Tag: 2017 (Page 4 of 4)

TAFC – HOUSTON 2017

April 24, 2017 / Todd Veney

Perennial championship contender Annie Whiteley, who had won half the races she entered this year as she pulled through the gates of Royal Purple Raceway, suffered a frustrating and frustratingly close first-round loss at the NHRA SpringNationals.

At the same Houston track where she just short of victory with a runner-up at the 2014 race, Whiteley qualified No. 6 this year with a 5.585 and was paired against Top Alcohol Funny Car rookie Ray Martin in the first round. Whiteley picked up half a tenth in the first round, wheeling the J&A Service/YNot Camaro to an outstanding 5.53 at nearly 270 mph.

Unfortunately for her, Martin, who was 7th on the grid with an almost identical 5.587, chose that round to run an even better 5.49/264 and won by about a car-length. “That was a tough draw,” Whiteley said of Martin, whose car is owned and tuned by 2014 Top Alcohol Funny Car world champ Steve Harker.

“We were in the No. 2 spot until the last qualifying session,” Whiteley said. “The car took the tires off in that session and it was, ‘See ya later.’ By the time the session was over, we were all the way down in the middle of the pack, and whenever that happens at a national event, you know you’re going to have somebody tough in the first round.”

PRO MOD – HOUSTON 2017

April 23, 2017 / Todd Veney

Jim Whiteley entered the NHRA SpringNationals in Houston as the defending event champ and son Steven did so as top-ranked driver on the J&A Service Pro Mod tour, winner of the season-opening Gatornationals. It ended in disappointment for both drivers, Jim in qualifying when he surprisingly failed to make the cut and Steven in the first round of eliminations.

“This was a big letdown after everything that happened in Gainesville,” said Steven, who fell in the first round to eventual winner Steve Matusek. “Winning Gainesville took a little bit of pressure off, just getting that first win, but it added some too because now everybody wants to take you out.”

Steven, twice a No. 1 qualifier already in his young career, entered last-shot qualifying just 25th in the field with a shutoff best of 6.35. Under immense pressure, he pounded out a 5.85 at 247 mph to make the program in the No. 12 position. Jim, whose earlier 5.93 had him comfortably in the field at the time, slipped to 21st by the time he staged in the final session and missed the race with a tire-shaking shutoff run.

In the first round, after lengthy delays for oildowns and the cleanup from Bob Rahaim’s scary double-wallbanger crash, Steven bolted off the line with a .053 reaction and was well on his way to a run well into the fives when the car got loose beyond half-track. He stayed with it until the very end, getting right on the edge of disaster without crossing it before finally relenting and reluctantly stepping off the gas. Matusek charged ahead and took the win with a 5.81, matching his qualifying time.

“This was the last thing I wanted after how well everything went in Gainesville,” Steven said. “These cars are so hard to keep consistent and you don’t want to let yourself fall into ‘Here we go again’ after a weekend like this, so we’ll just pick up from here and move on. I know what this team is capable of doing – we just did it in Gainesville.”

TAFC – BELLE ROSE 2017

April 11, 2017 / Todd Veney

In her first appearance ever at No Problem Raceway, Annie Whiteley built off the momentum from her breakthrough Gatornationals win last month, her biggest in years, with a second victory in just three 2017 starts, dominating from the outset and leaving with low e.t., top speed, and both ends of the track record.

“The car was smooth every run,” Whiteley said. “The guys were chasing the heat and the track, and they really stayed on top of it. They kept adjusting the tire pressure and timing because the track was getting hotter but basically left it alone and the car kept repeating. The left lane was good and the right was a little iffy so you really wanted to keep lane choice, and we had it every time.”

Deadly consistency – a 5.57, 5.55, and 5.56 in eliminations, all three at exactly 268 mph – carried the J&A Service/YNot Racing team to the title in tiny Belle Rose, La., about an hour north of New Orleans. Whiteley set not just low e.t. and top speed but low e.t. and top speed of all three rounds of eliminations after shattering the track e.t. and speed marks with a 5.508 at 268.80 mph in qualifying.

