Tag: 2014 (Page 2 of 2)

TAFC – DENVER 2014

June 23, 2014 / Todd Veney

Running within hundredths of a second round after round after round, Annie Whiteley reached the final at the Lucas Oil Series regional at Denver’s mile-high Bandimere Speedway only to fall short by 14-thousandths of a second. She and veteran Clint Thompson left the line within 17-thousandths of a second of each other and both ran 5.78s, but Thompson emerged victorious in a photo-finish decision.

“I never saw him the whole way,” said Whiteley, who has three final-round appearances in her first six starts of 2014. “He never saw me, either. We’d both been running the same thing all day long and we did it again in the final – it just didn’t fall our way.”

Whiteley qualified No. 1 qualifying with an outstanding 5.74, resetting her own track record, then set low e.t. of all three rounds of eliminations. Driving the Roger Bateman-tuned YNot Racing/J&A Service Ford Mustang, she sped to a 5.76 on a first-round single earned by being the top qualifier in a field with an odd number of cars, then lowered the boom in the semifinals with another track record, 5.728, against Wyoming’s Kris Hool.

Thompson was the picture of consistency all weekend, qualifying No. 2 with a 5.779 and running 5.78s in all three rounds of eliminations. He was slightly slower than Whiteley in the final, 5.786 to 5.783, but slightly quicker on the Tree, .070 to .087, to win by just five feet. Both drivers crossed the finish line at 248 mph. “That’s three pretty good years in a row at Bandimere,” Whiteley said. “One semifinal and now two runner-ups. Maybe next year it’ll be my turn.”

In Top Alcohol Dragster, veteran Mike Strasburg kept the YNot team’s unbelievable streak going on the mountain. At the wheel of the same car that Jim Whiteley drove to the national championship and to victory at this race last year, Strasburg won the final on a holeshot over Mark Taliaferro – amazingly by the exact same margin of victory as Whiteley lost by in the Top Alcohol Funny Car final: 14-thousandths of a second. For Strasburg, who moved to Top Fuel in 2002, it was the third Top Alcohol Dragster victory of his driving career and his first since 2001.

TAFC – TOPEKA NATIONAL 2014

May 30, 2014 / Todd Veney

Perennial Top 5 driver Annie Whiteley had low e.t. by a mile at the rain-plagued Kansas Nationals at Heartland Park Topeka but shook the tires in the first round and was upset by the No. 16 qualifier. “The track got a lot better than we thought it was going to be in eliminations, and it bit us,” said Whiteley, who had more than half a tenth on the field in qualifying. “It made the car shake the tires, and you’re not going to get away with something that against somebody like Doug Gordon. He’s not the kind of guy you expect to qualify No. 16 – ever. We knew they’d get their car figured out for the first round, and they did.”

In qualifying, on a surface that yielded nothing better than a 5.61 to any other car, Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Mustang blistered the track with a 5.55 in one of just two qualifying sessions under the rain-shortened format. On her other run, only her quick reflexes saved her from a potentially disastrous trip into the opposite lane.

“There was water on the track,” said Whiteley, who faced the same problem in the final round of her most recent start, the SpringNationals in Houston. “Right at the 2-3 shift, the car turned right and made a move for the centerline. The rpm barely went down when I shifted, then skyrocketed to way over 10,000 rpm. I made one attempt to pull on the wheel, and it wasn’t coming back. You always hear people say that if you ever get in that situation, get the chutes out, and I did or I would have just been along for the ride. It happened so fast. My right hand was still on the wheel because I’d just shifted into high gear, but I got my hand on the chute lever in time and could breathe again.

“Everything was great on the .55, but shaking the tires like that in the first round was a really disappointing way to go out,” Whiteley said. “Fortunately, we’ll have a whole bunch of chances to win coming up real soon.”

After a couple weeks off, the J&A Service/YNot Racing team has four races in the next five weeks – Denver for a Lucas Oil Series Regional; Chicago, where last year Whiteley earned her first national event title; Norwalk; and, for the first time in her career, historic National Trail Raceway in Columbus for another Lucas Oil Series Regional.

TAFC – HOUSTON 2014

April 30, 2014 / Todd Veney

Under gray, threatening skies at Houston’s Royal Purple Raceway, Annie Whiteley lost traction not far off the line in the Spring Nationals Top Alcohol Funny Car final and fell to Shane Westerfield. “It was spitting rain as we were staging,” she said. “I could see drops all over the windshield. They’d wipe ’em off, but then more drops would be right back on there. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when we left, and I was kind of thinking they were going to shut us off. I didn’t make it very far before the car started shaking, but I got farther than Shane did.”

Westerfield, who, like Whiteley, broke through for his first national event victory last season, went up in smoke immediately, but he was able to recover and run a 6.31 for his second career title. Whiteley had no such opportunity when her kill switch vibrated into the “off” position during tire shake between the 1.0- and 1.5-second mark, silencing her engine and bringing a premature end to what had been a storybook weekend.

Whiteley qualified her Roger Bateman-tuned J&A Service/YNot Racing Mustang No. 1 with the only run in the 5.50s, a 5.589, and set low e.t. of all three preliminary rounds of eliminations. She lowered low e.t. to a 5.580 on a first-round single earned by qualifying No. 1 in a field with an odd number of cars, and took out Todd Veney, who red-lighted, in the quarterfinals with a 5.59. After resetting low e.t. for the third time with a semifinal 5.57 win over Gatornationals runner-up Dale Brand, Whiteley lost traction in the final and coasted helplessly down the track as Westerfield sped away.

“That one hurt,” she said. “I knew Shane was in trouble too, and I didn’t see him for a while. I kept trying to get back in it, but when the engine shuts itself off there’s not much you can do.”

TAFC – GAINESVILLE 2014

March 19, 2014 / Todd Veney

After an enormous thrash that most teams wouldn’t even have attempted, Annie Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Top Alcohol Funny Car team was right back at the top at the Amalie Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla., Whiteley’s first national event appearance of the season. Just days before Whiteley and crew pulled into Gainesville, the entire left rear of her Mustang body was obliterated by a tire explosion at the Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series regional event in Houston.

The YNot team, led by veteran crew chief Roger Bateman, got Whiteley’s old car from Topeka to the East Coast, where the body from her 2012 car was grafted onto her current chassis. Right out of the box, the car showed its potential when Whiteley stormed to a 5.59 in the first qualifying session, followed by a 5.54 in last-shot qualifying that positioned her No. 4 in the 16-car field. “I still can’t believe they got all that work done in such a short amount of time,” she said. “It was as good as new, right from the start.”

In the opening round of eliminations Saturday evening, Whiteley put away Canadian Paul Noakes, who won the 2013 Auto-Plus NHRA Nationals in Reading, Pa., in his most recent appearance. Whiteley stormed to a 5.54, the second-quickest run of the round, to cover Noakes’ 5.66. Everything came to a screeching halt in the quarterfinals Sunday afternoon against Australian Steve Harker when her engine was silenced by, of all things, a broke throttle linkage.

“We left, and I was heading out toward the wall a little,” Whiteley said. “I was about to shift, and it just quit. For a second, you’re not sure what’s going because all of a sudden everything just stops. It’s a bad way to lose but it’s not like I absolutely had him covered. He ran a 5.58, low e.t. of the round.”

The highlight of the weekend for the YNot team came in Pro Mod, where son Steven advanced to the quarterfinals in his NHRA national event debut. He qualified sixth of nearly 30 entries with a career-best 5.900, just missing the 5.80s, then took out veteran Mike Knowles in the opening round of eliminations before falling to eventual winner Mike Castellana in the quarterfinals despite an outstanding 5.91.