Category: News (Page 5 of 39)

race-by-race wrapups

TAFC – INDY 2023

September 5, 2023 / Todd Veney

With a final-four finish at the biggest race of the year, former U.S. Nationals Top Alcohol Dragster champ Jim Whiteley turned in his finest showing to date as an NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car racer, taking out, of all people, wife Annie Whiteley along the way. Jim, who won the 2013 U.S. Nationals en route to his second straight TA/D championship, made his best run of the year right off the trailer and delivered a steady, consistent performance not unlike his glory days in dragsters with six full pulls in six trips to the line.

Fresh off a St. Louis victory in the eighth-mile Mid-West Drag Racing Series, Jim made his quickest quarter-mile run of 2023, a 5.52 at 262.08 mph, and Annie was right behind him a couple pairs later with a 5.54 at nearly 265 mph in her clutch car. They ran side by side in each of two ensuing qualifying sessions with only Jim making it to 2nd gear under power, but Annie’s Mike Strasburg-tuned “Shattered Glass” machine came back to life when it mattered most, in eliminations.

Annie advanced with a smooth 5.59/262 against the A/Fuel Funny Car of Mick Steele, who made his first start in this class in 25 years, but Jim really had to work for it to get around many-time national event winner DJ Cox. He deftly worked the throttle to maintain control early and moved on with a backpedaling 5.64/256 that cost him lane choice for his highly anticipated quarterfinal matchup with Annie.

She shot off the line with an excellent .045 reaction time in that one, but Jim was already ahead of her with the first of consecutive .00 lights, a perfect .000. “I always do better against him,” said Annie, who developed ignition troubles downtrack. “But a triple-0 light? That’s just mean.” Her clutch light was irrelevant when the ignition cut out at 9,400 rpm in every gear.

“It felt like I hit the rev-limiter,” she said. “I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I didn’t want to hurt anything and there was no way I was going to catch him, so I shut it off.” She coasted to a not-bad 5.68/236 but was well short of Jim’s 5.59/258.

In the semifinals opposite world champ Doug Gordon, Jim’s second straight .00 came up on the wrong side of perfection, a -.004 red-light that denied him a potential upset win. His Brandon Snider-tuned J&A Service Camaro was within striking distance of Gordon’s vaunted Beta Motorcycles entry, 5.50/266 to 5.57/259, and with anything from .001 to .003 green he’d have won on a holeshot.

PSM – INDY 2023

September 5, 2023 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed qualified on the bump at the NHRA U.S. Nationals and was out after a single round in his first start in nearly two years, but this time that wasn’t really the point. The only thing that mattered at the most prestigious event in drag racing was that he was back on a bike, back out where he belongs – both he and his teammate, 2022 championship runner-up Joey Gladstone.

The last time NHRA fans saw Reed, he was careening into Gladstone in the shutdown area in the second round of the 2021 Carolina Nationals in easily the most horrifying crash in the 40-year history of Pro Stock Motorcycle racing. “I had to make some 7.50 passes at 175 mph just to get my license back,” he said. “It was a little strange, but I guess it’s all part of the process of coming back. You’d think 175 mph might feel slow, but it didn’t – until we left Indy, everything up to 180 felt fast.”

Still hobbling but dead-set on returning to the quarter-mile, Reed accepted teammate Michael Phillips’ out-of-nowhere offer to run Indy on a two-valve bike. “We saw what Karen [Stoffer] did with the two-valve weight break [at Sonoma, where she ran a 6.79], and we were curious,” he said. “Michael called me one night and said, ‘What do you think? You ready to get back on a bike?’ and I thought, ‘What the hell? Why not?’ “

With the exception of the third session, the Reed/Phillips team showed steady improvement every time down the track, with times of 7.22/187, 7.21/181, 7.36/186, 7.19/185, and a 7.16/188 in last-shot qualifying, Reed’s quickest and fastest run of the long Labor Day weekend. A full four-tenths of a second behind Mr. Everything 2023, Gaige Herrera, who has taken the sport by storm since taking over for Angelle Sampey on the Vance & Hines flagship Suzuki, Reed didn’t expect to beat him in the first round, and he didn’t.

