mph in speed. That’s all it took. He was two-hundredths of a second quicker than Green to the 60-foot mark (.958-.979) and four-hundredths quicker to 330 (2.553-2.595), but by half-track any edge he had was long gone.

Green had him by a thousandth of a second at that point, 3.830-3.831, and his nitrous-powered 900 cubic-inch behemoth drove away from Whiteley’s blown-alcohol setup with a significant half-track speed advantage, 198 mph to 192. Whiteley’s slowest full run of the weekend, a solid but unspectacular 5.84/243, would have won all kinds of rounds this year, but Green took a huge leap forward with by far his best run of the entire weekend, 5.79/247, to win going away.

PSM – DALLAS 2021

October 11, 2021 / Todd Veney

It’s all up to Joey Gladstone now. With team leader Cory Reed sidelined indefinitely by the incapacitating injuries from his horrifying Charlotte crash, Gladstone will have to be the one to do it if Reed Motorsports is to lock down its first-ever Top 5 finish in the final NHRA standings.

Robbed of what would’ve been his first career Pro Stock Motorcycle victory in the Charlotte final when the kill switch somehow became unplugged (“I can’t stop thinking about it – I still think about it every day,” he said), Gladstone now leads the charge with three races to go and the Top 5 just outside their collective grasp. Sixth in the standings coming into this race, he set the tone with an off-the-trailer 6.90 – the same number that would flash on the Texas Motorplex scoreboards after every run he made all weekend but one.

Following that pass, a forgettable 6.99/194 under the lights Friday night amid the track’s tacky Spectacle of Speed fiasco, Gladstone pounded out identical 6.90s Saturday afternoon – a 6.908 at 194 mph in the left lane and a subsequent 6.905 at 195 in the right, his quickest lap of the race. Another 6.90 in the first round of eliminations and he’d have been right back in the middle rounds because he absolutely drilled longtime nemesis Jerry Savoie on the starting line.

But at Dallas, Savoie is the last rider anyone wants to face – especially Gladstone, now 0-7 lifetime against the 2016 world champ. Savoie, who’s appeared in the final round here six years in a row and won the past two, was way, way behind Gladstone coming off the line with a .104 reaction time, but even a .023 light wasn’t enough to hold him off.

Gladstone’s Vance & Hines-powered Hayabusa had him at half-track, but at the finish line the 6.90 on the scoreboard was not in his lane but rather in Savoie’s. “I’m still a little banged up [from a crash earlier this year at a non-NHRA event in Darlington, S.C.], my friend’s all banged up, and we’re just out here doing the best we can out here,” said Gladstone, who slipped to a 7.01 in the dispiriting loss. “Cory’s a warrior. His leg’s still beat up pretty bad and it’s gonna be a long road to recovery for him, but he’ll be back out here, trust me. And after Charlotte I know I can win one of these things.”

PRO MOD – TULSA 2021

October 4, 2021 / Todd Veney

As the back-loaded Mid-West Drag Racing Series season barrels toward another nail-biting conclusion, Jim Whiteley kept himself in contention for the 2021 Pro Mod championship, barely, with a huge weekend at Tulsa Raceway Park.

Inclement weather this summer postponed multiple events, forcing MWDRS officials to make the Throwdown in T-Town, already one of the biggest events on the calendar, a doubleheader – three days, two races, double the points, and double the purse for the same travel. Whiteley starred all weekend, driving his supercharged split-window Corvette to both finals, but both times he came away empty-handed, with no wins and two more runner-ups.

The two-time NHRA Top Alcohol Dragster world champ, 23-7 in national event finals in that category and 2-0 lifetime in NHRA Pro Mod finals, collected more round-wins over the extended weekend (six) than anyone, but he still can’t seem to buy a MWDRS win. He finished second for the second and third times this season, narrowly red-lighting in the Friday final against points leader Joey Oksas, and, for once, flat-out getting outrun in the Saturday final against series founder Keith Haney.

In the first race, held Thursday and Friday, Whiteley led all qualifiers with a 3.709, two-thousandths of a second ahead of Ed Thornton’s 3.711 but 18 mph slower on the top end, 219 to 201. He plowed through Chris Juliano, Rob Gallegos, and Haney in the preliminary rounds, but, plagued by -.00 red-lights all year, was undone by another one in the final. An infuriating -.003 foul start nullified his excellent 3.69/203 and made a winner of Oksas’ early-shutoff 4.14/134.

