Tag: 2015 (Page 2 of 3)

TAFC – BRAINERD 2015

August 25, 2015 / Todd Veney

At Brainerd Int’l Raceway, where three years ago Annie Whiteley faced off against The Man himself, Frank Manzo, in the first national event final of her career, her YNot/J&A Service team had its first off weekend after months and months of one great outing after another.

Hot off back-to-back victories in Woodburn, where she annihilated both ends of the track record, and Seattle, where a dominant performance ended in the third national event title of her career, Whiteley qualified fifth in the Top Alcohol Funny Car field. The weekend began with promise when she ran a 5.68 at 261.17 mph Friday followed by a strong 5.61/261.62 later that afternoon that slotted her third in the field at the time. “We were behind on the track all weekend,” she said. “It just kept sticking the tire every time we went up there.”

Whiteley, who qualified No. 1 in five of her last seven starts (including the Jegs Allstars race), shook on her final attempt and qualified outside the top three for the first time since the West Region season opener at Phoenix way back in February. That that was no problem, though – she still landed in the fast half of the field and has won races already this year from three different rungs on the eliminator ladder.

The problem came when Whiteley’s jet-black Camaro fought for traction again in the first round of eliminations against a much tougher opponent than the No. 5 qualifier usually gets: many-time national event champ Jay Payne. In that round, which was postponed by rain from late Saturday afternoon until Sunday, Whiteley, who arrived in Minnesota ranked number 1 in the national standings, left on the eventual runner-up but slowed to an 8.59 while Payne advanced with a 5.55.

“That was a bummer, definitely,” Whiteley said. “On the first qualifier, it shook the tires almost right at the hit – I don’t know how it made it – and every time we went up there after that the car made it a little further, but we never did catch up to the track.”

Despite the unexpected early exit, Whiteley’s YNot/J&A Service team enters the U.S. Nationals, the biggest race of the season, still solidly atop the Top Alcohol Funny Car standings, with almost a full-race lead (82 points) on second-place Doug Gordon.

TAFC – SEATTLE 2015

August 11, 2015 / Todd Veney

Already solidly in first place atop the Top Alcohol Funny Car standings when she got to Seattle, Annie Whiteley solidified her increasingly likely bid for a national championship with a dominant performance at the Northwest Nationals.

After back-to-back-to-back 5.51s in the preliminary rounds, Whiteley whipped nemesis Shane Westerfield, who lost traction right off the starting line, with a consistent 5.54 in the final. “My guys have given me an unbelievable car, and I just try to do my job and not screw up on the lights,” Whiteley modestly said of her J&A Service/YNot team, led by crew chief Mike Strasburg. “The car just runs smooth every time.”

Coming off a storybook weekend at Woodburn, where she qualified No. 1 and set both ends of the track record en route to her third win of the season, Whiteley annihilated the track record in Seattle qualifying with a 267.59-mph blast, the fastest of her career. She held down the No. 1 qualifying position until the last pair of the final session, when Mike Doushgounian edged her 5.502 with a 5.489.

Starting eliminations from the No. 2 spot on the grid, Whiteley, who had qualified No. 1 at five races in a row, mowed down the opposition with one spectacular run after another, starting with a 5.512 at 265.90 mph Saturday afternoon against rookie Chris Marshall, who veered crossed the centerline. Sunday in round two, her best run of eliminations, a 5.510 at 267.48 mph, dispatched former national event winner Jirka Kaplan, who got sideways in low gear, fell behind, and lost with a 6.32.

In the semifinals, Whiteley put a tenth on two-time Seattle winner Clint Thompson at the Tree with a .038 reaction time and drove away for another train-length win, 5.518, 265.90 to an up-in-smoke 15.88. Whiteley then won the final in another walkover against Westerfield, who had been 5-0 against her until this weekend, including a final-round win last year in Houston,

With four wins and seven final-round appearances already in 2015, Whiteley holds a 62-point lead over second-place Doug Gordon, who lost to Westerfield in the semi’s at Seattle. Next up for the J&A Service/YNot team is the Lucas Oil Nationals Aug. 21-23 in Brainerd, Minn.

