Tag: 2016 (Page 2 of 4)

PRO MOD – ST. LOUIS 2016

September 27, 2016 /

Back with the other top runners in Sunday eliminations, Jim Whiteley advanced to the quarterfinals at St. Louis in his best outing since he beat soon-to-be 2016 world champ Rickie Smith in the wild Houston final for his first NHRA Pro Mod title.

At the wheel of his powerful J&A Service/YNot Racing ’69 Chevelle, Whiteley forced his way into the tough AAA Nationals field with a 5.94 at 235 mph Friday afternoon and hung in there with a 5.93/243 Saturday morning. That afternoon in the first round of eliminations, qualified just 14th in the field, Whiteley lined up against No. 3 qualifier Sidnei Frigo, the Brazilian whose frightening over-the-wall crash at Houston made it possible for Whiteley to get back into the race as an alternate and eventually win.

Whiteley drilled Frigo with a telepathic .009 reaction time and drove away from Frigo’s state-of-the-art ’16 Corvette to win handily. “With Chuck’s clutch, you almost can’t not cut a good light,” Whiteley said of his new crew chief, master blower builder Chuck Ford, a former door-car driver himself. “We did three or four hits in testing, and the lights kept coming up -.005 red, -.001 red, -.002 red – the same thing every time. The spread was so close that Chuck said, ‘Stay right where you’re at and we’ll adjust it and be good,’ and he was right.”

Whiteley’s winning time against Frigo, who was off the throttle early, was a 5.90-flat, his best run all year outside of Indy. In qualifying, son Steven Whiteley ran even better – a 5.87 at 247 mph for the No. 8 spot – but he fell by the wayside in a first-round loss to Smith, who virtually locked up his third J&A Service NHRA Pro Mod championship with a runner-up to Troy Coughlin.

Jim was out one round later when he blew the tires off against past Top Fuel and Pro Mod winner Khalid alBalooshi – but not before getting the jump with another great reaction time, .021. “It’s just great to be going down the track again,” he said. “The car’s running better and better, no doubt about it.”

The NHRA Pro Mod season officially ends after the next race, the Toyota Nationals at Las Vegas – but not for Whiteley, who’ll be “racing” in Comp next weekend at Dallas. Actually, he won’t be racing at all; he’ll just be using that race to test for Vegas under the only kind of conditions drivers see at NHRA events – an NHRA-prepped track. “We’ll just treat every qualifying run a test run,” Whiteley said. “Same thing in the first round. If I accidently beat somebody with a good run, we’ll bypass the scales so they can get back in. We don’t want to mess anybody up – we just want to test under NHRA national event conditions.”

TAFC – WOODBURN 2016

September 20, 2016 /

At Woodburn Dragstrip just outside Portland, one of her best tracks on the circuit, Annie Whiteley was eliminated in the first round for the first time anywhere in nearly three months. The J&A Service/YNot team landed in Woodburn Alcohol Funny Car finals three times in a row coming into this race, with a win and a runner-up last year and a final-round loss earlier this season by the aggravating margin of just one-thousandth of a second.

This time, despite a getting off the line on time and charging past the 60-foot clocks, Whiteley was upset by No. 8 qualifier Brian Hough’s 5.57, fighting through vicious tire-shake for a disappointing 5.87 loss.

“The car did one of those weird things that makes all the guys stand there scratching their heads when we get back to the pits,” she said. “It spun the tires out past 60 foot, and it never does that. The starting line was super great, and it was a little slow early on that run, then it started shaking further out. If we would’ve had one more qualifying, that never would’ve happened.”

It started raining at 9 a.m. and didn’t stop till 9 p.m., washing out every scheduled qualifying session and generating so much rainfall that the flooded top end couldn’t be cleared for racing until 2 p.m. the following day, which meant just one thing: every tuner’s nightmare – one-shot qualifying. Whiteley and crew chief Mike Strasburg came through with an outstanding 5.53 at more than 268 mph for the No. 1 qualifying spot in the nerve-wracking do-or-die session, Whiteley’s fifth No. 1 in 12 starts this season.