Nobody else would have either. Reed picked up considerably to a 7.09 at 189 mph but was no match for the runaway points leader’s 6.79/198 in a lopsided but ultimately unimportant loss. “I’m just happy to be out here and lucky to be riding Mike’s bike,” he said. “I had zero expectations coming into this weekend – I’m just here to have fun. For Joey and me, it’s just great to be back out here with our racing family.”

PRO MOD – ST. LOUIS 2 2023

August 22, 2023 / Todd Veney

Steven Whiteley’s relentless march to the 2023 Mid-West Drag Racing Series championship continued at Worldwide Technology Raceway in a dream weekend in which teammate Brandon Snider (whose points count just the same as if Whiteley himself was driving) made the final of the rescheduled Night of Fire & Thunder Friday night and Whiteley followed with a huge Heads-Up Hootenanny victory on Saturday.

“It’s been a great season,” Whiteley said. “We started coming on strong at the last two races of ’22 – we probably would’ve won Tulsa if we hadn’t shredded all those blower belts – and it’s carried right over to this year.” Since Whiteley finished second in the Chicago-Style Second Chance Shootout at the season-opening Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod, it’s been one final after another: Snider won Tulsa, Whiteley made the final in Noble, Snider got second here, and Whiteley just brought down his biggest win since his career breakthrough at the 2017 NHRA Gatornationals.

Driving father Jim’s immaculate J&A Service ’69 Camaro, Whiteley qualified No. 2 and sailed through the first two rounds of eliminations, dispatching overmatched Robbie Vander Woude’s ’00 Camaro, 3.69/206 to 4.00/194, and Blake Housley’s classic ’41 Willys, 3.66/206 to 3.82/192. The stakes went way up in the semifinals against championship rival Keith Haney, and Snider, Whiteley’s irreplaceable crew chief, was ready for what both knew would be their biggest round so far this season.

Snider, who’d dumped Haney Friday night in a crucial semifinal decision, dialed up Whiteley’s best run of eliminations to that point, and Whiteley did his part behind the wheel, nailing Haney at the line and leading wire to wire for a 3.63/207 to 3.65/206 win that propelled the team into its fifth final of 2023. “That was huge,” Whiteley said. “Haney and I have had a rivalry going all year, the announcers were really playing it up, the crowd was into it, and we got it done again. Brandon beat him Friday night and I got him tonight.”

In the final, Whiteley produced his best run of the weekend, a 3.62/208, against the 217-mph turbocharged ’69 Camaro of No. 1 qualifier Mark Micke, who was coming off a big win the previous evening. Micke blew the engine in a huge cloud of smoke and never came around Whiteley, as he had the night before against Snider. “There was just smoke everywhere,” Whiteley said. “I could see it from inside the car. We’re leading the championship right now and really focused on these last three races. We just have to keep the momentum going.”

TAFC – ST. LOUIS 2023

August 20, 2023 / Todd Veney

He may have started at the bottom, but when the figurative smoke cleared, it was Jim Whiteley who stood tall, collecting the second victory of his escalating Top Alcohol Funny Car career. “It felt great,” said the 25-time NHRA national event winner of his latest triumph on the Mid-West Drag Racing Series tour. “It felt as good as any race I’ve ever won.”

The four-car field just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis at Worldwide Technology Raceway was, in a word, tight. Reigning NHRA Division 3 Top Alcohol Funny Car champion Phil Esz paced the field and Whiteley was dead last, but they were separated by just six-hundredths of a second, from Esz’s No. 1 3.63 at 208.75 mph to Whiteley’s fourth-best 3.69 at 207.88. In between were Jim’s wife Annie and the vaunted family team of veteran Steve Macklyn.

In a first-round battle of converter cars, Whiteley, who also scored at the final race of the 2022 MWDRS tour, the Xtreme Texas World Finals in Ferris, Texas, began his march to the $10,000 top prize with a close holeshot win over Esz. With a .059 reaction time Esz was hardly late, but Whiteley got the drop on him with a .045 and held him off at the eighth-mile stripe to win a close one, 3.64/207 to Esz’s slightly quicker 3.63/207. The margin of victory was just five-thousandths of a second.