TAFC – WOODBURN 2015

July 20, 2015 / Todd Veney

At Woodburn Dragstrip just outside Portland, Annie Whiteley dominated one of the toughest regional events of the season to take over first place in the Top Alcohol Funny Car national standings. “This is the first time I’ve ever been number one,” said Whiteley, who scored for the third time in six final-round appearances already this season. “I’ve been as high as second, early in the season a couple years ago, but I have to say this feels pretty great.”

It was truly one of the great performances of her career, a clean sweep: She qualified No. 1, obliterated both ends of the track record, and set low e.t. and top speed of all three rounds of eliminations.

After traveling almost 2500 miles from Chicago, where Whiteley was runner-up at the Jegs Allstars, the J&A Service/YNot team topped all qualifiers for the fifth race in a row – Denver, Norwalk, the Allstars race, Chicago, and now Woodburn. Her outstanding 5.56 at 266.42 mph held up for low e.t. and top speed of the entire event and was backed up by a pair of 5.64s in the other two qualifying sessions, making her a prohibitive favorite going into eliminations. (With a 5.59 for No. 2, championship contender Doug Gordon was the only other driver to run in the 5.50s all weekend.)

Whiteley just missed getting back in the .50s in the opening round with a 5.601 that stood as the quickest pass of all of eliminations and was more than enough to eliminate newcomer Chris Marshall, who faded with a 6.14, 224 in the first round of his Top Alcohol Funny Car career. Marshall held down the bump with a 5.75 – quicker than defending event champ Mike Doushgounian and former Woodburn winners Brian Hough and Steve Gasparrelli, who all missed the cut.

In the semifinals, Whiteley’s consistent 5.62 knocked off rival Shane Westerfield, who lost traction on the tricky, slippery surface and slowed to a 10.21. Former national event winner Jirka Kaplan gave Whiteley her toughest race of the weekend in the final, but she drove away from him on the top end with a 5.69 to win it by a car length. “That was actually the worst run we made all weekend,” Whiteley said. “The car was trying to walk all over the track and I had to short-shift just to get it down there. That guy’s always so tough on the lights; I was just glad I never saw him.”

TAFC – CHICAGO 2015

July 13, 2015 / Todd Veney

With the greatest run of her Top Alcohol Funny Car career, Annie Whiteley cracked the 5.5-second barrier with a 5.488 for the No. 1 spot in both the Route 66 Nationals and the invitation-only Jegs Allstars event that’s run in conjunction with it.

“I knew it was a good run, but I didn’t know it was that good,” said Whiteley, whose previous best had been a 5.50 in Sonoma in July 2012. “It didn’t feel that much different from a low .50-something, but [crew chief] Mike [Strasburg] and the guys told me if I made it to the finish line without shaking the tires it was going to be my first .40, and it was.”

The 5.48 was just one of four great runs in a row for Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro in Chicago – just like her five consecutive passes last week in Norwalk, where she rattled off two 5.57s, a 5.53, and two 5.55s. Here, it was a 5.53, the landmark 5.48, and back-to-back 5.50-flats in the first two rounds of the prestigious Allstars race.

A 5.508 at 264 mph in the first round of Allstars eliminations took down many-time national event winner Mickey Ferro’s 5.58. Under the lights in the semi’s, an identical run – right down to the thousandth of a second – erased former Indy winner Chris Foster’s 5.65.

In the final, run on Sunday afternoon due to inclement weather Saturday, John Lombardo Jr., running a cylinder head borrowed from the YNot team, unloaded his own 5.48 for the Allstars title when Whiteley lost traction in low gear. It was a frustrating end to what had been a great weekend and only compounded the aggravation from the first round of the Route 66 Nationals, run earlier that day, when she was upset by No. 16 qualifier Kirk Williams.

Next up is a Western Regional event in Woodburn, Ore., which has already attracted a 17 entrants for just eight qualifying spots. Whiteley heads there ranked second in the West standings, with a victory and back-to-back final-round appearances in her last two regional starts.

