Category: News (Page 17 of 40)

race-by-race wrapups

TAFC – ALLSTARS 2020

September 6, 2020 / Todd Veney

Top Alcohol Funny Car star Annie Whiteley was out early at theoretically the toughest race of the season, the prestigious Jegs Allstars, held this year in conjunction with the granddaddy of them all, the U.S. Nationals.

Shifted to Indianapolis from its originally scheduled June date in Chicago, the invitation-only race-within-a-race attracted the biggest names in the country – just about everybody but the two biggest: 2018-19 NHRA world champion Sean Bellemeur and yearlong 2020 points leader Doug Gordon. Eliminations had to be wedged into an already jam-packed U.S. Nationals schedule, and Allstar drivers got just a single qualifying attempt because all eight were seeded into the starting lineup anyway.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing team made the most of its one shot with a businesslike 5.56 at 267.22 mph, top speed of the event to that point and good for No. 3 on the grid and a first-round matchup with former East Region champ DJ Cox. Whiteley, the defending Central Region Top Alcohol Funny Car champion, had lane choice and seemingly had the upper hand, but when she rolled in to stage, Cox uncharacteristically took several seconds to follow her into the beams, which, with the engines screaming at 7,500 rpm and her red-hot clutch getting tighter and tighter, felt to her like several minutes.

“I sat there for a while – 4 or 5 seconds, according to the computer,” Whiteley said. “As high as we’re leaving now, it’s hard to hold it that long.” Right as she shoved down on the clutch pedal to keep the car from creeping through the beams for an automatic disqualification, Cox lit the fourth and final light and the Tree came down. She was caught off guard, and the Maryland driver opened a noticeable lead in low gear and advanced with low e.t. of the round, 5.51. Whiteley streaked to a 5.54 – quicker than anybody but Cox ran that round – at a speed of 269.78 mph (top speed of not just that round or of the Allstars competition, but of the entire weekend), but by then the race was lost.

TAFC – YELLOWSTONE 2020

August 30, 2020 / Todd Veney

When the smoke literally had cleared from three qualifying sessions on the unfamiliar Yellowstone Drag Strip quarter-mile, Annie Whiteley, No. 1 qualifier at virtually every race she’s been to all year, pulled it off a fourth straight time with both ends of the track record: 5.633 at 263.26 mph – two-hundredths quicker than No. 2 qualifier Brian Hough and nearly 5 mph faster than any other car on the grounds.

Several of the nation’s premier Top Alcohol Funny Car teams converged on the farming community of Acton, Mont., 675 miles north of the YNot Racing/J&A Service team’s Grand Junction, Colo., base and smack dab in the heart of Big Sky Country. With all the other sportsman teams on hand, drag racers accounted for two-thirds of the population of the town of Acton (which counts just 183 souls for 51 weekends a year) for two long days of racing before almost everybody headed east for the biggest race of the year, the U.S. Nationals.

It truly was an all-star cast, with five of seven entrants former national event champs: Whiteley, Hough, points leader Doug Gordon, back-to-back U.S. Nationals runner-up Chris Marshall, and veteran Kris Hool. Even the Nos. 6 and 7 qualifiers – former nitro driver Steve Macklyn and newcomer Doug Schneider – dipped into the five-second zone at the high-altitude (3,800 feet) strip.

As the No. 1 qualifier in a field with an odd number of cars, Whiteley was the deserving recipient of a bye in the first round, where she was out of the gas early and coasted into the semis with an abbreviated 15.75 at just 65 mph. For Whiteley, who dominated the season-opener in Belle Rose, La., where she’s never lost a round in her life, and reached the final four in her other two regional starts this year – in Gainesville, Fla., and Denver – the weekend came to a premature end in the semifinals, where again she encountered traction woes immediately, rolling to a 10.55 loss to Marshall’s steady 5.72.

TAFC – ST. LOUIS 2020

August 16, 2020 / Todd Veney

TAFC – ST. LOUIS

Admittedly unnerved at having a Funny Car body lowered over him for the first time in his already legendary driving career and well aware that he’d have to crank the wheel harder than ever before to maintain control, door-car superstar Stevie “Fast” Jackson just missed winning in his Alcohol Funny Car debut. At the Summer Speed Spectacular in St. Louis, Jackson narrowly red-lighted in the rain-delayed final against another reigning NHRA world champion, 2018-19 Top Alcohol Funny Car champ Sean Bellemeur.