Qualifying for the second race commenced immediately, and when it was over Whiteley was third in the order and well on his way to another final-round appearance. Haney entered eliminations with the upper hand, No. 1 with a 3.67 that placed him just ahead of the matching 3.69s of Oksas, Whiteley, and 2020 series champ Ron Muenks.

Whiteley ran quicker than anybody in the opening round (3.70), then proceeded to erase Zach Barklage in the quarterfinals and, for easily his biggest round-win of the 2021 MWDRS season, Oksas in a crucial semifinal showdown that made him the first to beat the suddenly unbeatable upstart in the past 14 rounds.

In the final round opposite Haney, Whiteley rolled in first, turned it green, and was right there all the way with a strong 3.68/202, but Haney’s sinister-looking nitrous-powered machine got around him at the top end with a superior 3.67/207, relegating Whiteley to runner-up for the third time in MWDRS competition this year.

TAFC – TULSA 2021

October 4, 2021 / Todd Veney

From the beginning, Annie Whiteley seemed destined to finish fourth in the 2021 Mid-West Drag Racing Series Funny Car standings. Right in the middle of it race after race but somehow always a half-step behind, she hit Tulsa, her childhood home, dead-set on nabbing that elusive first career MWDRS event title.

It didn’t happen. Bill Bernard arrived with a four-point lead over incoming favorite Sean Bellemeur, who’d earned more points per race than anyone all year but skipped the U.S. 131 Nationals to run the NHRA event at Maple Grove. Whiteley and Chris Marshall were right behind both, but at the conclusion of back-to-back events over three days of the epic Throwdown in T-Town doubleheader, her YNot Racing/J&A Service team was officially out of title contention.

It wasn’t that Whiteley didn’t have an opportunity to stay in the points race or that she just didn’t run hard. She did. The six-time NHRA national event champion qualified fifth for the Thursday/Friday event and powered into the semifinals, where she was upended by eventual winner Bellemeur, 3.72 to a shutoff 9.52. Marshall ran quicker in the final, but Bellemeur, who’s forged a reputation as one of the finest drivers ever to strap into an Alcohol Funny Car, got him on a holeshot.

Marshall then led all qualifiers for the other race with an outstanding 3.60, just ahead of Bellemeur’s 3.62 and Whiteley’s 3.66. He’d go on to claim a crucial final-round win when Bellemeur’s crankshaft snapped in half around the half-track mark, setting in motion one of the more violent explosions in the history of alcohol racing and more or less destroying his whole car. By then, Whiteley had already been eliminated, victimized by second-generation driver Bryan Brown, 3.69/207 to her shutoff 4.20/133.

All in all, the YNot team displayed remarkable consistency throughout the 2021 campaign, scoring 69 points in Ferris, 66 at the rescheduled I-30 race in Tulsa, 69 in Tulsa, 67 in Great Bend, and 70 in Martin, but this 48-point effort knocked them out of the championship. With one race left, the title’s now officially out of reach – a win is worth 110 points, and Whiteley trails Bellemeur by 118.

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2021

September 20, 2021 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed, who’s shrugged off who knows how many motocross injuries but until now had had never been hurt on a drag strip, was lucky to survive a harrowing top-end crash in round two. Immediately after crossing the finish line at 190+ mph in a thrilling side-by-side match with teammate Joey Gladstone, Reed’s bike veered toward the opposite lane and just kept going.

Hanging further and further off to the left until he almost wasn’t even on the bike anymore, Reed never did get it to come back, finally tangling with Gladstone and going down hard. The bike catapulted high into the air and smashed into the wall while he tumbled down the unforgiving zMax Dragway pavement in a frightening scene.

Gladstone managed to avoid becoming entangled with Reed’s errant mount, came to a safe stop, and, when he whipped around to look back uptrack, was horrified to see Reed laid out on the asphalt, immobilized by multiple injuries. Gladstone sprinted toward his fallen comrade, arrived almost simultaneously with safety personnel, and, when the ambulance pulled out of the track, was right in there with Reed, who would undergo the first of multiple surgeries that night.

Gladstone made it back to the track in time to defeat incoming points leader Steve Johnson in the semi’s only to watch an in-the-bag first career NHRA victory dissolve before his eyes in a heartbreaking final against Angelle Sampey. The kill switch somehow became disengaged, cutting the power and bringing a sad end to an emotional day for the young racer, who’d strapped a bike-length holeshot on Sampey and was seconds away from the victory of a lifetime.