PRO MOD – NORWALK 2015

July 6, 2015 / Todd Veney

At the SummitRacing.com Nationals at Norwalk, Jim Whiteley qualified higher than he ever has in his brief Pro Mod career – No. 5 – and then proceeded to run even better in eliminations. But, tired of watching turbocharged and supercharged clutch cars drive around him on the top end, he’s taking out his torque converter setup after this race and going back to a clutch for the U.S. Nationals.

The two-time Top Alcohol Dragster world champ backed up an out-of-the-box 5.91 with an outstanding 5.90 in the second qualifying session, just missing the 5.80s and claiming the provisional No. 4 spot on the grid. He ended up fifth, ahead of 23 of the 28 entrants in the typically huge Pro Mod field and in the first round faced Pro Mod rookie Troy Coughlin Jr., son of the 2012 NHRA Pro Mod champ and 2013-14 championship runner-up.

Whiteley cut a decent .089 light, young Coughlin was off like a shot with a .024, and Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Chevelle immediately overcame the Jegs car’s quicker start and sailed into a sizable lead. He was out front by more than half a tenth at the 330-foot mark, still held a noticeable advantage at half-track, and finally relinquished it around the 1,000-foot mark.

“I never saw him until the very end,” said Whiteley, whose reaction times usually are in the .030s and .040s. “Those turbocharged cars have 6 or 7 mph on the converter cars at the top end, and he got around me. When the converter slips like that, you just give away too much speed, and that thing’s about to come out of there. It’s not easy to make a change when the car runs as good as it did this weekend, but in the end, I think this will be for the best.”

TAFC – NORWALK 2015

July 6, 2015 / Todd Veney

Until the car inexplicably went up in smoke in the semifinals, Annie Whiteley utterly dominated Top Alcohol Funny Car at the SummitRacing.com Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio. She ran not just low e.t. of the meet, but low e.t. of all three qualifying sessions and each of the first two rounds of eliminations. Her worst run of the entire event to that point, an off-the-trailer 5.57, was better than any other driver’s best run.

“I have no idea why it went up in smoke that time,” said Whiteley of her J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro. “The car was set up just about the same and everything had been going perfectly from the time we got there.”

Whiteley was the only driver in the 5.50s in Friday’s first qualifying session with a 5.579 at 264.96. She followed with a 5.570 later that afternoon, then lowered the boom in last-shot qualifying Saturday with a 5.531 at 265.06 mph, putting more than a half a tenth on the No. 2 qualifier, Sweden’s Ulf Leanders.

The bludgeoning continued in eliminations when Whiteley left on John Headley in the first round and unloaded a consistent 5.55 at the exact same speed at which she’d already established top speed of the meet to that point: 265.06 mph. The car ran even better in the quarterfinals against 2013 Norwalk winner Kris Hool, but that one could have ended in disaster.

For the first time in memory, and for no known reason, the Tree took about twice as long to come down as it normally does, affecting both drivers’ concentration – it was so long that NHRA Official Starter Mark Lyle threw his hands up in the air. Hool was unable to hold his car on the starting line and rolled through the beams for an instant disqualification, but Whiteley hung on, left at exactly the right rpm, and laid down low e.t. of eliminations, 5.553, and a track-record speed of 266.16 mph.

“I didn’t think that Tree was ever going to come on,” she said. “It gets you completely out of your normal groove, but I waited for it.” In the semi’s, Whiteley smoked the tires like a fuel car right off the starting line and could only watch as D.J. Cox scooped up the win with a 5.74 – about two-tenths slower than she’d been running all weekend.

Norwalk was just the first of back-to-back-to-back races for the YNot Racing/J&A Service team. This weekend is the Route 66 Nationals in Chicago, where in 2013 Whiteley picked up the first national event victory of her career, and the following weekend the team will be all the way across the country in Woodburn, Ore., for the fourth race of the seven-race Western Region schedule.

TAFC – DENVER 2015

June 25, 2015 / Todd Veney

With a third final-round appearance in her last four races, Annie Whiteley, who had swept the Las Vegas regional and national events on back-to-back weekends, kept her bid for a Top Alcohol Funny Car national championship very much alive.