Macklyn won the other first-round match, also on a holeshot, in another tight race against Annie. She was slightly quicker with a 3.67 at 209.72 mph – the fastest speed of eliminations – but couldn’t quite get around Macklyn’s quicker-leaving 3.68 at 203 mph. No such scenario played out in the final. Whiteley left on Macklyn by a hair, .056 to .059, and ran quicker and faster, too, with a 3.63 at 207 mph to Macklyn’s 3.67 at 202, making Whiteley a multiple major-event winner in all three alcohol categories – Top Alcohol Dragster, Pro Mod, and now Top Alcohol Funny Car.

PRO MOD – ST. LOUIS 1 2023

August 19, 2023 / Todd Veney

Steven Whiteley doesn’t particularly care who drives his car – talented driver/tuner Brandon Snider or him. To him, it still it isn’t that strange to stand on the starting line and watch his car charge down the track with someone else at the wheel.

“It really isn’t,” Whiteley insisted. “I get asked that a lot, but, first of all, it’s not my car – it’s my dad’s. I know Brandon’s driving style, and he’s good. Really good. He’s a lot better than I ever was. I’ll stage and wonder, ‘Did I do this right? Did I do that right? Is this the right rpm?’ He never thinks anything like that.”

At the rain-delayed Night of Fire & Thunder, contested in conjunction with the originally scheduled Heads-Up Hootenanny, Snider pulled off something even more important than winning: he took out rival Keith Haney, the biggest obstacle between Whiteley and his first Mid-West Drag Racing Series championship.

Snider proved his worth from the start, six weeks ago on the original date, when he tuned and drove the car to the No. 1 spot by more than a tenth and a half with a 3.69 at 205 mph, securing a first-round bye in the 13-car field. On that single, he came within thousandths of a second of low E.T. of the round with a 3.72/203, second only to hard-charging Mark Micke’s 3.71 at 215 mph, which was top speed of the meet by nearly 10 mph.

It set up a massive quarterfinal clash with Haney, which Snider won with a better light (.063 to .075) and a quicker (3.64 to 3.70) and faster (208 mph to 201 mph) pass. “The way he tunes the car shows how much more analytical he is than I am,” Whiteley modestly said. “I’m just a driver. I let go of the trans-brake button and send it, then tell Brandon what I felt when I get out of the car. He knows what’s going on the whole time – in or out of the seat.”

Snider then mowed down Jerry Hunter in the semi’s, 3.69/207 to Hunter’s slowing 3.85/187, but Micke grabbed the upper hand for the final on a 3.65/217 single. Picking up significantly to a 3.66/207, Snider gave the J&A Service/YNot Racing team a real chance in the final, but Micke ran him down before the eighth-mile with a superior 3.64/217.

“Brandon was winning,” Whiteley said, “but against that turbo car there’s not much you can do after half-track. He outran us, but that wasn’t the big thing for us this weekend. Beating Haney was the big thing, and Brandon beat him.”

TAFC – SEATTLE 2023

July 24, 2023 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley, still the fastest Alcohol Funny Car driver alive – man or woman – with a national-record speed of 276.18 mph, just missed her latest national event victory with a runner-up finish at the Northwest Nationals. At expansive, multipurpose Pacific Raceways, the Grand Junction, Colo., veteran, a winner here in 2015 in her only previous Seattle final-round appearance, was unerringly consistent from start to finish – until the final.

Whiteley, a six-time national event champ, rolled off the trailer Friday afternoon with a 5.56 at 264.80 mph for the early qualifying lead and got only quicker from there, with a 5.51/265.59 that evening to match reigning world champ and No. 1 qualifier Doug Gordon, and a 5.52/264.86 Saturday in last-shot qualifying. “We got better and better all weekend,” she said. “The guys [led by crew chief Mike Strasburg] kept finding a little more each time.”

From the No. 3 spot, behind only Gordon and Mike Doushgounian, the only other driver in the 5.40s (barely, with a 5.499), Whiteley opened eliminations against Alaska’s Ray Martin, who’s driven just about every kind of car legal in NHRA national event competition, including nitro Funny Cars. She left right with him and pulled away to a lopsided 5.52/265 win while Martin got his brains beaten in by tire shake. In the semifinals, her best run of the weekend, a 5.50-flat at 262 mph, would not have been enough to advance opposite Doushgounian’s outstanding 5.46, but he wasted it on a foul start she never noticed.