PRO MOD – CHARLOTTE 2016

September 20, 2016 /

In much tougher conditions than at Indy, where everybody was running 5.80s, Steven Whiteley qualified a season-high third at the Carolina Nationals at zMax Dragway with an outstanding 5.840. He actually led qualifying at the palatial Charlotte, N.C., facility for a while and was in the No. 2 spot until the 11th hour in what turned out to be his best outing of the NHRA season.

For Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot team, it was one mid-.80 after another in qualifying – 5.87, 5.84, 5.86 – then nothing but trouble in eliminations, starting against Eric Latino in Saturday’s opening round. “I had to pedal the car to get around him,” Whiteley said. “I got aggressive, stayed in it, then blipped the throttle and got back into it and it made it down through there.”

Whiteley turned that potentially disastrous situation into a winning 5.91 at 247 mph, well ahead of Latino’s distant 6.25/204, but there was no saving it Sunday afternoon in the second round. “It started further out than it did in the first round,” he said. “I stayed in it again and hoped it would clean up, but I couldn’t catch it quick enough – when I blipped the throttle, it turned toward the wall.”

Whiteley wisely got the car straightened out before hammering the gas again, but by then opponent Todd Tutterow was long gone. “When the other guy’s laying down a 5.93 like that, there’s not much you can do,” he said. It was his first trip to the quarterfinals in 2016, but there’s still time for a late charge to the Top 10 like brother Cory Reed pulled off at Indy with his Pro Stock Motorcycle.

“The car was running well in qualifying,” said Whiteley, whose highest qualifying position this season had been No. 5 at Englishtown (5.88). “We backed it off a little on the last qualifier to get a race-day tuneup and basically left it alone for the first round, but I guess we didn’t compensate enough for the track. The thing is, we have the power to do this. All those .80s in qualifying mean we can go rounds at the last two races and still get in the Top 10 – that’s our goal.”

PSM – INDY 2016

September 6, 2016 /

In the final event of the 10-race regular season, in the best race of his young drag racing career, Pro Stock Motorcycle rookie Cory Reed catapulted over three other riders to move from 13th place into the Top 10 and into championship contention.

Reed qualified in the fast half of the field yet again and drew 10th-ranked Steve Johnson in a titanic head-to-head first-round matchup that meant the end of a potential title run for the loser. Reed was off the line like a shot with a .027 reaction time and drove away from Johnson, 6.93 to 7.06, and just like that, he was on the doorstep of the Countdown.

“I knew what I had to do before we ever got here: go one round further than Michael Ray, Karen Stoffer, and Steve Johnson,” Reed said. “I figured if we got to the semi’s I was in, but it turned out that I just had to get to the second round because everybody else lost first round. I watched Ray lose [to eventual runner-up Hector Arana Jr.] right in front of me, so that was one. I was running Johnson, so if I won he was automatically out. So then I just needed Karen to lose.”

She accommodated him with a loss to perennial championship contender Eddie Krawiec, 6.83 to 6.89 – but first Reed had to get around the wily Johnson, who has more starts than anyone in NHRA bike history. “Steve’s always been nice to me,” Reed said, “but I thought he’d try to play a game on the line – that’s his style – but he didn’t roll it back out of the beams or try anything.”

Reed had the lead from start to finish, and by the time he returned to the PSE/Star Racing pits, he was in the Countdown. “What I didn’t get was why nobody else seemed to know it,” he said. “I won first round, they all lost – I knew I was in.”

To put an exclamation point on the accomplishment, Reed, who had reached the quarterfinals at five of the past six races, took it one step further with a first career semifinal finish, topping teammate Angelle Sampey, who fouled away a 6.92. Reed’s .013 reaction time and quicker 6.88 meant that he actually got to the finish line first anyway.

In the semi’s, Reed fouled by the narrowest possible margin – one-thousandth of a second – against Arana, but by then the war had already been won: he was in the Countdown to the Championship. Now instead of trailing the points leader by an insurmountable 596 rounds, Reed finds himself just 110 points out of the lead because of the controversial Countdown format, which erases the points racers have accumulated all season and separates everyone in the Top 10 by just 10 points per position.

