YNot Racing

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PRO MOD – HOUSTON 2019

April 15, 2019 /

At Houston Raceway Park, defending SpringNationals champion Jim Whiteley missed the cut and and son Steven Whiteley reached the quarterfinals before being ousted by Gatornationals winner Todd Tutterow, who took his sixth of seven consecutive round-wins to open the season. Jim, who also won Pro Mod at Houston in 2016 (and scored in Top Alcohol Dragster in 2011 and 2012), was in the 5s on three of four attempts but not far enough under the six-second threshold to crack the 5.790 bump.

Steven went rounds for the second race in a row and left his dad’s favorite track on the J&A Service Pro Mod tour tied for fifth in the standings. Jim opened with a 5.94 at 244 mph that had him well in the field, 11th of 26. Steven shut off early in that session, coasting across the finish line at just 209 mph and still running in the 5s with a 5.98. Both stepped way up Friday evening, Jim to a season-best 5.83/245 to bump his way back into the show for the time being and Steven to a 5.78/249 that got him in the fast half at the time, and both shook hard, got out of the groove, and had to lift Saturday morning.

Saturday afternoon in last-shot qualifying, Steven shut off to a 9-second time, but all was not lost – he was already safely in the field. For Jim it was all over, despite making yet another competitive run, a 5.86/244, because the bump, for the second race in a row, was in the 5.70s. The entire 16-car field crammed itself in the unbelievably tight spread of less than six-hundredths of a second, from leader Jose Gonzalez’s 5.731 to former world champion Rickie Smith’s 5.790.

Though he qualified 13th and first-round opponent Rick Hord was fourth, Steven was down only three-hundredths going into their first-round matchup. With a clutch .037 reaction time, he shot of the line in the lead, as he has all year, and when problems set in downtrack he still coasted home a winner with a 6.93 at just 148 mph. Hord, last year’s Carolina Nationals winner, went into brutal shake early and was never in the race. Steven then gained an imperceptible starting-line lead on Tutterow in the quarterfinals, .053 to .054, but his nemesis outran him, 5.76/251 to 5.82/250, en route to his second final of the season.

TAFC – DALLAS 2019

April 10, 2019 /

After sitting around staring at each other for days, Annie Whiteley and the J&A Service/YNot team sprang into action when the call to the lanes for the first qualifying session, finally, mercifully, went out and ended up winning the race with a dominant performance. Half of the quickest side-by-side race in Top Alcohol Funny Car history at this track a year and a half ago – 5.37-5.38 opposite Doug Gordon in the 2017 Fallnationals final – Whiteley qualified No. 1 with a 5.52 at 269.40 mph, top speed of the meet by more than 5 mph to that point.

“We all knew going in that the weather was going to be a problem this weekend,” said Whiteley, who had to jet back to Colorado in the interim to help keep J&A Service running smoothly. “They kept moving the schedule around because the weather kept changing. Originally, we were going to qualify on Friday and race on Saturday, but, naturally, everything changed, so our first qualifying run was Thursday night at 7:00, which meant that we had to be there on Wednesday to test. Then we sat and sat and sat and it would rain just enough to keep us from running. [Top Alcohol Dragster team owner] Randy [Meyer] was kind of running everything, and he’d stop at every pit when the weather let up run and ask, ‘You guys ready?’ and we’d wait till everybody was ready to run and then go up to the lanes. We all just wanted to get this done.”

When former Division 2 champion Mark Billington was unable to show for the first round of eliminations three days later for the rare Monday race day start, Whiteley singled to a 5.54/268 that almost certainly would have advanced whether the veteran Billington or anybody else had been lined up in the next lane. Qualifying No. 1 in a six-car field meant that when three cars were still around for the semifinals, she’d the one with the bye into the final. Again, she pounded out a run that nobody could’ve handled anyway, a 5.49/268 (low e.t. of the meet) that afforded the team lane choice for the final against one of the more prolific drivers in alcohol racing history – Jay Payne, who’s racked up nearly 100 national and divisional/regional wins in a career that dates back to the 1960s.