“I had no clue he red-lighted,” Whiteley said. “I saw him out there and thought, ‘Man, I just got my butt whipped’ because he was way out there. Hearing that he red-lighted was a whole ‘nother adrenaline rush. They tell you, ‘You’re in the final,’ and you’re like, ‘Wait a minute. What? How?’ I couldn’t believe it.”

In the final against Gordon, whom she beat for the 2015 Las Vegas title, she shook the tires and slowed to a coasting 7.37 while he shot ahead for a winning 5.47/268 to bolster his national points lead in his final season as a Top Alcohol Funny Car racer. Despite running just a partial NHRA schedule while concentrating primarily on the Mid-West Drag Racing Series tour, Whiteley is up to eighth in the NHRA national standings.

TAFC – WOODBURN 2023

July 17, 2023 / Todd Veney

Clearly distracted by real-life issues bigger than anything that could transpire on a drag strip, Annie Whiteley trudged through a forgettable weekend in Woodburn, Ore., bowing out in the first round of both events of a double regional. “I don’t know what the heck was going on this weekend,” she said. “And right now, I don’t really care. I had a lot of things on my mind, things a lot more important than how I staged the car.”

The Top Alcohol Funny Car field at Woodburn Dragstrip, just south of Portland, was chock full of truly accomplished drivers: four of the six are past national event champions, and it wouldn’t have been an upset no matter who won. All six ran low- to mid-5.60s in qualifying, from the .60-flat of No. 1 Brian Hough, tuned by 2015-16 world champion Jonnie Lindberg, to the 5.65 of veteran Bret Williamson, who’s been building and driving Funny Cars since the 1980s.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing “Shattered Glass” Camaro began eliminations right from the middle of the field with a 5.64 that placed her fourth on the grid and a speed of 264.31 mph – top speed of the event through three qualifying sessions. Racing Jake Guadagnolo, who won the Northwest Nationals at Seattle last year, at the track operated by the family of her pseudo-teammate, five-time Top Alcohol Dragster world champ Joey Severance, Whiteley came out on the wrong end of an aggravating first-round race.

Guadagnolo, an accomplished bracket racer with tons of trans-brake experience, got off the button for a typically quick .023 reaction time and an early lead. Whiteley chased him down with top speed of the meet by a mile and an E.T. quick enough to have landed her No. 2 in the field had she run it in qualifying, but it was to no avail. His 5.63 at 261.55 mph in the Miner Bros. machine run by second-generation racer Greg Miner held off her slightly quicker 5.61 at a booming 266.74 mph.

“I double-bulbed when I rolled up there,” she said. “I never do that. Both bulbs came on at the same time, and I thought, ‘What the hell are you thinking?’ I didn’t mean to do it, but by then there was nothing I could do about it.”

TAFC – DENVER 2023

June 19, 2023 / Todd Veney

In his final start at one of his all-time favorite racetracks, Bandimere Speedway, two-time Top Alcohol Dragster world champion Jim Whiteley bowed out early in his first (and last) appearance there in a Funny Car. Whiteley, who dominated Top Alcohol Dragster on the mountain in each of his championship seasons, 2012 and 2013 (and for four straight years before that, 2008-11), qualified high but finished low.

It may not have been a full eight-car field (these days, it almost never is), but the six-car lineup was a tough one, with three Top 10 drivers from 2022, including the top two – Shane Westerfield, who led the national point standings all season and seemed destined to win a second national championship, and Doug Gordon, who ultimately did. Two drivers still looking for their first major Top Alcohol Funny Car victory – Doug Schneider and Christine Foster, the distaff member of a husband-and-wife team with husband Chris Foster – also made the show.

As the No. 2 qualifier with a 5.81 at 253.18 mph, Whiteley seemed sure to face one of them in the first round. Spoiler alert: he didn’t. Instead, he got stuck with the worst possible draw – Gordon, the reigning world champ who’s led the 2023 NHRA standings almost wire-to-wire all season but stumbled to a best of just 7.56 at 137 mph in two aborted qualifying attempts here.