Now, anything can happen. “I really think making the Top 5 is a realistic goal, but I’m a racer – I want to win the championship,” he said. “We’re almost as fast as the Harleys now – maybe the next-fastest ones after them – and I do a little better with pressure, so we’ll see what happens. I definitely want to win at least one race.”

TAFC – INDY 2016

September 6, 2016 /

With another final-round performance – her third in four starts – Annie Whiteley is back in the Top 5 in the national Top Alcohol Funny Car standings. It wasn’t just her third runner-up in her past four appearances this season – it was also her third runner-up in four career appearances at the prestigious U.S. Nationals. “I’m getting a little tired of this,” she joked. “I guess it just means we’ll have to come back and try it again next year.”

In her entire NHRA career, Whitely has only not been in the final round at the “Big Go” once, in 2014, which, not coincidentally, was also the only time she ever didn’t make the final Top 10. She has one of the better win-loss records in U.S. Nationals history – an enviable 9-4 (.692) – but no hardware to show for it.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot team charged into the early qualifying lead with an off-the-trailer 5.52 at 267 mph and a 5.47 at nearly 268 for both low e.t. and top speed of the meet at the time. She was more than ready for eliminations with a consistent 5.52 in the third qualifying session and an up-in-smoke 28-second pass in last-shot qualifying when she was already second on the qualifying grid and there was no point in shooting for anything but No. 1.

With a steady 5.51/268 and a .043 light, Whiteley trounced newcomer Chris King, who got in as an alternate for the second time in his three-race career and went down with a fine 5.63/255, the best run of his career. Houston winner Steve Gasparrelli was the next to go. Whiteley had an even better .042 reaction time and advanced easily with a 5.55/267. She took out upstart Bryan Brown in the semifinals, 5.60 to 5.99, but lost traction immediately in the final against Jonnie Lindberg, who won the biggest prize in drag racing with just a 5.67.

“He had to pedal it, too,” said Whiteley, who coasted across the finish line with a 10.21 at 92 mph. “It probably looks like we went for it and got after it too much because it was the final or something, but the guys didn’t hop the car up at all. They actually backed it down a little knowing that we were going to be in the right lane.”

Overdue, Whiteley and the YNot team head into Woodburn, Ore., where she always performs well, including a win and three final-round appearances in her last three trips there.

PRO MOD – INDY 2016

September 6, 2016 /

At the all-5.80 NHRA U.S. Nationals, the biggest race of the season, Jim and Steven Whiteley both qualified for the fastest lineup in Pro Mod history, Jim with 5.86 at 246 mph in his immaculate ’69 Chevelle and Steven with a 5.89 at 246 in his ’14 Cadillac CTS.

Steven opened with a 5.95 off the trailer and a nice 5.90-flat that would have qualified him for any other Pro Mod race ever but would’ve left him 17th for this 16-car field had he not improved in later sessions. Jim started with a 5.96. Steven unloaded a 5.89 in the third session that ultimately landed him on the bump for the record field and Jim moved up 16 spots to No. 7 at the time with the 5.86/246, the quickest and fastest run of his Pro Mod career.

The wheels came off in eliminations when Jim was chased down in the first round by yearlong points leader Rickie Smith’s come-from-behind 5.83 after drilling Smith on the Tree with a .034 light. Facing No. 1 qualifier Troy Coughlin, the reigning J&A Service Pro Mod Series champ, in the first round, Steven got out of shape early, brought it back from the wall and went after Coughlin until there was no way he could catch the Jeg’s driver, even if he broke, and coasted to a 6.61 at 216 mph. Coughlin, the eventual runner-up who dipped into the 5.70s multiple times in qualifying, advanced with a 5.83.

It may have been an off weekend for the J&A Service/YNot Pro Mod cars, but it was anything but for teammate Annie Whiteley, who reached the Top Alcohol Funny Car final for the third time in four career trips to Indianapolis, and Cory Reed, whose career-first semifinal appearance in the Pro Stock Motorcycle semifinals leapfrogged him over three other riders on the last day of the regular season for the final Countdown position and a shot at the championship.

The Pro Mods will be back in action next weekend in the heart of door-car country, Charlotte, N.C., at the Carolina Nationals at ZMax Dragway.