After a solid 5.57 on the first-round single she earned by qualifying No. 1, Whiteley took out two-time national event winner Kris Hool in the semi’s with a 5.55. In the final against Bryan Brown, the only other driver in the 5.50s this weekend, she pounded out an almost identical 5.55 to easily turn back Brown’s trouble-plagued, up-in-smoke 6.42.

“It was a great weekend,” Whiteley said. “No Problem is out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a nice, long track, which was great – we had a chute failure three runs in a row. Not both chutes, thank God, or there could have been a problem, but there was plenty of room to get stopped anyway. We tried so hard last year and never came home with any Wallys. Now we’ve only been to three races and we’ve already got two.”

PRO MOD – GAINESVILLE 2017

March 21, 2017 / Todd Veney

With the quickest, fastest, most consistent runs of his Pro Mod career – a barrage of 5.70s and low 5.80s at more than 250 mph – Steven Whiteley stopped many-time winner Mike Castellana and crew chief Frank Manzo in the Gatornationals final for his biggest victory to date. “It’s just an unbelievable feeling,” said Whiteley, who watched his mom, Annie Whiteley, win Top Alcohol Funny Car one pair ahead of him. “When she won, it really sent the pressure on me through the roof. I thought, ‘Now, I have to win this thing.’ ”

With his best reaction time and best E.T. of the weekend and the fastest speed of his career, he did. For father Jim Whiteley, who also qualified for the Pro Mod field in Gainesville, the dual wins surpassed anything he ever personally accomplished on the quarter-mile. “I’m overwhelmed,” said Jim, who won dozens of races and multiple NHRA championships as a Top Alcohol Dragster driver. “This means more than any race I ever won. If none of us ever wins again, this weekend makes my whole drag racing career worthwhile.”

Steven, a two-time No. 1 qualifier in NHRA competition (in Charlotte in 2014 and in St. Louis last year), started at the top, leading a giant field of qualifiers after the first session with a 5.80-flat. He eventually dipped to the No. 5 spot with that e.t., but when others faltered in eliminations, Whiteley got only stronger, cutting better lights as the day wore on and never losing his consistency.

“The car was perfect all weekend, and I owe it all to my team,” Whiteley said of the J&A Service/YNot team, led by crew chief Jeff Perley. “I could not be more appreciative of what they do, day after day, week after week. Testing at Bradenton went really well, the whole team has been working well together, and I just had a good feeling coming into this race.”

Whiteley topped one major event winner after another in eliminations, starting with door-car legend Todd Tutterow in the opening round, 5.79/252 to 5.86/247. Former series champion Mike Janis slipped into Whiteley’s lane in the quarterfinals, but the second-generation driver was long gone for a 5.80/251 win that set up a titanic semifinal clash with two-time NHRA Pro Mod champ Troy Coughlin, who had beaten Brazilian Sidnei Frigo in the semifinals in the quickest race in Pro Mod history, 5.75 to 5.72.

“Now, that was nerve-wracking,” Whiteley said of the Coughlin matchup. “It’s not just that he was coming off a 5.75 – he was coming off a .00 light, too.” Coughlin, runner-up for the 2016 championship, just missed another .00 reaction time with a telepathic .012, but Whiteley had him covered by several car lengths at the finish line, 5.82/251 to Coughlin’s 6.21/197.

The final was over early. Castellana blew the tires off early, and Whiteley was home free. Anything would have done, but he punctuated the victory with his quickest and fastest run ever in NHRA trim, a 5.791 at 253.52 mph. “The best part of it was the way Castellana was to me,” Whiteley said of the many-time NHRA winner. “He could not have been any cooler, and that’s something I’ll always remember.”