Whiteley left first and would have joined No. 1 qualifier Brian Hough as one of just two drivers to run in the 5.70s with a competitive 5.79/252, two-hundredths of a second better than his best qualifying run. Unfortunately for him, Gordon beat him to the 5.70s with a 5.70-flat at 257 mph, just a few miles per hour short of the incoming track speed record held by Jim’s wife, Annie, who, with a run of 260.01 mph, will go down in history as the only Top Alcohol Funny Car driver ever to crack 260 at Denver.

PSM – BRISTOL 2023

June 12, 2023 / Todd Veney

You know it hasn’t been a great weekend when your bike gets picked up by the wheelie bars and walked off the starting line three times in a row.

For Joey Gladstone, the second-ranked Pro Stock Motorcycle rider of 2022, the Thunder Valley Nationals undoubtedly was the low point of what’s been an up-and-down early 2023. He’s yet to reach the semifinals but made it to the quarterfinals every time – until now.

Following a ho-hum off-the-trailer 6.94, Cory Reed’s YNot Racing Suzuki lurched off the line that night in the second qualifying session and did the same Saturday morning in Q3. In the fourth and final session that afternoon, Gladstone didn’t even make it that far – he never took the Tree. Actually, he didn’t make it through the burnout. The coil wire came off, silencing the engine.

Gladstone, who scored three times last year in by far the best season of his burgeoning career, raced eventual winner Steve Johnson, the only driver to beat second-year sensation Gaige Herrera all year, in the first round. At the time, Johnson seemed like a decent draw: Gladstone had been mired in the bottom half of the field at the season-opening Gatornationals, too, but he put Johnson away when the veteran rider, perhaps intimidated by Gladstone’s well-known starting-line reflexes, threw it away with an untimely red-light start.

Not this time. Gladstone was more or less on time with a .052 light, good for an early lead over Johnson’s mediocre .077, and made his quickest run of the weekend, a 6.93 at 192.71 mph. But Johnson ate into his lead with every push-button shift of the 5-speed transmission and drove around him at the 700-foot mark, crossing the stripe first by about 10 feet with an 8.88/193. “Well, that sucked,” Gladstone said. “If I’d had my normal reaction time, I could’ve beat him on a holeshot.”

“We really thought we had it fixed,” Reed said. “We put the old tire back on it and thought we were good. Today was just frustrating – the whole year has been.”

PRO MOD – NOBLE 2023

June 5, 2023 / Todd Veney

Back in the car for the first time since March, Pro Mod veteran Steven Whiteley picked up right where he left off in Bradenton – in the final.

Runner-up earlier this season in the Chicago-Style Second Chance Shootout at the Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod, Whiteley found himself at the precipice of victory once again here at the Mid-West Drag Racing Series’ Thunder in the Valley only to fall just short. He qualified No. 1 at the Noble, Okla., facility and powered through the preliminary rounds before fading in the final against Tulsa track owner Keith “You Know My Name” Haney.

From the pole position, Whiteley trounced No. 12 qualifier Joshua Vettel in the opening round with a remarkably consistent 3.68 at 204.40 mph, easily covering Vettel’s coasting 5.72 at 81 mph. Brian Lewis was the next to go, narrowly red-lighting with a -.002 reaction time and slowing to a 4.27/125 while Whiteley moved on with a consistent 3.68/204. Qualifying No. 1 in a 12-car field afforded the YNot Racing/J&A Service team a semifinal bye and with it a chance to test for the final, but Whiteley was off the throttle well before the finish line on a slowing 4.30/124.

In the other semi, Haney, who’d matched Whiteley’s pole-qualifying 3.664 right down to the thousandth of second in a quarterfinal victory over perennial top-speed setter Ed Thornton, took down Albuquerque’s Mike Labbate in a great race, barely overcoming Labbate’s holeshot head start. After missing the Tree with a drowsy .104 reaction time, Haney held off Labbate’s 214-mph top end charge to advance by the invisible margin of one-thousandth of a second.

In the final, in a battle of the top two drivers in the 2023 MWDRS standings with a $2500 side bet on the line, Whiteley left noticeably ahead of Haney with a .039 light and was headed to victory only to slow on the top end. Haney claimed low E.T. of the meet with a 3.662 at 203.23 mph while Whiteley’s immaculate ’69 Camaro fell off to a 3.79 at 163 mph.