Tag: 2016 (Page 4 of 4)

PSM – ATLANTA 2016

May 16, 2016 / Todd Veney

From a 6.95 in the opening session that gave him the early qualifying lead to a .010 reaction in the first official elimination round of his young drag racing career, the NHRA Southern Nationals was easily Cory Reed’s finest outing to date. “I was ready,” Reed said of his first-round matchup with many-time Pro Stock Motorcycle event winner Chip Ellis, who once came within one round of the NHRA championship. “I said I was going to get him on the Tree, and I did. Everybody told me ‘Don’t jinx it’ but I knew I was going to cut a light on him.”

Reed, who made the field in just his third career start, may have been well on the way to his first round-win … until the bike didn’t shift into 3rd gear. “When I left, I thought, ‘I was on it,’ and I never saw him at all. Then it wouldn’t shift and hit the rev-limiter, and I just kept hitting the button, hoping it would go into the next gear. That was going to be a good run, really good. It picked the tire up when I hit 2nd gear – that’s how you can tell.”

Astride an S&S-powered YNot Racing/Star Racing EBR 1190RX, Reed was in the sixes virtually all weekend at Atlanta Dragway, the home race on the NHRA tour for Americus, Ga.-based Star Racing. For Reed, who’s made countless test runs in Valdosta, Ga., and Gainesville, Fla., this race represented his first trips down the 40-year-old course, home of an NHRA national event for the past 35 years.

Reed’s Precision Service Equipment teammate, Angelle Sampey, qualified No. 1 with a 6.86 and ran a career-best 6.79 in the first round for low e.t. of the meet, so clearly the power is there. “We really got my bike figured out this weekend,” Reed said. “Something was dragging – maybe the back brake needs a new hanger – so we switched motors with her to make sure that was the problem. My bike’s going to run a lot better; it has low .80s in it. I was on a low .80 run in the first round – 6.81, 6.82 – until the transmission didn’t shift. The way it was trying to run that time and the way Angelle was running all weekend, I know I can win.”

PRO MOD – HOUSTON 2016

May 2, 2016 / Todd Veney

Former Top Alcohol Dragster world champion Jim Whiteley earned his biggest Pro Mod victory to date at the NHRA Springnationals in easily the wildest final in J&A Service Pro Mod Series history. While favored Rickie Smith was bouncing off both walls at Houston’s Royal Purple Raceway, Whiteley dodged Smith’s careening, out-of-control nitrous Camaro to win a race he didn’t even qualify for.

After getting into the field as an alternate for former Top Fuel driver Sidnei Frigo, Whiteley parlayed the opportunity into his first career Pro Mod final and first win, leaving on all four drivers he faced – usually by a lot. With his best reaction time of the event, .023, Whiteley opened a huge lead on Smith, the runaway early points leader who won the only other race this season, qualified No. 1 at this one, and hadn’t lost a round all year.

“It felt like a good light when I left, but I barely made it to the Tree,” Whiteley said. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s it – I lost,’ but now I’m glad it took the tire off. If I’d still been on the throttle, Rickie would have been into the side of me for sure.”

Smith’s car got up on two wheels, careened across the centerline into Whiteley’s lane, just missed clipping Whiteley’s car, then slammed into the wall in Whiteley’s lane while Whiteley, for the first time in his career, jammed on the brakes in the middle of a run. “I saw Rickie coming into my lane and realized I’d just won the race,” he said. “But I couldn’t really focus on that yet because I was still trying not to run into the back of him.”

The final was a fitting conclusion to a crazy, rain-plagued, crash-marred event – and the cars that crashed weren’t just any old cars. Of all the drivers in the massive 29-car field, the three who crashed were the No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 qualifiers after the opening session – Smith, Frigo, and former Pro Stock racer Jonathan Gray.

Gray began the carnage when he banged into the wall beyond the finish line after his left rear tire exploded right as he completed a 257-mph that held up all weekend as top speed of the meet. Frigo suffered by far the worst crash, catapulting over the left wall and barrel-rolling through the grass and mud in the second qualifying session after nailing down the No. 2 spot on his only previous attempt.