For the event title, Whiteley left on Payne and screamed down the track with the second-quickest and second-fastest run of the entire weekend, behind only her semifinal numbers. Payne, after reeling off back-to-back-to-back times of 5.54, 5.54, and 5.55, pushed too hard and smoked the hoops to a nine-second time and settled for runner-up. With a 5.497 at 269.13 mph that trailed only her own 5.495 from the semifinals and 269.40-mph qualifying charge for low E.T. and top speed of the meet, Whiteley picked up her first win of the season and the 14th divisional/regional victory of her eight-year career.

PSM – LAS VEGAS 2019

April 8, 2019 /

After dropping valves in the second session of Four-Wide Nationals qualifying and more or less levelling the engine, 2016 Rookie of the Year Cory Reed took a quantum leap forward in last-shot qualifying Saturday afternoon with a 6.95 in the thin desert air of Las Vegas that propelled him all the way to the No. 6 spot – higher than he’s qualified since Chicago last June.

“We’ve been thinking we were underpowered, but we’ve been overpowered this whole time,” Reed said. “We toned it down for that last qualifying session and got it down through there for a good run. Just by adding a little timing, the bike picked up three- or four-hundredths [of a second] in the first 60 feet.”

Free to pick any of three of the four lanes for the first round of eliminations and thinking big after an outstanding qualifying performance, Reed seemed better positioned to go rounds than he’s been all year. Instead, he was gone after a single round of eliminations. It certainly wasn’t the best quad he could have hoped for – two of the other three drivers were past world champions (Jerry Savoie and Eddie Krawiec) – but Reed needed only to outrun one of them and No. 14 qualifier Freddie Camarena to advance. He sped across the finish line well ahead of Camarena, as expected, but trailed both Krawiec (6.90) and Savoie (6.94) with a disappointing 7.12.

“That was my fault,” Reed later admitted. “I over-revved 1st gear and ‘double-buttoned’ 2nd, and bam – there goes your whole run. I pulled on Jerry through the middle but ran out of room before the finish line got there. I staged super, super shallow that time, thinking, ‘If I just go green, I can win with another .95,’ but I was thinking too much up there. I had a .046 light – not terrible, but nowhere near what I’m capable of because I had death grip on it as I staged. ” ‘Relax,’ I told myself. But whenever you do that, it’s always right when the tree comes on. I almost short-shifted another gear, but I caught myself and thought, ‘Noooo, don’t do that,’ and ended up hitting the rev-limiter. I just have to get back to what I already know how to do.”

TAFC – GAINESVILLE NATIONAL 2019

March 17, 2019 /

Just days after a frustrating outing at the same track that resulted in only the second DNQ of her career, Annie Whiteley and the J&A Service/ YNot Racing Top Alcohol Funny Car team charged back with a solid outing at the Gatornationals, which both she and son Steven won in 2017. She qualified 4th with a blistering 5.44 at 272 mph and advanced to the quarterfinals only to come out on the wrong end of an instant classic opposite career-long nemesis Doug Gordon, the eventual runner-up.

With a safe but competitive 5.56 at nearly 270 mph off the trailer that positioned her in the top half of the show, Whiteley made sure there’d be no repeat of the embarrassing DNQ she suffered a week earlier at the same facility. No. 4 with the 5.44 entering eliminations, she easily moved on to the quarterfinals when opponent Bryan Brown was unable to make it to the lanes for round one. He qualified in the bottom quarter of the field with a 5.63, and would’ve have had a tough time advancing anyway when she laid down 5.45 at 273 mph on the bye.

In the quarterfinals, crew chief Mike Strasburg dialed up a usually unbeatable 5.45, but Gordon got her again with an even better 5.42. “You run a .45, you think you’d win, but I guess that time it wasn’t enough,” Whiteley said. “We still don’t have this new car figured out. What the old car liked, this one doesn’t. Tire pressure, transmission ratio, all these different things – I don’t know what it is, but this is a different car, and it seems to want something different.”

