Tag: 2017 (Page 2 of 4)

PRO MOD – INDY 2017

September 5, 2017 / Todd Veney

Steven Whiteley pounded out three picture-perfect runs to open the prestigious U.S. Nationals, then survived a 1-for-3 stretch to record a quarterfinal finish and maintain fourth place in the J&A Service Pro Mod Series standings.

Whiteley, who won the season-opening Gatornationals, began the biggest race of the season with a 5.785/249, 5.840/248, and 5.795/249. He was up in smoke early in last-shot qualifying (“That was no surprise – we pushed the limit on purpose, just to see what we could get away with,” he said}, but when the tires broke loose again in the first round of eliminations, it was anything but OK.

It didn’t matter, though – opponent Shannon Jenkins, one of the true legends of Pro Mod racing, red-lighted. Whiteley was as surprised as anyone, and, as it turned out, the last to know. “All the way down the track and all through the shutdown area, I had no idea Shannon red-lighted,” he said. “I turned off the track and tried to swing wide to get of his way, but they kept pointing me over to where the winners go to be interviewed. When they told me, I couldn’t believe it.”

Granted the unexpected reprieve, Whiteley and the J&A Service/YNot crew didn’t capitalize Monday in the quarterfinals, bowing out with a good-but-not-good enough 5.91/247. Eventual winner Sidnei Frigo of Brazil took them out with a better 5.81/252 – exactly what Whiteley expected his own car to run. “As soon as I let the clutch out and made the 1-2 gear change, I knew we were screwed,” he said.

Whiteley’s second-round showing kept him in the top five in the standings, but he’ll be hovering in the lower reaches of the Top 10 the next time he straps in at an NHRA event – not because the team isn’t running well but because he has bigger priorities. Whiteley, whose wife, Delaina, is scheduled to give birth to a daughter right around the time of the next event on tour, Charlotte (Sept. 15-17), will skip that one and the following one, St. Louis.

“We’ll probably fall to sixth or seventh in the points by the time we’re back out there – lower, maybe – but as long as we change the car number [by finishing in the Top 10] for next year, I’ll be happy,” Whiteley said. “There are bigger things in life. This is my first child. I can race for the rest of my life.”

TAFC – BRAINERD 2017

August 21, 2017 / Todd Veney

In the picturesque resort country of Brainerd, Minn., where she runner-upped last year and reached the first national final of her career in 2012, Annie Whiteley came up just short of another final-round appearance.

With a bye to the final round of the Lucas Oil Nationals on the line, Whiteley came out on the wrong end of a tight quarterfinal match against touring pro Kris Hool, 5.50 to 5.53. “The car ran great – exactly what we thought it would,” she said. “We didn’t know he was going to run a .50-flat. That’s kind of how things have been going all year.” The winner of that round earned a bye into the final, and, as has been the case far too often this year, the luckless YNot team came up a few hundredths of a second short at just the wrong time.

Whiteley qualified a solid fifth with a 5.566 at 269.13 mph in the first qualifying session, then followed with broken runs in the remaining two sessions and another in the first round. She lost traction early in that one but, for once, got a break – opponent Chris Foster, fresh off back-to-back regional wins on the same weekend in Indianapolis, broke a rear end and could only coast helplessly toward the far end.

Granted a rare reprieve, Whiteley tromped on back on the throttle for the easy win. Only from her perspective, it didn’t seem easy at all. “I kept wondering when he was going to come back around me,” she said. “I automatically shifted when the car shook, but that didn’t get rid of the shake, so I lifted. When I got back on it, I was already in 2nd gear. It took a loooooong time for that shift light to come on for high gear – almost to the 1,000-foot mark. Right when I was starting to think that I missed it, it came on.”

Whiteley hit high gear and scooped up the win with just a 6.48 e.t. but a speed that indicated what was to come in the following round and, hopefully, for the rest of the year. Despite lifting early and losing momentum in the most important part of the run, she charged across the finish line at more than 258 mph. On the losing 5.53 run in the quarterfinals, she obliterated the track record with top speed by a mile, running a track-record 273.33-mph speed on a weekend when no one else ever got out of the 260s.

PSM – BRAINERD 2017

August 20, 2017 / Todd Veney

With their backs to the wall after blowing up an engine on the first qualifying run and skipping the second one, Cory Reed and Team Liberty rebounded Saturday morning with a 6.97 to move into the Lucas Oil Nationals Pro Stock Motorcycle field for good.

At Brainerd International Raceway, where the quickest runs in Top Fuel and Funny Car history were recorded Friday night, Reed wheeled his Team Liberty machine to a decent 6.97 at 187 mph Saturday morning and a consistent 6.98 at 186 that afternoon to solidify his position in the final lineup.