“It’s drag racing – it happens – but I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this bad luck,” said Gladstone, almost despondent. “It stings, it really does.”

Reed, runner-up here earlier this year at the Four-Wide Nationals and tied with Gladstone in the standings coming into this event, qualified solidly with a 6.99 at 191 mph. He knocked off Sonoma winner Karen Stoffer in the first round before narrowly losing to Gladstone, 6.94-6.93, an outcome rendered meaningless by what happened after they crossed the finish line.

It was exactly the kind of matchup Reed was looking for when qualifying wrapped up. “I like running guys close to me in the points head-to-head,” he said. “Let’s just get to it, right? I don’t need anybody else deciding anything for me. I want to settle it myself.” Now, unfortunately, he won’t get that chance.

PRO MOD – MARTIN 2021

September 13, 2021 / Todd Veney

Sometimes Jim Whiteley’s a little too quick for his own good. Nobody’s really beating him. He’s beating himself, barely, and in the most infuriating possible manner – on red-lights that aren’t that red.

He’s not screwing up some part the delicate staging process, not distracted, not choking under pressure. Like Top Fuel great Antron Brown in his final days on a Pro Stock Bike, Whiteley’s seeing yellow, reacting, and missing not just a decent light but a perfect light by just a fraction of a second.

It happened again at the Mid-West Drag Racing Series’ U.S. 131 Nationals in Martin, Mich., and this one was particularly grating because it came in the first round and really compromised his shot at the 2021 championship. Like always, it was a round Whiteley absolutely would’ve won with almost any kind of green-light start, and, like always, it was by the narrowest possible margin – eight-thousandths of a second.

After another late-round finish last month in Kansas – he’s gone rounds at six races in a row and reached at least the semifinals at every MWDRS event this year – Whiteley hit Martin with a narrow three-point lead over Great Bend winner Joey Oksas, 287 to 284. Tulsa champ Jon Stouffer and Ed Thornton came in about 30 points back, but after his Great Bend crash, Stouffer effectively is out of the title hunt.

The J&A Service/YNot Racing team’s own championship hopes took a huge hit when Whiteley’s surprise first-round loss was compounded by the fact that his closest challenger, Oksas, capitalized with a second straight victory, topping series founder Keith Haney in the final.

Whiteley, who qualified No. 1 at Great Bend, was just sixth this time, one of five drivers to qualify with a 3.70-flat. He was ahead of two and behind the other two with a 3.703 at 203.62 mph that tied Oksas to the thousandth of a second. Haney paced the field with an outstanding 3.666, and Judd Coffman established top speed at 207.56 mph despite qualifying just ninth.

Eliminations for Whiteley came to an abrupt end in the first round when he voided a potentially winning 3.75/200, one of the quickest runs of the round, with the -.008 red-light start, advancing Tom Ladisky’s 3.81/192. Despite the brutal early loss, a championship remains a distinct possibility, with a double at Tulsa later this month and the Xtreme Texas World Finals set for Ferris Oct. 22-23.

PSM – READING 2021

September 13, 2021 / Todd Veney

He may not have gone the distance, but at the Mopar Express Lane NHRA Nationals, the first race of the seven-race 2021 Countdown to the Championship playoffs, underrated Pro Stock Motorcycle racer Cory Reed met his stated pre-race goal: go rounds. Running hard in not just the first qualifying session but in all three at legendary Maple Grove Raceway, Reed opened with a strong 6.86 Friday evening and followed with an even better 6.84 the next afternoon.

With a near-perfect .005 reaction time and another 6.86 Saturday evening, Reed nailed down the No. 6 spot in the final lineup, his best qualifying performance all year. “I think we’re finally starting to make a little progress here,” he said, justifiably pleased. “Both bikes [his and PSE/Reed Motorsports teammate Joey Gladstone’s] are set up the same, and now we’ve got them both running the same.”

Pitted against pal Ryan Oehler in the final pair of the first round, Reed got off the mark first and overcame a series of obstacles downtrack to win a crucial points battle by just 16-thousandths of a second, 6.97/193 to 6.98/194. “He definitely could’ve beat me right there,” said Reed, who pulled to within four points of Oehler in the NHRA standings. “It spun bad, and I had to just ride it out. The front end was trying to wash out and the bike was all over the place, but it was race day and I had to stay with it or I’d have lost for sure. If that was a test run, I’d have said, ‘Screw it,’ and shut it off.”