PSM – GAINESVILLE 2019

March 17, 2019 /

In their first appearance of the 2019 NHRA season and everyone’s first on Gainesville Raceway’s all-new million-dollar track surface, Cory Reed led early Pro Stock Motorcycle qualifying and teammate Joey Gladstone lasted all the way to the semifinals, tying the best finish of his young career.

Reed picked up from his opening 6.93 to a 6.91 at more than 195 mph that miraculously wound up good for only the bump, 16th in a 16-bike field, and paired him up against Andrew Hines, who took the pole with the quickest run in NHRA history, 6.72. Under first-round pressure and lined up opposite the toughest possible opponent, Reed improved still more, dipping into the 6.80s with a 6.87, but Hines was out of reach with another 6.7-second blast, a 6.78.

Two pair ahead of him, Gladstone, matched up with former YNot/PSE team rider Angelle Sampey, shot off the line with a telepathic .002 reaction time for an insurmountable lead on Sampey’s late .120 light on her first official leave with Vance & Hines’ world-famous Harley-Davidson team. Both covered the quarter-mile with nearly identical E.T.s, and Gladstone got the best of a 6.87-6.88 decision not nearly as close as the elapsed times alone would indicate.

“Joey did great,” Reed said of his teammate, who catapulted from the No. 11 qualifying position (6.855), to a spot in the final four. Said Gladstone, “Before I saw the E.T. slip, when I first heard that it was 6.87 to 6.88, I was thinking, ‘Man, I hope I ran the .88 and she ran the .87 so I beat her on a holeshot’. I led the class in reaction-time average with something in the low .020s my first year and have a reputation as the best leaver out here but I’ve never actually won a round on a holeshot.”

After leaving on Sampey and then outrunning her, Gladstone trailered an even bigger name in the quarterfinals – reigning world champ Matt Smith, who knew he was in trouble before he staged and never made it to the finish line. “He was trying to mess with me on the line, but I knew what he was doing, so it didn’t affect me,” said Gladstone, who easily advanced to the semifinals with by far his best run of the weekend, a 6.81. It gave him lane choice over former series champion Eddie Krawiec, who bogged off the line in a lucky 6.92 win over Jimmy Underdahl, who had him beat until his engine blew in high gear.

In the semi’s, Gladstone left on Krawiec and would have made his first final had he not dropped a couple hundredths of a second from his earlier performance in a close but disappointing 6.81-6.85 loss. “That time, I actually felt like I had a good chance to beat Eddie,” Gladstone said. “It gets a little easier as the rounds go on, believe it or not. The pressure actually goes down – at least until you get to the final.”

PRO MOD – GAINESVILLE 2019

March 17, 2019 /

A disappointing 28th and 29th in the order entering second-day qualifying for the 2019 J&A Service/Pro Mod season opener with respective bests of 8.63 and 10.98, Jim and Steven Whiteley veered in opposite directions. Jim continued on the same trajectory, getting loose and clicking it early for the third time in a row, but son Steven stepped up dramatically to a 5.76 at more than 252 mph that catapulted him all the way to the No. 4 spot on the provisional grid.

Jim’s killer ’69 Chevelle finally made a representative run in last-shot qualifying, an early-shutoff 5.92 that still wasn’t quick enough to make the cut. The two-time world champion and two-time event winner in Pro Mod ended up 26th of 29 in the final order, ahead of friend Clint Satterfield, veteran Chip King, and Mike Castellana, who led the standings for much of the 2017 but crashed this weekend in his first appearance without many-time TAFC world champion Frank Manzo as his crew chief.

Steven made another quantum leap forward in that session, to a blistering 5.71 at 252.28 mph that surprisingly was good for only the No. 9 spot in the quickest field ever (bump: 5.753). “Stevie Fast” Jackson set the pace with the best NHRA Pro Mod run of all time (5.665), Jose Gonzalez set the national speed record (259.31 mph), and six drivers (Steve Matusek, Sidnei Frigo, Pete Farber, Doug Winters, Alex Laughlin, and Erica Enders) ran in the 5.70s and still didn’t qualify.