TAFC – GAINESVILLE 2017

March 20, 2017 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley made the two greatest runs of her career in the semifinals and final round of the NHRA Gatornationals for her fourth career national title and first since Seattle in 2015.

“Sometimes you wonder if things are ever going to go your way again, but a weekend like this makes it all worthwhile,” said Whiteley, who ran a 5.40 (low e.t. of the meet) to edge defending champion John Lombardo in the semifinals and a 5.41 on a final-round single when 2013-2014 Gatornationals winner Dan Pomponio was unable to appear. “The car was just unbelievable all weekend.”

Despite an outstanding 5.45, Whiteley qualified just fifth in the field, then survived major scares in the early round of eliminations. In the opening round, she was just about to get strapped in for what she thought was a single when she was informed that, due to a mistake by NHRA officials, she would not have a bye run but instead would be racing Bill Naves. “We were really going for it that time because with a bye run, why not?” she said. “If it makes it, you know how hard you can push it for the next round, and if it doesn’t, you win anyway because there’s no one in the other lane.”

The car didn’t make it, shaking the tires violently and giving Naves, who qualifying attempt, a shot at the biggest round win of his NHRA career. Fortunately for the J&A Service/YNot Racing team, Whiteley was able to get the powerful beast back under control in time to blow past Naves for a 6.44 to 8.11 win.

In the quarterfinals, Whiteley got a scare of a different kind when opponent Andy Bohl, who had run one 5.4 after another until that point, veered completely into her lane, just missing her. “I’m glad I didn’t see how close he got,” she said. “People had pictures of it and were trying to show me, and I said, ‘I don’t want to think about that.’ ”

She advanced with a solid 5.51, then unloaded the 5.40 on Lombardo, the No. 1 qualifier, and beating him by one-thousandth of a second, stealing low e.t. from him (5.404 to his 5.409) to win a photo-finish decision. Both of them hit 273 mph in the fastest-side-by-side race of all time.

In the final, with the track to herself, she eclipsed her one-run-old career-best speed of 273.05 with a 273.22-mph blast. “It’s weird being on a single in the final,” she said. “You think of the ignition quitting or some dumb little thing breaking. What happens then? Does nobody win? I left, and it was just a perfect run. The front end came up, settled back down, came back up again when I hit second gear and just ran perfectly straight to the finish line. I wish every run could be like that.”

PSM – GAINESVILLE 2017

March 19, 2017 / Todd Veney

The debut of Pro Stock Motorcycle’s new superteam, Team Liberty Racing, went better than anyone could have envisioned – especially as the dwindling days before the season-opening NHRA Gatornationals wound down. “Everybody’s happy,” said team leader Cory Reed after both he and teammate Angelle Sampey qualified for the tough Gainesville field. “I think we all decided as we headed to the track that we’d already accomplished our goals for the first race.”

While established teams spent the winter picking away at setups, finding new power, and refining their 2016 tuneups, the all-new Georgia-based operation was just trying to get a new shop built. “It was a relief to be actually be at a race after all that work,” Reed said. “It was like, ‘Well, let’s see how we stack up with everybody else.’ ”

Reed quickly learned that Team Liberty Racing stacked up quite well – both bikes made the cut. Reed and Sampey both picked up as the race wore on, Reed making the cut on his first run and eventually improving to a 6.88 at 192 mph for the No. 11 spot and Sampey qualifying a completely unfamiliar motorcycle under last-shot pressure.

“She was a nervous wreck for a while there,” Reed said of Sampey, a three-time NHRA world champ. “She just needed one pass to confirm that she can do it, and she was fine. When I first started learning, I’d sometimes make back-to-back passes rotating between four different bikes, so I got used to it. Now, I’m comfortable on just about anything.”

Reed showed it in eliminations, when, after not particularly trying to cut a light during qualifying, he opened an early lead on former world champion L.E. Tonglet in the first round with a clutch .011-second reaction time. Tonglet eventually drove around the 2016 NHRA Rookie of the Year, 6.80/197 to Reed’s 6.95/190, but by then Reed’s point was made: Team Liberty is going to be a factor in 2017.