Pitted against Top 10 rider and No. 4 qualifier Scotty Pollacheck in the first round, Reed left Pollacheck at the line and sped away for his first round-win of the season and the first ever for Team Liberty, 6.94 to 6.96. “I looked over somewhere in high gear and nobody was there,” he said. “I had to look behind me to find him. That was the best feeling ever: we’re going to win. Actually, I felt that way even before I ran him, when I woke up Sunday morning. That’s the first time I can say I honestly felt that way all year.”

Reed fell in the next round to year-long nemesis and eventual runner-up L.E. Tonglet, the runaway points leader, who has won as many races this year as all other riders combined – but not before getting another holeshot head start. Reed opened up a huge early advantage, but Tonglet drove around him with, naturally, his strongest run of the weekend, a 6.85. Reed trailed with a 6.96, but at that point, it almost didn’t matter.

“I felt like I won the whole race when we won the first round,” Reed said. “I didn’t even need to make another run after that. It’s tough, starting a new team like this. We knew it was going to be, and it has been. But after a weekend like this, I can finally see what’s ahead of us down the road.”

TAFC – SEATTLE 2017

August 7, 2017 / Todd Veney

A totally unexpected mechanical glitch knocked Annie Whiteley out of the Northwest Nationals – right when everything was going perfectly. At venerable Seattle International Raceway, site of some of the greatest runs in Top Alcohol Funny Car history, Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro reigned atop the qualifying charts after the opening session with a strong 5.538 at 269.67 mph.

Things got only better as qualifying progressed, as Whiteley and crew chief Mike Strasburg backed up their off-the-trailer shot with equally impressive and nearly identical runs of 5.528/268.01 and 5.532/270.86. Set up perfectly for eliminations, Whiteley seemed even more sure to win when opponent Steve Gasparrelli, the eventual runner-up, managed just a 6.10 against her in the first round.

Unfortunately for Whiteley, she didn’t even make it to the Tree that time before going up in hard smoke. “The idle was too high,” she said. “The guys tried everything but couldn’t get it to come back down.” The result was an engine running way too lean and getting way too hot, which created way too much power and led, inevitably, to an up-in-smoke loss.

“The cylinder heads were 190 degrees – not 140, like they’re supposed to be,” Whiteley said. “The butterflies in the injector got ‘twisted,’ which also made the launch rpm too high – 7,600 instead of 6,800 or 7,100, like normal. It just made too much power. Lately, we just don’t have any luck. That could’ve happened on a warmup or on a qualifying run, but it had to happen right in the first round of eliminations. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just one more way to lose.”

PRO MOD – DENVER 2017

August 6, 2017 / Todd Veney

Steven Whiteley outdrove and outran the top drivers in the world to reach the final round of the World Series of Pro Mod, the highest-paying race in class history, where, for maybe the first time ever for an event of this magnitude, no E.T.s or speeds appeared on the scoreboard.

There was no qualifying – pairings were completely random, drawn out of a hat in the weeks before the event. Everybody knew what they were running the whole time, but nobody ever knew what anybody else was. When the final was run and the tire smoke literally had cleared, it was revealed that just five 5-second times were recorded in the unfriendly climes of Denver’s mile-high Bandimere Speedway. Whiteley accounted for three of them all by himself, in the first, second, and semifinal rounds of eliminations.

One more 5-second run – anything close to a 5, actually – and Whiteley would have claimed the biggest payout in Pro Mod history, $100,000, but this was one time it didn’t pay to finish second. The World Series of Pro Mod, more than any drag race ever, was truly winner-take-all. Not only did first- and second-round losers receive no paycheck, but neither did the semifinalists. And neither did the runner-up. This one was all or nothing.

“That was a tough round to lose,” admitted Whiteley, who whose car annihilated the tires about 100 feet off the line in the final round. Upstart Michael Bowman had to lift, too, but he didn’t shake as severely as Whiteley did and got back on the throttle for a winning 6.27 at 239 mph – the only numbers to appear on the scoreboards all weekend – and the biggest payday in Pro Mod history.

“The car was straight as can be until the tire kicked out,” said Whiteley, who was off the mark first with a clutch .029 reaction time. “I got back on it, and it pushed me to the centerline. You never want to lift, but it wasn’t worth wrecking. Michael’s a good guy. He’s humble. He probably needed the money more than we did, and I’m just happy with how our car ran.”