Steven, who picked up the first national event title of his career at this race in 2017, won the first round over former Top 5 driver Bob Rahaim, who qualified a few thousandths of a second of him with a nearly identical 5.713. The YNot driver coasted across the finish line with a 6.17 at just 157 mph but still advanced easily when Rahaim went into violent shake early in the run and had to lift. He was unable to appear for the second round against “Stevie Fast,” who would go on to lose the final on a holeshot by mentor Todd Tutterow despite resetting his own national record with an unbelievable 5.643.

TAFC – GAINESVILLE REGIONAL 2019

March 10, 2019 /

Rained out before a wheel ever turned at what she thought was her season opener – the Central Regional in Belle Rose, La., where it rained so much there was never any reason to bother unloading the car – Annie Whiteley instead began her 2019 campaign with a thud at the Gainesville Regional, where, for just the second time in her entire career, she didn’t qualify.

At the wheel of a brand-new Yenko blue Camaro, the last Top Alcohol Funny Car legendary fabricator Brad Hadman will ever build, Whiteley never made it to 2nd gear in three qualifying attempts. “I’ll be honest,” she said. “We were all a little worried about this new car. After the second qualifying session, I started thinking, ‘This thing is going to give us fits…’ ”

With an aggregate best of 7.71 at 162 mph, Whiteley wound up dead last in the final lineup, 11th of 11 potential qualifiers. “It would make it just far enough that you’d think you were good,” she said, “and then it would take the tire off right before the gear change. We switched transmissions, but obviously it didn’t like that ratio, either.” When qualifying was over and she found herself in the unacceptable and completely unfamiliar role of non-qualifier instead of being No. 1, as she was five times in a row to open the 2018 season, Whiteley and crew made one last test run Sunday afternoon to prepare for next week’s Gatornationals. The result: a more-than-competitive 5.53 at 271 mph.

“We finished last season with [John] Lombardo’s old car after I went into the net at Dallas, but that was Lombardo’s car – not my car,” Whiteley said. “I never did feel right in there. This new car … I just liked the way I fit in it right away. The guys measured every little thing and had everything placed just the way I like it before I ever got in the car. I never even sat in it till just before the first test run, but everything was right, right away. If it runs anything like it did in testing, we should be fine this year.”

TAFC – POMONA 2018

November 12, 2018 /

With three straight runs in the mid-to-low 5.40s, Annie Whiteley wrapped up her seventh season as a Top Alcohol Funny Car driver with a another solid showing at the NHRA Finals in Pomona, Calif. Whiteley, who ran .40s in all four rounds of eliminations last year, put together three runs from 5.45 to 5.43 for a semifinal finish to complete a four-win campaign third in the final standings, tying the career-high she established in 2015.

“It was a really good year,” said Whiteley, who scored in Belle Rose, Charlotte, Denver, and Brainerd and also made it to the final in Gainesville and Dallas. She qualified No. 1 six times, including five in a row to open the season, had an average qualifying position of 2.9 with an average e.t. and speed of 5.522 at 269.10 mph, and made the fast half of the field in 15 of 16 starts – all but the race before this one, the Las Vegas regional.

The electronic gremlins that hamstrung the YNot team in Vegas persisted in the first qualifying session at Pomona, where the car shut itself off and had to be pushed off the line. Whiteley roared back with a 5.45 at 272 mph for the No. 2 spot and wiped out Northamptonshire, England’s Robert Turner in the first round with a better 5.44/268 and Wyoming’s Kris Hool in the second round with an even better 5.43/272.56 (top speed of the meet). Banished to the left lane for the semifinals, she came out on the wrong end of a pedalfest with Sweden’s Ulf Leanders, who earned lane choice with a career-best 5.38 (low e.t.) in the previous round.