Back on the mountainside at her home track, picturesque Bandimere Speedway, Whiteley outran everybody in qualifying, which was saying a lot at this race – two-thirds of the drivers in the field were former national event winners. She qualified No. 1 with an off-the-trailer 5.80, and it’s a good thing she did – there were just two qualifying sessions, and her YNot Racing/J&A Service Camaro had to be pushed off the starting line after the burnout on her second attempt.

In the first round of eliminations, opposite Nick Januik in a matchup of the last two spring Vegas winners, Whiteley charged to low e.t. of the meet to that point, won handily, 5.76 to 5.92, and earned the semifinal bye. A consistent 5.81 on that run seemed to set her up well for the final against Lombardo, who was right there with a 5.77, but when the light turned green in the final, all hell broke loose in both lanes.

Whiteley went right up in smoke, but so did Lombardo, and the race was on. Any other up-on-smoke pass in her entire career would have meant an easy win for Lombardo, but she made him work for this one.

“I learned something that time,” she said. “I’ve always been told that if the car shakes, just stay out of it. And I always have. But that time…I don’t know. I guess that little competitive edge that you have inside you kicks in and you feel like you’ve got to keep trying because you’re in the final. So I got back on it.”

Whiteley got the car calmed down, tromped back down on the throttle and legged it to the finish line for an 8.04 at 211 mph, but Lombardo got there first with a 7.48 at just 160 mph. “That’s OK,” she said. “I learned something. I did something I didn’t know I could do. And this year’s already been a lot better than last year.”

PRO MOD – ATLANTA 2015

May 18, 2015 / Todd Veney

The father-and-son team of Jim and Steven Whiteley was locked in the five-second zone on five of six qualifying runs at the NHRA Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway, the third race of the 10-race J&A Service NHRA Pro Mod Series. That’s the good part. The bad part is that neither took the green for the first round of eliminations.

Jim’s YNot Racing/J&A Service ’69 Chevelle was still in the pits when scheduled opponent Troy Coughlin won the first round over alternate Gerry Capano. Steven’s ’14 CTS was about one inch from the starting line – pre-staged but not quite staged – when the Tree flashed, and veteran Steve Matusek had the track all to himself as Steven was timed out.

“I was taking my time, trying to stage as shallow as I could, and didn’t notice that he was all the way in or I’d have sped it up a little,” Steven said. “It’s too bad. The car was really running good – mid .90s every time.”

Steven ran a 5.970 at 243.63 mph off the trailer Friday afternoon and followed with an even better 5.957 at 244.25 that evening. After a 5.976/245.45 in Saturday’s final qualifying session, everything seemed to be in place for a deep run in eliminations.

“We’ve finally gotten to where we want to be with the new car,” Steven said of his Haas-built CTS. “We had a setup that was working pretty good with the old Camaro, and we put the same thing in this car and just nit-picked it until we found what it wanted. Now that it’s happy, we just need to throw power at it. It’s going down the track every time; we just need to get a little more aggressive.”

Jim’s car was performing even better than Steven’s – especially on his final qualifying attempt. Coming off his first career semifinal appearance as a Pro Mod driver, the former Top Alcohol Dragster world champ ran a 5.93 at just 236 mph, coasting across the finish line after his engine expired in high gear.

“Dad’s car was flying this weekend – outrunning mine – but it grenaded a motor on that last one,” Steven said. “They had it all put back together and ready to go for first round. They would have made the call, but there wasn’t enough time to get everything totally right, so they decided not to run it, and it was the right decision. The important thing is that both cars are really running good right now.”

PRO MOD – HOUSTON 2015

April 28, 2015 / Todd Veney

At the NHRA Spring Nationals, the second event of the J&A Service Pro Mod Series, in by far the best outing of his Pro Mod career, two-time Top Alcohol Dragster world champ Jim Whiteley whipped the reigning Pro Mod champ to reach the semifinals for the first time as a Pro Mod driver.