Seeded into Frigo’s spot on the ladder and pitted against Pete Farber in the opening round, Whiteley took a huge early lead – .044 to .122 – and held on for a narrow holeshot win, 6.02 to 5.95. The margin of victory was an invisible 8-thousandths of a second. Another massive holeshot in the quarterfinals against Shane Molinari, .026 to .170, left Whiteley well ahead at the finish line despite their similar E.T.s, 5.92 to 5.96. In the semifinals against reigning series champ Troy Coughlin, Whiteley again was off the mark first, .031 to .044, and needed it for a close 5.92 to 5.93 win that set up the unforgettable final.

“We still need to get this thing running a little better,” Whiteley said of his flawless J&A Service/YNot Racing ’69 Chevelle, “and I really think we will. If I can stay this sharp on the starting line and we get the car running a little quicker, we can really do some damage this year.”

TAFC – HOUSTON 2016

May 2, 2016 / Todd Veney

With one low 5.50 after another at the NHRA SpringNationals in Houston, Annie Whiteley turned in her finest performance since she dominated Top Alcohol Funny Car racing last summer with four final-round appearances and two wins in a five-race stretch.

The J&A Service/YNot racing team opened qualifying at Houston’s Royal Purple Raceway with a 5.51 for the provisional pole, improved to a 5.50-flat to lock down the No. 1 qualifying spot for good, and breezed into the semifinals with another 5.50 that held for low e.t. of the entire event and another 5.51 that stood as low e.t. of the second round. “We tested at Dallas before this race and the car was perfect, and it was the same thing when we got to Houston,” said Whiteley, whose suffered back spasms all weekend and had to be lifted gently into the cockpit before each run. “It’s great to have the car running like this again – it just gives you a lot more confidence.”

A nearly identical 5.52 in the semifinals wasn’t quite enough against veteran Steve Gasparrelli, who rebounded from .100+ reaction times in the first two rounds to post a .042 line and got to the finish line first with a slightly slower 5.54. It was the only reaction time and the only run Gasparrelli had all weekend quick enough to hold off Whiteley’s hard-charging Camaro on the top end.

For the YNot team, it was a doubly painful loss because, due to a bizarre set of circumstances, that semifinal match against Gasparrelli turned out to be the de facto final. With an odd number of cars in the field, the other semifinalist, Brian Hough, had a bye into the final, but a crank-trigger problem on the burnout silenced his engine and knocked him out of the race even though there wasn’t a car in the other lane. “I saw them pushing him off the line and thought, ‘OK, this is the final. Let’s get it done,’ but I didn’t quite get it done,” said Whiteley, who refused to use back pain as an excuse.

Despite that disappointment, crew chief Mike Strasburg and the YNot team have a car that can contend with the only two drivers who topped them in the 2015 national standings, Winternationals winner Jonnie Lindberg and Gatornationals champion John Lombardo. “We’re back where we belong,” said Whiteley, whose next race is the Denver regional in June. “We’re going to test between now and then, so we should be ready for anything when we come back.”

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2016

April 25, 2016 / Todd Veney

With one 6-second blast after another, Cory Reed went quicker every time he left the starting line at the always unpredictable Four-Wide Nationals at zMax Dragway but just missed making his first NHRA start.

One of four qualifying sessions at the palatial Charlotte, N.C., facility was rained out, but the Pro Stock Motorcycle bump still ended up a brutal 6.91 – just a couple hundredths of a second quicker than Reed’s weekend best of 6.94 on his final attempt. “We definitely could have used that session that got rained out,” he said. “If we’d gotten that last run, it would have been in the .80s for sure.”

It’s a legitimate claim – in testing the day after the race, Reed laid down back-to-back .80s in much less favorable atmospheric conditions than were present for Friday’s and Saturday’s qualifying. “We kept moving in the same direction on Monday that we’d been headed in qualifying,” he said. “We just ran out of runs one run too soon.”