At the wheel of series sponsor Jim & Annie Whiteley’s Yenko-blue YNot/J&A Service Camaro, “Stevie Fast” refined the team’s torque-converter combination while simultaneously familiarizing himself with the unfamiliar confines and sometimes confounding characteristics of a dragster-style center-steer chassis. All he did was set top speed of the entire event (214.11 mph) and nearly win the first time he ever raced a Funny Car. Jackson put away 2017 champion Shane Westerfield in the first round with a 3.68 and vastly improved second-generation driver Kyle Smith in the semifinals with a lethal 3.62 before red-lighting by a fraction of a second in the final.

As expected, it took Jackson, who said he’d win the NHRA Pro Mod world championship last year and actually did, little time to adapt to a Funny Car. The versatile, talented old-school pro’s 3.64 in the final was just a tick slower than Bellemeur’s 3.63, and he’d have been a hero holeshot winner had his finger come off the button just .002-second later. “They’re hard to drive,” he said of his first Funny Car race. “They’re nothing like a Pro Mod. You have to line up in a different spot – it’s kinda weird being right in the middle of the lane like that – and nothing that works for one kind of car means anything with the other. A Funny Car doesn’t pull as hard early in the run as I thought it would, but you really have to get aggressive steering it downtrack. It’s gonna take a little time to be good, but if it’s got wheels on it, I can drive it.”

While Bellemeur, who also scored last month at the Xtreme Texas Nationals, kept his lifetime record in Keith Haney’s Mid-West Drag Racing Series unblemished – two starts, two wins – Jackson padded his extensive, varied résumé with another massive success in a completely different kind of race car. “This was awesome,” concluded “Stevie Fast,” who, unbeknownst to most, has actually held a Top Alcohol Funny Car license for 12 years – he just hadn’t raced one until now. “I just can’t thank Jim and Annie enough for letting me drive her car this weekend.”

PRO MOD – INDY III 2020

August 10, 2020 / Todd Veney

PRO MOD – INDY III

The inaugural Dodge NHRA Indy Nationals, a pseudo-national event staged at half-speed in the heart of the Coronavirus panic, didn’t quite feel like a national event, and Jim Whiteley didn’t quite feel like himself behind the wheel of his ’63 Corvette. Whiteley, who almost never loses on a holeshot – or even gets left on, for that matter – lost on a holeshot.

“I just lost focus that time,” said the two-time world champ of by far the worst light of his entire career, an unimaginable .313 in the second round against 2018 series champ Mike Janis. A reaction time half that bad (.157) would’ve been easily the worst light Whiteley ever had, Pro Mod or otherwise, but he got caught off guard that time and Janis had it the instant he launched with a .035 light, advancing with a passable 5.97 at 240 mph. “I don’t know what the hell I was looking at up there,” Whiteley said, laughing. “All of a sudden I was staged, the Tree came on, and I thought, ‘I should probably leave now.’ “

Until the Tree flashed, everything had been going just fine. Whiteley wheeled the J&A Service/YNot Racing ‘Vette to a competitive 5.85 in the first pair of the first session of Pro Mod qualifying and wasted Pro Mod/Funny Car driver Chad Green in the first round of eliminations, leaving first and leading wire to wire, 5.88/241 to 7.14/138. With fields this tight there really are no underdogs, but both he and Janis technically “upset” higher-qualified drivers in the first round, Whiteley over No. 5 qualifier Green with a 5.88 and Janis over No. 4 Jeff Jones with a 5.94.

With no better option than to flush the whole forgettable weekend in this utterly forgettable year, Whiteley is shifting his focus to the Midwest Drag Racing Series’ Summer Speed Spectacular next weekend in St. Louis. He’ll jump into “Stevie Fast’s” world-famous “Shadow 2.0” and Jackson will test the viability of a torque-converter/automatic-transmission setup in Annie Whiteley’s record-holding Top Alcohol Funny Car.

TAFC – FERRIS 2020

July 12, 2020 / Todd Veney

Drawn by a potential $20,000 payday – the biggest winner’s purse in the 40-year-history of Top Alcohol Funny Car racing – Annie Whiteley and name drivers from around the country headed to increasingly popular Xtreme Raceway Park for the Xtreme Texas Nationals, the first time Alcohol Funny Cars have ever been part of Keith Haney’s fast-rising Midwest Drag Racing Series.