The wheels came off in the next round against superstar Andrew Hines, 6.85/199 to 6.98/191 – not that Reed didn’t have him covered for a good while. “The clutch didn’t lock up enough,” he explained. “We were trying to slip it down low – I mean, you really can’t get too conservative against somebody like him, can you? You’ve got to try to go a .79, right? I thought I was doing all right for a while there, but he caught me around half-track and just took off from there. I’ve never seen anybody go by me like that.”

TAFC – MARTIN 2021

September 13, 2021 / Todd Veney

Numerous forces conspired to deplete the car count at the Mid-West Drag Racing Series’ U.S. 131 Nationals: the ongoing war for the 2021 NHRA Top Funny Car championship at Maple Grove between Sean Bellemeur and Doug Gordon for one, and a vital Central Regional in Earlville for another. But what the MWDRS field may have lacked in quantity it more than made up for, as they say, in quality: all three teams in attendance ran 3.60s, and two of them just missed the .50s.

At completely renovated U.S. 131 Dragway, host of the Popular Hot Rodding Championships, the biggest independent Funny Car race of the ’70s and early ’80s, no one was quicker or faster than Annie Whiteley, who reached her second final of 2021. Hunting down her first event title ever in this series, Whiteley, who reached the semi’s at Ferris in her only other MWDRS start this year, came out on the wrong end of a classic final-round matchup with the converter-equipped car of Bill Bernard.

With just three Funny Cars in attendance in tiny Martin, Mich., halfway between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, qualifying No. 1 meant a bye to the final, and Whiteley got it by just three-thousandths of a second over No. 2 Chris Marshall, 3.606 to 3.609. In the first round, which, in the unusual three-car format, doubled as the semi’s, Whiteley moved into her first final since the Belle Rose season opener with a smooth 3.69 single and Bernard upset Marshall on a holeshot in the other semi in a great race, 3.67 to 3.65.

Then, in the exciting under-the-lights final, Bernard’s Mustang and Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro were locked side by side right to the eighth-mile mark, where Bernard’s 3.670 at 204.17 mph barley held off Whiteley’s fast-closing 3.679 at 211.47. With the victory, Bernard assumed the points lead, but, with three races to go, it’s still a wide-open affair between him, Bellemeur, Whiteley, and Marshall for the 2021 MWDRS Funny Car championship.

PSM – INDY 2021

September 6, 2021 / Todd Veney

This year, the U.S. Nationals, the longest race of every NHRA season, turned out to be the shortest. For the first time in the 67-year history of the sport’s oldest and most prestigious event, qualifying for all pro classes consisted of exactly one run.

Instead of one attempt Friday, two Saturday, another two Sunday, and eliminations on Monday, it was one shot Friday and straight into eliminations on Sunday – if you qualified. Saturday was a complete washout, and, as a concession to the pandemic, eliminations this year were contested Sunday and not on Labor Day Monday as they have been since the ’60s.

“Not getting all five sessions really changed things up,” Cory Reed said Saturday afternoon, bored to tears in the gloomy Indy pits but secure in the knowledge that at least if the rain never let up he’d already locked himself into the Pro Stock Motorcycle field with a six-second run under the lights Friday night. “I think having just the one session really stressed out some people. Not me. It actually might just play into our favor.”

Paired against Kelly Clontz Friday night in the first of what should have been at least three qualifying sessions, Reed guided his sleek Suzuki Hayabusa to a respectable 6.99 at 187 mph that put him third at the time and ultimately landed him 10th in the final lineup. Sunday dawned bright and sunny, but the track was still suspect after a relentless 15-hour deluge, which made lane choice critical. The young rider, 10th in the field, didn’t have that advantage – his first-round opponent, former teammate Angelle Sampey, earned it by qualifying in the fast half of the program, No. 7.

Reed, who’d beaten her the last few times they’d raced, drilled the former world champ with a .014 reaction time and made his quickest and fastest run of the rain-shortened weekend, a 6.97/192, but she powered around him downtrack with a winning 6.83/194. It was a disappointing end to a strange race that marked the end of the regular season, but not one without promise. When the Countdown to the Championship playoffs begin next weekend at Maple Grove Raceway, both Reed and teammate Joey Gladstone will be in title contention, and, thanks to the points reset, closer to the lead than they’ve been all year.