TAFC – BRAINERD 2016

August 23, 2016 /

With her third straight trip to the semifinals and a second final-round appearance in a row, Annie Whiteley solidified her hold on seventh place in the NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car standings. Glad just to be in the final here in 2013, Whiteley had a much better shot at the title this time than she did the first time around, in 2013, when she lost the first national event final of her career to the unstoppable Frank Manzo by a couple car-lengths.

The 2016 Lucas Oil Nationals final was closer – much closer. Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro came out on the wrong end of a 5.44-5.45 classic with second-ranked Jonnie Lindberg, the defending NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car champ. “At least I didn’t lose on a holeshot,” joked Whiteley, who got off the mark with a better-than-average .078 reaction time, which ended up being actually her slowest of four solid lights, including a pair of .050s.

In one of the quickest and fastest TA/FC races of all time, Whiteley became one of few drivers ever to lose with a 5.45 e.t. – though for her it was the second time in a row, including the Seattle semifinals. “Now that would have been a nice time for the other guy to screw up,” Whiteley said. “Both of us were on good runs – he was going 214 mph at half-track, and we were going 211.”

In the semifinals, Whiteley put away the driver she and Lindberg battled for the 2015 championship down to the last day of the season, John Lombardo. As in the final, both cars were locked side by side to the half-track mark, but Lombardo’s NAPA car suffered a blower explosion and Whiteley pulled away to win convincingly with another 5.4 run, a 5.47.

“Everybody asked me if I heard him blow up because it was so loud, but I didn’t,” she said. “I barely saw his front fender, just a little bit of blue out of the corner of my eye, and I thought, ‘Oh no,’ because at that point you know you’re usually not gonna get around him, but then he just disappeared.” After qualifying No. 1 in each of her last two starts, Woodburn and Seattle, Whiteley began eliminations from the No. 4 spot with a 5.52 and, as in Seattle, knocked out three 5.40s in eliminations. She stopped upstart Topeka winner Jeff Jones in a great first-round race, 5.52 to 5.55, and outran 1996 world champ Tony Bartone in an even faster second-round matchup, 5.45 to 5.50.

Two more mid-.40s in the late rounds left her just short of victory. “It was another good weekend,” said Whiteley, who now has three final-round appearances this season, “but it’s not as good as a win. No more runner-ups. Time to start winning.”

PSM – BRAINERD 2016

August 23, 2016 /

At the NHRA Lucas Oil Nationals in Brainerd, Minn., for the fifth time in the last six races, Cory Reed advanced to the quarterfinals. It has him on the brink of the Top 10 with one more race before the Countdown to the Championship playoffs begin, but Reed was more frustrated at the way he lost than pleased to have advanced that deep in eliminations again.

“I was ahead of him the whole way until the bike didn’t shift,” said Reed of his opponent, reigning Pro Stock Motorcycle national champ Andrew Hines, the most prolific rider in bike history with 45 career event titles. “It made the 1-2 and 2-3 shifts just fine, but it wouldn’t go into 4th gear.”

Reed, who left on Michael Ray in the first round of eliminations with a near-perfect .007 reaction time and pulled away with a career-best 6.83, was out on Hines, too, with a .011. Hines, the eventual winner, got the win with just a 6.89 – almost certainly slower than what Reed would’ve run had his bike just gone into gear.

“This is the first loss all year where I’ve been genuinely pissed off,” Reed said. “I mean, I’m still mad. It sucks that it played out the way it did because I knew I was ahead of him. I knew I got a good light – I could just tell – and it was weird because I could hear him over there and knew he was behind me. I probably hit the button five or six times and just rode it out on the chip for a while, then laid my head down on the tank. The one good thing that came out of all of this is that the bike keeps getting faster and faster.”

Reed opened qualifying with a 6.98 and got only quicker from there, with a 6.92 Friday night in the second qualifying session, a 6.89 Saturday morning, and a 6.88 in last-shot qualifying that slotted him in the No. 7 position on the eliminator ladder, tying the career high he established earlier this season at Norwalk. The 6.83 in the first round was the quickest official run of his career by a full five-hundredths of a second. “We picked up points on some people,” Reed said. “I’m just one round out of the Countdown now, so we have real chance at this with one race left.”