Whiteley, whose YNot team has reached at least the semifinals at every stop all season, absorbed a dispiriting, uncharacteristic first-round defeat in their first appearance in Ferris, Texas. With $20,000 on the line, it wasn’t a bunch of patsies filling the Xtreme Raceway Park pits. The toughest teams in the country made their way to the underrated eighth-mile facility just north of the Texas Motorplex: besides Whiteley, red-hot 2020 NHRA points leader Doug Gordon and two-time reigning world champ Sean Bellemeur, there was veteran Mark Billington, Texas talents Bryan Brown and Jonathan Johnson, and emerging contender Bob McCosh from Missouri.

Racing under the lights before a packed house, with fans closing in around both cars as they inched toward the beams in the finest match-race tradition, Whiteley lined up opposite Gordon, one of the two toughest possible opponents today (Bellemeur being the other). Whiteley’s beautiful Yenko blue Camaro Funny Car laid down one of the strongest runs of the entire event, a 3.72 at a booming 210.77 mph that would’ve beaten almost just about anyone else. But, just a few feet ahead on her right, Gordon produced an even quicker 3.68 208.72 in his new red Beta Motorcycles colors to advance.

Earlier in the day, way down at the end of the shutdown area, Johnson plowed into the guardrail in Gordon’s lane, destroying one of the best-looking Funny Cars of all time. Gordon managed to avoid him and went on make to the final, where he lost, earning $5,000 – exactly what NHRA national events pay to win – for runner-up honors, while Bellemeur collected the 20 grand, the richest prize in class history, for the Bartone Bros./Hussey team led by all-time-great crew chief Steve Boggs.

TAFC – DENVER 2020

June 22, 2020 / Todd Veney

Perennial Top Alcohol Funny Car contender Annie Whiteley, who won Denver in 2018 and was runner-up in 2014, 2015, and last year, suffered a rare middle-round loss at her home track, one-of-a-kind Bandimere Speedway in the Rocky Mountain foothills just west of Denver. The many-time national event champion and current national speed record holder qualified high, as usual, but came up just short of yet another final-round appearance.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot team, based just four hours from Bandimere in scenic Grand Junction, Colo., began eliminations from the fast half of the field, as always, No. 1 for the third time in four starts this year with an aggregate best of 5.734 at 258.91 mph. Pole qualifier for the fourth time in her career on the mountain, she actually got the top spot by less than a thousandth of a second by virtue of winning the best-speed tiebreaker over eventual winner Doug Gordon, who also ran a 5.734, by 5 mph – 258.91 mph to 253.90.

Crew chief Mike Strasburg, from neighboring Utah, cooked up a high-altitude combination for the first round of eliminations perfect for the unique conditions all mile-high racers face. Whiteley reeled off another winning run, a 5.73/257, but a similar 5.74/256 in the semifinals left her just short. Torque converter driver Bill Bernard got off the starting line a little quicker for a 5.75/248 holeshot win. From here, Jim and Annie Whiteley’s YNot team heads into an uncertain future – who knows when COVID-19 restrictions will permit another race? – with a win and three semifinals finishes on its 2020 score card.

TAFC – DALLAS 2020

May 24, 2020 / Todd Veney

In her first official outing since the COVID-19 pandemic brought NHRA drag racing to a standstill, defending event champ Annie Whiteley just missed back-to-back titles at the Texas Motorplex, dropping an ultra-close final-round bout against the toughest possible opponent, 2018-19 Top Alcohol Funny Car world champ Sean Bellemeur.

“It feels like it’s been a year since we were at the track,” Whiteley said, “and I’ll admit it – I was a little nervous. The whole routine … ‘Am I going auto remember everything?’ You don’t know till you do it. But once they started the car, it was like, ‘I got this.’ ” She definitely did, qualifying No. 2 with a 5.52 at 268.60 mph en route to yet another final-round appearance on the all-concrete Motorplex surface.

Masked like everybody else in the oppressive Texas heat, Whiteley’s YNot/J&A Service team, led my crew chief Mike Strasburg, headed to the line for the first round against former national event finalist Steve Burck. They slowed to a still-good 5.58/267, but it was more than enough to subdue Burck’s 5.70/259 and set up a semifinal showdown with early season points leader Doug Gordon.