Neither driver cracked the six-second mark in the semi’s – Whiteley shook hard off the line, pedaled, recovered, and charged for the top end until it was clear that there was no overtaking Leanders, who had made it farther downtrack before tire-shake set it. “That was a one-lane race track,” Whiteley said. “If I was in my car, I’d have tried a little harder to pedal it earlier, but when it’s somebody else’s stuff, there’s always one thing in the back of your mind: Don’t tear up their car. The steering box was going bad. It felt loose, like the front end wasn’t planted, and it kept getting worse. You’d just barely touch the wheel and the car would be turning and I didn’t want to push it. It’s OK, though. Four wins, third place in the points – that’s a pretty good year.”

PSM – POMONA 2018

November 12, 2018 /

Back on the bike after team boss Cory Reed had to substitute for him in Las Vegas, Joey Gladstone reeled off some of his best runs of the season and ranked among the top drivers deep into qualifying. After ripping off a 6.88 in the second of four sessions for the No. 5 spot on the provisional grid, Gladstone settled into the No. 11 spot on the final ladder with that time and backed it up with a nearly as good 6.90-flat.

Heading into eliminations, Gladstone had a nice stack of E.T. slips to build from: 6.96/193, 6.88/196, another 6.963/193, and a 6.90/193. His first-round opponent turned out to be about as tough as it gets – 2016 Pro Stock Motorcycle world champ Jerry Savoie, but Gladstone was only had a few hundredths of a second behind him, 6.83 to 6.88.

Trying to get a jump on Savoie, who has come out on the wrong end of a few holeshot decisions over the years, an overanxious Gladstone jumped the gun by the invisible margin of just 1/50th of a second. His -.023 red-light start invalidated a 7.01 at 192 mph and advanced the always-tough alligator farmer from the bayous of Mississippi, who advanced to the quarterfinals with a run that would have been hard to get around anyway, 6.83. It was a disappointing end to the 2018 season for Gladstone, but with a full-time ride with Team Liberty for the 2019 NHRA Mello Yello campaign, there are bigger and better things ahead.

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL 2018

November 5, 2018 /

Annie Whiteley took her rightful place in the quickest, fastest Top Alcohol Funny Car field of all-time, but at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, site of so much success in years past, she was gone early. Driving the repurposed John Lombardo/Rick Jackson Camaro she’d strapped into for the first time a week earlier at the Vegas national, Whiteley ran a 5.52/267 and an even better 5.51/268 that surprisingly didn’t land her in the fast half of the field.

It took a run in the 5.40s to do that and an unbelievable 5.53 to make the record bump. Newly crowned world champ Sean Bellemeur, who entered the event on a five-race win streak, locking up the first perfect 10-win season since Frank Manzo’s glory days, failed to qualify, and perennial contender Doug Gordon nearly did. Whiteley’s 5.51 was good only for the No. 6 spot, which set up a first-round match with Lombardo, who’d run a 5.47 for No. 3.

“[Crew chief] Mike [Strasburg] was saying at Dallas that the car wasn’t running that great, wasn’t doing what it was supposed to,” Whiteley said. “He could tell that something in the ignition wasn’t right because he was putting in timing maps all weekend that have never worked before but that the computer told him to run. Turns out the spark plug wires weren’t right, so we weren’t making the power every other part of the tune-up told him we should be making. Every run, he’d say, ‘It should have run better than that,’ and he never says stuff like that.”

Strasburg and crew threw a new set of wires on it for eliminations and voilà – instant power. Only now, with the rest of the tune-up hopped up to compensate, the car made too much power, and Whiteley blew the tires off right at the swap, allowing Lombardo to survive with a run barely over 200 mph. His engine blew in a flash of flame, slowing him to a 5.73/202, but he still made it across the finish line well ahead of Whiteley’s coasting 12.67 at 85 mph. “That showed Mike that the power had been there all along,” Whiteley said. “We just couldn’t run what we should have been running because the wires were bad. This was one time we almost didn’t even mind losing a round because now we know the car will be right for Pomona.”

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