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot team ran between 5.97 and 5.99 in all three preliminary rounds, against local driver Tommy Johanns, Canadian Eric Latino, and Steve Matusek. Between them, the other 15 teams accounted for just two 5-second laps and Whiteley’s dad, YNot team leader Jim Whiteley, ran one of them. Matusek ran the other, a 5.98 in the semifinals, but Steven, whose worst light all weekend was a .032, beat him on a holeshot with a 5.99.

“It was a good weekend,” Whiteley concluded. “Bandimere’s basically our home track. We got to the final and the car ran great all weekend. I’m encouraged about Indy and the rest of the season, and I haven’t had this much fun racing in a long time.”

PSM – SONOMA 2017

July 31, 2017 / Todd Veney

At the Sonoma Nationals just north of San Francisco in Sonoma, Calif., second-year sensation Cory Reed came within a thousandth of a second of his best run all year. Reed, crowned Rookie of the Year after his incredible 2016 campaign, picked up more than a tenth of a second from his opening qualifying run to record a 6.889 – just one-thousandth of a second from the season-best he established at the Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla.

Reed ran an out-of-the-box 6.99, picked up dramatically in the second session to a 6.92, and, after a 7-flat in the third session, inched to the line in the final session riding the bubble with the 6.92. Under intense pressure, the Team Liberty rider dropped the hammer for a 6.88 at 191.46 that surprisingly landed him on just the 14th rung on the qualifying ladder.

That set up a first-round match with the No. 3 qualifier, perennial championship contender Hector Arana Jr. For once, Reed actually didn’t tree his opponent, and against one of the fastest bikes in the country, he was out of contention early in the race. Reed recorded a respectable 6.97 at 186 mph, but Arana’s Lucas Oil-backed bike was long gone with a 6.74 at the sixth-fastest speed in Pro Stock Motorcycle history, 199.52 mph.

“This wasn’t a good weekend for us,” Reed admitted. “We’re a new team, and this is going to happen sometimes, but when we get our dyno done and get to try all the stuff [crew chief] Ken [Johnson] has in mind, we’ll be fine.”

PSM – DENVER 2017

July 24, 2017 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed and his Team Liberty crew paid the dues at the Mile-High Nationals in Denver that all new drag race teams must before it all pays off in the end. At mile-high Bandimere Speedway, as at every track on tour this year, Reed and teammate Angelle Sampey continued their quest to meet the lofty goal they established before the season got underway in Gainesville: qualify both bikes at every race all year.

“It’s a lot to ask – especially for a brand-new team – but we’re capable of doing it and so far we doing it,” Reed said. What’s proved much more elusive is racking up round-wins, but, in easily the most competitive class in professional drag racing today, that’s to be expected.

Reed opened rain-shortened qualifying with a solid 7.27 at 181 mph that afforded him the early qualifying lead. As he has so often this year, Reed backed up his early success with rock-solid runs in the ensuing sessions, recording similar times of 7.31/179 and 7.30/181

Qualified a solid 10th in the field – the second-highest he’s qualified all year, behind only Norwalk, where he was ninth – Reed had a first-round matchup against the toughest possible opponent: reigning world champ Jerry Savoie. Reed charged off the line with a holeshot head start, as usual, but Savoie’s White Alligator Racing Suzuki surged into the lead before half-track and pulled away for the win, 7.23/183 to Reed’s competitive 7.30/181.

Despite fighting to keep the bike in the groove for much of the race, Reed fell short by just 56-thousandths of a second. “It was close, but not close enough,” he said. “It make take a while, but we’re going to get there – trust me.”

TAFC – WOODBURN 2017

July 17, 2017 / Todd Veney

Filling in for perennial title contender Annie Whiteley for the second time this season, Greg Hunter, whose only previous start in the J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro, four months ago in Phoenix, yielded personal best E.T.s and speeds, went the distance this time, topping one of the quickest Top Alcohol Funny Car fields in history (5.58 bump) for his third career victory and biggest ever.

“It was an honor to drive Annie’s car,” Hunter said. “The whole thing just came out of nowhere Wednesday. I got a call from [crew chief] Mike [Strasburg.] Did I want to drive her car this weekend? Hell yes I did. I got there, and an hour later I was in the car. I was a little rusty at first, a little behind the car, but by the time we ran eliminations, I felt good in there.”

Starting from the No. 2 position behind surprise No. 1 qualifier Chip Beverett, Hunter drilled opponent Nick Januik on the Tree with a .027 reaction time and obliterated the Woodburn Dragstrip speed record with a 5.52 at 272.47 mph in the first round. Another 5.52 in the semifinals took out many-time Woodburn winner Steve Gasparrelli, who had just run a career-best 5.49 at 268 mph in the previous round.