That one went much easier than expected when Gordon got caught looking at the tach as his car inched from the pre-staged beam to the staged beam while he was trying to figure out why the throttle pedal wouldn’t move. (The blades froze up in the injector.) Gordon was still looking down when the tree came on, and Whiteley was long gone with her quickest run of the weekend to that point, a 5.51/268, for a surprisingly easy round-win, her fifth in a row at this event. “He went to bring the RPMs up and was trying to get the blades to open and didn’t realize he’d bumped in and lit the light,” she said. “When he looked up at the Tree, it was already on.”

A couple hours later in the final, Whiteley cut her best light of the day and made her best run all weekend but still fell just short of the vaunted Bellemeur/Boggs/Bartone juggernaut, which got the best of by far the best race of the entire event, 5.494 to 5.496. “The tire was just stuck to the track or we would’ve run better,” she said. “It was a good race. We both had .960 60-foot times and when I got down there – I never look over in the other lane – I was saying, ‘Come on. Did we, did we?’ We came so close to winning – I never saw him – but even though we didn’t quite win, it was still nice just to be back at the track.”

PRO MOD – ORLANDO 2020

March 9, 2020 / Todd Veney

Always ready to race – anytime, anywhere – Jim Whiteley leaped at the chance to be part of the inaugural World Doorslammer Nationals at Orlando Speed World Dragway. Like Don Garlits’ revolutionary National Challenge ’72 in Tulsa or Drag Illustrated‘s World Series of Pro Mod events decades later in Denver, the groundbreaking event guaranteed the biggest payout in history. “No way I was going to miss this deal,” Whiteley said. “There were a lot of good cars here – a lot of good cars.”

In the end, more than $300,000 was divvied up among the absolute biggest names in drag racing’s premier door-car classes – Pro Mod legends Rickie Smith, “Stevie Fast” Jackson, Todd Tutterow, Jason Scruggs, and Mike Janis, and NHRA Pro Stock stars Jeg Coughlin, Greg Anderson, Erica Enders, Jason Line, and Alex Laughlin, the only driver to compete in both categories. Enough Pro Mod cars to fill two 16-car fields poured through the Orlando gates, and when all four qualifying sessions were complete, Justin Bond had run quicker than the incoming NHRA national record with a 5.623 for the pole position and veteran Steve Matusek established the record bump with a 5.739.

Whiteley’s show-stopping ’63 Corvette slipped to the 14th spot with a 5.73 in the opening session that had him, at the time, fourth-quickest of the 27 drivers who took the Tree that round. In all, 33 teams attempted to qualify, more than three-quarters of them ran 5s, and five ran 5.70s and still didn’t make the cut. Whiteley’s J&A Service team, led by crew chief “Stevie Fast,” drew Laughlin, the No. 3 qualifier and reigning NHRA U.S. Nationals Pro Stock champion, in the first round. Running one pair ahead of them opposite Michael Biehle, Jackson, the defending NHRA Pro Mod champ, crashed into the left wall beyond the finish line. (He was uninjured, and the car is repairable.)

When the wreckage was cleared, Laughlin rolled into the staged beam immediately after Whiteley pre-staged, Whiteley quickly followed, and they left as one and charged side by side the length of the quarter-mile. The YNot team captain ran within mere thousandths of a second of his qualifying time, but Laughlin edged him out in a photo-finish that typified the entire event, 5.71/249 to Whiteley’s right-there 5.73/246. Laughlin ran just a 5.82 in the following round but went on to win the event, pocketing $50,000 – five times the winner’s share of an NHRA Pro Mod race – and Coughlin collected $75,000 for winning Pro Stock.

TAFC – GAINESVILLE 2020

March 9, 2020 / Todd Veney

All Annie Whiteley did at the Southeast Regional in Gainesville, Fla., days after winning the 2020 season-opener in Belle Rose, La., was make the fastest Top Alcohol Funny Car run of all time: 276.18 mph. “I had no idea it was that fast,” she said of what’s basically a brand-new car. “It’s kind of picky, actually, almost like the chassis is too stiff. Sometimes it doesn’t want to respond, but it sure did that time.”