TAFC – SEATTLE 2016

August 8, 2016 /

Running better than she ever has – including four straight runs in the mid- to low-5.40s – defending Northwest Nationals champ Annie Whiteley reached the semifinals and continued her long climb back up the national Top Alcohol Funny Car standings.

In last-shot qualifying, the J&A Service YNot Racing team, just No. 7 in the field at the time with a usually great but suddenly ordinary 5.53, unloaded their all-time-best, 5.42, one of the greatest runs in class history, for the No. 1 spot. The speed, 271.13 mph was also a career best, and the 5.42 was good for not just low e.t. of the meet but also a new track E.T. record.

“I had no idea that it was a .42, but I could tell it was a good one just by how early the shift-light came on in both gears,” Whiteley said. “When I got out of the car down at the top end, it seemed like Funny Car driver that pulled off the end of the track had just set a career-best. It was ‘Candy Land’ for everybody. The air was really, really good and the track was perfect.

It took an unbelievable 5.51 to make the fast half of the field, and every car but one was at least in the mid-5.50s. Awarded a first-round bye run for being the No. 1 qualifier in a field with an odd number of cars, Whiteley ran a 5.45 – one of three mid-5.40s in eliminations – that would’ve crushed whatever hapless No. 16 qualifier had pulled into opposite lane had there been a full field.

Pitted against three-time Seattle winner Brian Hough in the quarterfinals, Whiteley ran a 5.46 to trounce Hough’s otherwise excellent 5.49 in the kind of race that typified the entire event. Another 5.45 in the semifinals, one of the last pairs completed before the skies finally opened for good and washed out the remainder of the event, wasn’t quite enough. The J&A/YNot team came out on the wrong side of a race nobody deserved to lose when opponent Nick Januik matched his career-best with an identical 5.45 and punctuated it with a .016 light.

“It’s too bad,” said Whiteley, who’d never lost to Januik before. “He had a .091 and a .092 the two rounds prior, but he pulled it out, so you have to give him credit.” Now seventh in the national standings, with fewer races claimed than nine of the other top 10, Whiteley and crew head to Brainerd, Minn, where in her rookie year she reached her first national event final.

PSM – SONOMA 2016

August 2, 2016 /

Cory Reed’s rocket ride to the top of Pro Stock Bike racing took a slight detour at the event he was looking forward to more than any other this year, the Sonoma Nationals, where instead of racing more than a mile above sea-level as he had one week earlier at Denver, he competed at the much lower – and faster – altitude of just 15 feet.

Reed picked up more than three-tenths of a second from Denver, where, for the third race in a row, he advanced to the quarterfinals, but a 6.93 at nearly 190 mph that at the time had him 10th in the field in the end left him a few hundredths of a second short of the fastest field in NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle history. The bump was 6.90-flat, and 15 of the 16 were in the 6.80s, where Reed was sure his PSE/Star Racing bike would have been had he gotten his final qualifying shot.

“The little clip that holds all the gears in place popped out,” said Reed, who was shut off behind the line and didn’t even get his last shot at cracking the field – right when the conditions were perfect. “That put it into fifth gear on the burnout, and burned out the gear. It got fused up because it was stuck in fifth.”

Unlike in Denver when all appeared to be lost in a similarly stressful behind-the-line situation and he made it to the line in time to whip Shawn Gann in the first round of eliminations, this time Reed could only watch veteran Steve Johnson disappear into the distance while his bike sat silenced behind the line. “The TPS [throttle-position sensor] was bad, and when you take off and the TPS quits, it kills the transmission. It’s too bad. It was a brand-new transmission. We put one in that already had something wrong with it – that was the crappy part. We felt like there was no way we wouldn’t qualify, and then that happened.”

It was a bitter pill to swallow after pretty much doing better every time out this year. “I was starting to get used to it,” Reed said. “We were trying some new stuff Friday because we knew we had two shots Saturday if it didn’t work. We thought we were good.” There’s still time for a charge into the Top 10 and even a shot at the Countdown to the Championship playoffs. Though the NHRA season is two-thirds of the way over, the Pro Stock Motorcycles are barely halfway through, and they’ll be at every race until the end of the season.

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