“Now, that was an awesome weekend,” said Whiteley, who also went a couple rounds in Top Alcohol Dragster. “It’s hard to hop from car to car, and Pro Mod and Alcohol Dragster were stacked right on top of each other all weekend, so there wasn’t much time to get ready mentally, but it turned out pretty well.”

It wasn’t looking good with one session to go, but a tire swap Saturday morning brought Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing ’69 Chevelle to life. “A few feet off the line, it was obvious that putting the new Goodyear tire like we run on Annie’s Funny Car was the right move,” he said. A 5.92 on that run put Whiteley well into the field and set up a first-round match with the second-ranked driver in Pro Mod this season, Gatornationals runner-up Pete Farber.

Whiteley’s car stumbled off the line, but Farber disqualified himself with a red-light, advancing Whiteley to the quarterfinals. “You never like to have one given to you like that,” he said. “I hated it for Farber – he was way up there in points. I told him, ‘You really shouldn’t have done that,’ and I never even knew he red-lighted till they pulled me off the track – the car shook so hard that it shook the kill switch off, and I coasted forever.”

34 seconds after he left the starting line, Whiteley rolled silently across the finish line at 22 mph, the winner. “You don’t pay any attention to what’s going on in the other lane in a situation like that,” he said. “I was so mad that I lost, I was just looking for the first place to turn off.”

In the second round, Whiteley didn’t need any lucky breaks. In a performance reminiscent of his dominant days in Top Alcohol Dragster, he hit the Tree for an outstanding .043 reaction time, cracked the 5.8-second barrier for the first time as a Pro Mod driver, and whipped the most accomplished Pro Mod driver of the past several years, two-time and defending world champ Rickie Smith, on a 5.89 to 5.88 holeshot.

Whiteley slipped to a 5.94 in the semifinals and fell to eventual winner Don Walsh, who would have been hard to beat regardless with a 5.82, low e.t. of the meet. “The video shows that it put a hole out about 60 feet out, then it picked it back up,” Whiteley said. “The car kind of sashayed through low gear, and that was it. Doesn’t matter. I’m so pumped – I’m ready to race again right now. I wish there was another race this weekend.”

TAFC – HOUSTON 2015

April 27, 2015 / Todd Veney

She may not have won, as she did on back-to-back weekends earlier this month at the national and regional events in Las Vegas, but Annie Whiteley didn’t leave Houston’s Royal Purple Raceway empty-handed. Driving the J&A Service/YNot Racing Top Alcohol Funny Car, she set low e.t. of the meet in eliminations with a 5.53 and top speed of the meet during qualifying with a 266.85-mph blast, the fastest run of her four-year career.

Currently fourth in NHRA national points, just a round out of second place despite running fewer races than the drivers ahead of her in the standings, Whiteley grew increasingly quicker throughout qualifying with an opening 5.614 at 264.29 mph followed by a 5.595/264.03 and a 5.581/266.85. “Up until the second round, the car was running great,” said Whiteley, who ran at least 2 mph faster on all three qualifying passes than she’d ever gone before this race.

After dispatching former U.S. Nationals winner Chris Foster in the quickest side-by-side race of the opening round, 5.53 to 5.59, Whiteley dropped a weird second-round match with Sweden’s Ulf Leanders, the eventual runner-up. “The car shook the tires about 200 feet off the starting line and at first we couldn’t figure out why,” said Whiteley, who was runner-up at Houston last year. “The computer graph was odd. It shouldn’t have done anything different on that run because the way the car was running, we hadn’t really made any changes.”

A post-race analysis of video from that run revealed the culprit: liquid spraying up from one of the rear tires. “It looked like I was pushing puddles, like there was water on the track or something,” Whiteley said. “We refired the car in the pits, and it was making a puddle underÂ one of the headers because the inner tube was cracked.”

The Spring Nationals, Whiteley’s third race in three weeks, will be her last for nearly two months, and she heads for the sidelines having won 80 percent of her rounds so far this year, tops in Top Alcohol Funny Car. Next up: the Central Regional at Bandimere Speedway just outside Denver, the YNot team’s home track, June 19-21.