After qualifying No. 1 by more than half a tenth with the only run in the 5.30s all weekend, a 5.39 at 274.66 mph (top speed by nearly 5 mph at that point), the new pipe answered crew chief Mike Strasburg’s calls with the first 276+ mph run in NHRA history. More than half of the qualifiers found the 5.40s, but the bump ended up being just a 5.89 by Josh Haskett, who wasn’t around when eliminations got under way.

Instead of Haskett in the opening round, Whiteley, who has perfected the art of drawing inordinately tough first-round opponents despite almost always qualifying near the top, got alternate Ulf Leanders, one of the few Top Alcohol Funny Car racers to ever run in the 5.30s. She upped the NHRA national speed record to 276.18 mph on a 5.43 while the dangerous Leanders fell back with a harmless 6.85.

For the YNot team, already owners of seven of the 10 fastest Top Alcohol Funny Car speeds ever, it all came to crashing down in the semifinals when their temperamental new machine went up in smoke instantly opposite perennial bridesmaid Doug Gordon, who went on to a long-overdue final-round win over Bellemeur. Whiteley may not have left with a second straight victory to start the ’20s, but she did walk away with the pole, low e.t. by a mile, and the fastest speed of all time.

TAFC – BELLE ROSE 2020

March 2, 2020 / Todd Veney

Every year at the first hint of spring, Annie Whiteley and the J&A Service/YNot team abandon the natural beauty of Grand Junction, Colo., for the swampy Louisiana bayou, and every year they win. After perhaps her strongest performance ever in tiny Belle Rose, La., the diminutive, soft-spoken driver, now 12-0 lifetime in eliminations at No Problem Raceway, has amassed four victories in four career stops at the aptly named track.

Whiteley smashed both ends of No Problem’s Top Alcohol Funny Car record in 2017 in her first appearance there, dropped Kris Hool in a pressure-packed winner-take-all final in 2018, established low e.t. and top speed en route to victory in 2019, and made it another wire-to-wire sweep this year with the pole, low e.t., and top speed. “I have no idea why we always do so well here,” she said. “It’s crazy. I mean, it’s definitely not the easiest track to get down.”

The Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series Central Region season opener couldn’t have started any better for the YNot team when crew chief Mike Strasburg dialed up an off-the-trailer 5.52 to give Whiteley the provisional qualifying lead over a field of past national event champions. “The track was better than ever this year, but it’s still a little bumpy,” she said. “It almost gives you false readings – you have to be careful.” Strasburg was anything but in the Saturday afternoon session, when Whiteley steamed to low e.t. of the meet, a 5.49 that earned the team a bye run in the first round of eliminations, which came in extra-handy this weekend as near-sea-level density-altitude readings and a tricky track conspired to confound top tuners.

Tiptoeing through the early portion of the quarter mile and legging it straight and true through the lights on her first-round solo, Whiteley recorded another 5.52 at more than 268 mph that stood up for low e.t. and top speed of the round. Semifinal opponent Kris Hool, who’d been all over the track in a 5.98 first-round win over surprise Winternationals winner Aryan Rochon, ran an even more all-over-the-track 7.21 against Whiteley in the semi’s, allowing her to advance with just a 5.88. Shake forced her to lift early and Hool almost crossed into her lane on two wheels at the top of low gear; she slammed back down on the gas to win, blissfully unaware that Hool had ever flirted with the center line.

That .88 cost Whiteley lane choice for the final against returning veteran Bob McCosh, who, with legendary Fred Mandoline, Top Alcohol Funny Car’s third-ever world champion , calling the tuning shots, hadn’t made a bad run all weekend. McCosh and Mandoline forced Whiteley into the right lane, which those with lane choice had avoided all day, but Team YNot remained unfazed. “They’ve fixed some of the bumps so the left lane is a little smoother than it used to be,” she said, “but the past two years the right was actually the better lane. We knew we could get down it in the final.”

Both drivers were ready to stage and race – no games – and Whiteley, for once, went in last. After nearly identical 60-foot times, she opened a noticeable lead at half-track and was going 15 mph faster by then and pulling comfortably away from McCosh (211 mph to his 195), but McCosh wasn’t letting his first NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car event title get away that easily. He hung with it as long as he could, and not just in low gear – in high gear, too, at way beyond 230 mph. Whiteley never saw him, though, sailing down the so-called “bad” lane with a 5.55/268, safely ahead of McCosh’s valiant 6.02/203 and into the record books with her fourth straight Belle Rose win.