It was Reed’s first experience in the controversial four-wide format, which pits riders side-by-side-by-side-by side for one weekend a year and typically accounts for more starting-line screw-ups than the other 15 NHRA races combined. “It’s crazy,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to know which part of the Tree you’re supposed to be looking at. They had to tell me ‘Lane 3’ one time before I pulled up there. Another time, I was trying to figure out where I was on the Tree, and when I found my lane, I realized that I was fully staged and barely got backed out of there in time.”

On his first run ever with three other bikes on the track, Reed finished second of the four riders with a respectable 6.99 at 190 mph. He followed with a better 6.97 at 198 Saturday morning and a 6.94 at 189 Saturday afternoon that left him 29-thousandths of a second short of the bump.

“I wish we could’ve run those .80s we ran Monday during the weekend, when it counted, but it’s all good,” Reed said. “I got to experience the four-wide thing, and it was cool, especially in the shutdown area, when you’re looking across the track and there are all these other guys out there coasting along with you. After what we ran Monday, we know we’re right in there with everybody else, and as long as we can keep the power management like it was then, I think we’re in a good spot going into Atlanta.”

LAS VEGAS NATIONAL 2016

April 4, 2016 / Todd Veney

At the Denso NHRA Nationals, Annie Whiteley didn’t do what she has so many times before at the Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway – win – but she did take a big step in the right direction after the first-round loss at the Phoenix season-opener. Whiteley, the defending Top Alcohol Funny Car champion at this event, pounded out solid runs in two of three qualifying sessions, including a 5.58 at nearly 265 mph, her best run of the season, en route to a quarterfinal finish.

“Let’s just say it was an extremely tricky track,” said Whiteley, whose YNot Racing/J&A Service team was one of just two top-half qualifiers to survive the wild, wide-open first round. “When that many people struggle to figure out the track in the same round, you know something’s up.” No. 1 qualifier John Lombardo, No. 2 qualifier and many-time Las Vegas winner Tony Bartone, and No. 3 qualifier and national points leader Doug Gordon all were gone after one round, with Bartone’s backpedaling 5.82 the best run of the bunch. Whiteley, who qualified No. 4, backpedaled to a 6.20 to hold off Chris Marshall, who had upset her in the first round of eliminations here last fall.

Whiteley was off the line first with one of the best reaction times of her career, a near-perfect .004, and got the car under control enough to pull away from Marshall’s all-over-the-track 6.37/238 with a 6.20/252. “It spun the tires early, but I didn’t know where he was,” she said. “You have to be quite a way behind to see the other car, and I never did see him, so just I kept trying.”

She had no such luck in Sunday’s second round of eliminations against eventual winner Terry Ruckman, the only other driver from the fast half of the field (No. 5) to make it out of the first round. While Whiteley fought to keep her car off the wall, Ruckman was long gone with a 5.58, his best run of the weekend and low e.t. of eliminations. Whiteley steered back into the groove, chased him down until there was no way she could catch him even if he broke, and coasted to a 6.18 at 217 mph.

“Nobody wants to lose, but Terry’s a good guy and he’d never won a national event before,” said Whiteley, who hails from the same hometown as Ruckman, Grand Junction, Colo. “All in all, it was a decent weekend. We figured out a few things with the car and my reaction times. The whole team has been working to figure out something for my lights, and I think we got it. We kept repositioning my [throttle] pedal and repositioning it, and I’m a lot more comfortable now. I don’t have to bury my foot against the can anymore, it just feels a lot better, and that has me kind of excited about the rest of the season.”

PRO MOD – GAINESVILLE 2016

March 22, 2016 / Todd Veney

Coming off a career-best stretch to close the 2015 NHRA J&A Service Pro Mod season and fresh off a big win at the RPM (Real Pro Mod) event earlier this month in West Palm Beach, Fla., Steven Whiteley was riding an all-time high entering the NHRA Gatornationals.