“The car doesn’t fit me quite right,” Hunter said. “You’re all twisted up in there. You’re a little tight, your foot’s not quite where you want it, and you’re like, ‘Was it like this last time?’ Then they tell you that you ran 271 mph right out of the box for a new track record, and you’re like, ‘Maybe this isn’t too bad…’ Then you go 272.3 in qualifying and 272.4 in the first round, and the next thing you know, you’re in the final.”

Waiting for him was the second-ranked driver in the nation, Doug Gordon, who uncharacteristically qualified on the bump but picked up in eliminations, including a 5.521 in the first round that matched Hunter’s time right down to the thousandth. Gordon ran just a 5.59 in the semifinals, which forced Strasburg and the YNot crew to make a decision for the final: stay with the same tuneup or go for broke.

“They’d left it alone all day,” Hunter said. “That’s the thing – when you’re running like that, running those numbers in the heat all weekend, it puts pressure on the other team, so they didn’t touch a thing. We knew Doug would step up, but how much – .56? .55?”

Gordon actually ran a 5.53, so did Hunter, and he edged Gordon’s respectable .065 reaction time with a .055 to win on a slight holeshot. “I’ve never driven any car close to as fast as this,” Hunter said. “It just hauls ass. When I put it in high gear, I thought I left him in the dust, but you look at the numbers and it was close all the way. It was just a fantastic drag race, and I hope it helps Annie win the championship.”

PSM – CHICAGO 2017

July 10, 2017 / Todd Veney

2016 NHRA Rookie of the Year Cory Reed paced the field early in qualifying for the Route 66 Nationals in Chicago before ultimately bowing out in the first round of eliminations. Reed, teammate of three-time Pro Stock Motorcycle world champ Angelle Sampey, wheeled his Team Liberty Victory machine to a speedy 6.96 at just short of 190 mph off the trailer to assume the top spot.

Reed and crew chiefs Ken Johnson and Chris Rivas maintained their consistency in the second session with a similar 6.97 at just 185 mph. Under different atmospheric conditions Saturday afternoon in the third of four qualifying sessions, Reed managed an incredibly consistent 6.97 at his best speed of the weekend, 190.62 mph, and followed with a steady 7-flat at 189 that evening.

Eliminations ended early when Reed, one of the quickest-reacting drivers in drag racing, was too quick for his own good. By less than one-hundredth of a second he fouled in the opening round of eliminations against recent nemesis L.E. Tonglet, who absolutely dominated the first half of the season, winning more races than all other riders combined.

“It didn’t even matter – no way I could have beaten him that time no matter what my reaction time,” said Reed of his -.009 red-light start. Tonglet, who also won the Chicago event in 2010, when he won the NHRA championship, and again in 2011, marched to a 6.830 at 196.36, crossing the finish line ahead of Reed even despite Reed’s ill-gotten early lead. “We’ll keep working at it and working at it and one of these days I won’t need to try to cut it so close on the Tree.”

PRO MOD – NORWALK 2017

June 27, 2017 / Todd Veney

Steven Whiteley came through under huge pressure in last-shot qualifying at the NHRA Summit Racing Nationals to make the cut and extend the longest active consecutive-race qualifying streak in Pro Mod. Twenty-fifth on the list with a shutoff best of 9.13 when the session began, Whiteley was the first one down the track in the left lane. Charging off the line and speeding through the mid-range, he clocked a strong 5.87 at 248 mph – his highest speed since a 249-mph blast at Charlotte – for the No. 10 spot on the grid.

In the opening round, Whiteley cut one of the best lights of the entire event, .033, only to fall to Jonathan Gray when the former Pro Stock racer was even quicker with a .023 reaction time and a 5.83 opposite Whiteley’s otherwise fine 5.93. Whiteley, who opened the season with a victory at the Gatornationals, remains in the Top 5 in the J&A Service Pro Mod Series despite a second straight early exit in eliminations.

“It’s been a little rough the last two weeks, but it’s still the best season we’ve ever had, by far,” said Whiteley, who currently stands fourth in the rankings. “[Crew chief] Jeff [Perley] and all the guys have worked their tails off to make this car consistent, and you can tell by the number of rounds we’ve won and the number of times we’ve beaten higher-qualified cars.”

After racing on back-to-back-to-back weekends in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Ohio, teams get a two-month reprieve before the series picks back up with the biggest race of the season, the U.S. Nationals, in Indianapolis over Labor Day weekend. “That’s a lot of time to work on the car, test, and make everything better,” Whiteley said. “If we can stay in the Top 5 all season, maybe even move back up a couple spots, that would be incredible. You start out in this deal and you just want to qualify. Then you want to win rounds, and then you want to win a race. We’ve done all that now. We just need to keep going in this direction.”