The back-loaded NHRA schedule for Pro Stock Motorcycles, which features a much more packed slate of races and long breaks between events early in the 16-race season, stops next in Charlotte for the Four-Wide Nationals in late April. “We’ll have a lot of testing in by the time we get there,” Reed said. “We changed a bunch of piston stuff and cam stuff before we even left Gainesville, and we’ll be ready when we get to Charlotte. Both of us making the show in our first race made it a good weekend, but as the season goes on we’re both going to be a lot closer to the top teams.”

TAFC – GAINESVILLE REGIONAL 2017

March 13, 2017 / Todd Veney

In her first outing of the 2017 season (but not her car’s first), perennial championship contender Annie Whiteley was unceremoniously upset in the first round of Top Alcohol Funny Car eliminations by veteran Kris Hool after qualifying way up in the No. 2 spot.

At the Eastern Regional in Gainesville, Fla., one week before she would win the prestigious Gatornationals at the same facility, Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro inexplicably blew the tires off in low gear, costing her the race. “We have no idea why,” she said. “It was running perfect in qualifying, then in the first round, ‘poof‘ – up in smoke.”

Until that point, Whiteley was perfectly positioned for another win. Qualified No. 2, behind only Sweden’s Ulf Leanders, she ran an outstanding 5.502, missing the .40s by a mere three-thousandths of a second. Weeks earlier in mineshaft conditions at the Western Regional event in Phoenix, substitute driver Greg Hunter reestablished his career best seemingly every time down the track in the YNot Camaro with one solid run after another, including his first 5.40s.

“We got back to the pits after first round, and Mike and the guys were all scratching their heads,” Whiteley said of crew chief Mike Strasburg, a former national event champion in Top Alcohol Dragster. “There was no way they were trying to do anything except what they’d already been doing. That’s OK, though – that’s why they have the next race, right?”

TAFC – PHOENIX 2017

March 6, 2017 / Todd Veney

Filling in for Annie Whiteley, who was kept away from the track this weekend by business commitments, veteran driver Greg Hunter wheeled Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro to a career-best 5.47 at the 2017 season opener in Phoenix for the No. 1 spot in the quickest Top Alcohol Funny Car field of all time (5.55 bump).

“I didn’t know exactly how quick it was, but I knew it was the quickest, fastest run I ever made,” said Hunter, who boosted his career-best speed by a full 7 mph in his debut with the team, from 263 to 270, making him one of the fastest drivers in Alcohol Funny Car history. “We were getting ready for first round, and I had to think about it for a minute, get my head around having the fastest car in the field. I’ve never had that kind of feeling before.”

Adapting quickly to the unfamiliar confines of Whiteley’s car, Hunter got the job done in the first round with a .050 light and a wire-to-wire win over the converter car of Bill Bernard, 5.51/268 to 5.58/258. In the semifinals, another new career best – 5.478, just one-thousandth of a second quicker than the 5.479 he ran to top all qualifiers – left Hunter just short of Doug Gordon’s unbelievable 5.43 at nearly 270 mph.

“I’m not saying I know it would’ve run a 5.43, but it could’ve run better that time,” Hunter said. “When I put it on the clip, it didn’t go all the way to the rpm [crew chief] Mike [Strasburg] wanted. We were trying to leave higher, and the track would’ve held it.”

Hunter, longtime driver for the recently sidelined SynOil Top Alcohol Funny Car team, is a two-time winner on the NHRA tour, both times at the Lucas Oil Series race at Mission Raceway in Mission, B.C. “I couldn’t believe it when Annie’s team asked me if I wanted to test their car, and then I even got to race it,” he said. “I was totally honored that they would let me do it. After the race, I told them, ‘Hey, maybe I should test Annie’s new car at every national event for a about a year, just to make sure everything’s good to go.’ “