Driving the supercharged YNot Racing Cadillac, Whiteley was as high as 8th in the field at world-famous Gainesville Raceway but had the misfortune in the first round to line up opposite his nemesis, eventual winner Rickie Smith, who laid down low e.t. of the meet at the time, a 5.78 – the seventh-quickest run in Pro Mod history. “With a low-5.90 two years ago, when I debuted here, you’d be in the top three,” said Whiteley, who lost despite an otherwise excellent 5.90. “Now, that puts you in the slow half of the field. It’s not enough when guys are running .80s and even .70s. Everybody just keeps getting faster and faster and that’s cool, that’s how it should be. We should be running that too, and in certain conditions, we do.”

Whiteley shook and shut off on his opening qualifying attempt and stormed to a 5.92 at 246 mph in the second session, and it’s a good thing he did: He was pushed off the starting line in the final session. “The bolts on the back side of the ring gear came lose,” he explained. “I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it would roll freely and then lock up, roll freely and then lock up, so I knew it had to be something in the rear end. If that had been eliminations, I would’ve parked it in the beams and hoped the other guy made a mistake, but on a qualifying run there was nothing to do but shut it off.”

Whiteley made his best run of the weekend when it counted most, in the first round, but his 5.90 wasn’t enough against Smith’s 5.78 – even though the J&A driver drilled him on the Tree with a .053 reaction time. “I don’t know where Rickie came up with that, but we didn’t go for it and he did,” Whiteley said. “We’re better than that. Right now, what we struggle with is high-humidity conditions. It just kills the power and makes it shake the tires. When it does get down, it’s dead slow. When we have ‘Disneyland’ conditions, we’re tough, and we’re going to see those conditions again soon.”

PSM – GAINESVILLE 2016

March 21, 2016 / Todd Veney

In the first race of his first full season in NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle, Cory Reed just missed the cut at the prestigious Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla. Qualified 14th with one session to go, he ran 6.90s in three of four qualifying sessions only to get bumped in the final session by the guy in the other lane, perennial championship contender Hector Arana Jr.

“It was still a solid weekend, a great learning experience,” Reed said. “I like racing way better than just testing. It actually makes it a little easier, especially on the line – they put their first bulb on, you put yours on, you stage, they stage. It’s good just to get into the whole rhythm of having someone in the other lane.”

Astride the YNot Racing/Star Racing Buell EBR, Reed, who made his official debut last November at Las Vegas, took the early qualifying lead Friday afternoon with a career-best 6.933 at 191 mph only to have his time wiped off the board in the Friday evening session, when he spun off the line and slipped from 10th to 15th in the qualifying order – just below the crucial Top 12 line. In an NHRA rule enacted in 2008, all but the top 12 times are dropped heading into Saturday qualifying and everybody from 13 down starts all over. The final bump was 6.938, so if not for the controversial rule, Reed would have made an NHRA national event field in just his second attempt.

“It was hard not to think about that, but I’m more focused on getting used to the acceleration off the line and watching the shift light,” Reed said. “That first shift comes up fast – just past the 60-foot clocks – and you really have to be patient and wait on it. I short-shifted 1-2 and 2-3 really bad or that first run absolutely would’ve been in the .80s.”

Reed made two more strong runs Saturday – a 6.95 that got him back into the show in the third session and a 6.97 in last shot qualifying – but ended up 18th on the final qualifying grid, right between former world champ Matt Smith and many time national event winner Shawn Gann.

“It was awesome being right in there with all the big guys, especially Jerry [Savoie, who was in contention for the 2015 NHRA championship right down to the final day of the season],” Reed said. “Just rolling up next to Jerry was pretty sweet. It made me feel good to be a part of this team. [Star Racing teammate] Angelle [Sampey] qualified fifth [with a career-best 6.84], which just gives you even more confidence. These fields are tight, tight, tight every time, but we’re gonna figure everything out and I’m going to get this shift light figured out. We’ve definitely got the power, that’s for sure.”