Tag: 2020 (Page 2 of 3)

TAFC – MARTIN/TULSA 2020

October 10, 2020 / Todd Veney

Starting at a track she’d never been to in her life and finishing a month later 800 miles away at a facility at which she’d never not made the final round, Annie Whiteley turned in her finest performance to date in Midwest Drag Racing Series competition, trailering some of the greatest Alcohol Funny Car racers ever along the way.

Originally scheduled for Sept. 11-12 at U.S. 131 Dragway, the completely rebuilt facility in Martin, Mich., has always been fast, dating back the Popular Hot Rodding Championships in the ’70s, the most prestigious race that wasn’t an NHRA, AHRA, or IHRA national event. Whiteley qualified with a 3.71 (eighth-mile) at the outrageously fast speed of 215 mph, and in the first round dropped the most feared driver in Top Alcohol Funny Car today, Sean Bellemeur. Then it rained. And rained. And kept right on raining until series founder Keith Haney was forced to move the remainder of eliminations to MWDRS’ home base, Tulsa Raceway Park, for double points at the season finale.

At Tulsa, the YNot/J&A team picked up right where it left off in Michigan, taking out another two-time NHRA world champ, Jonnie Lindberg, to make a fourth straight final at the Oklahoma track. The Swedish driver red-lighted, invalidating a 3.675 at 212.43 mph, but Whiteley had him all the way with a nice .054 reaction time and a quicker 3.671 at 211.59.

In the final against perennial contender Chris Marshall, Whiteley got off the mark first with a clutch .023 reaction time and posted an E.T almost identical to her winning semifinal time, a 3.68 at 211 mph. But with a quicker 3.64/210, Marshall ran her down by 19-thousandths of a second to win $15,000 – the same winner’s purse Top Fuel and Funny Car drivers are racing for at NHRA national events for the rest of the year.

“I hated to lose, but we still had fun,” Whiteley said. “I really like this Midwest Drag Racing Series deal. Haney’s a racer. He’s not pocketing all this money. There’s a plan. They’re happy you’re here, and if Super Pro loses a session because of the weather, the Funny Cars do, too. It doesn’t matter who you are – everybody’s equal, nobody is better than anybody else.”

PRO MOD – GAINESVILLE 2020

September 28, 2020 / Todd Veney

At the only Gatornationals ever contested in the Fall and the only one that likely ever will be, two-time NHRA Pro Mod winner Jim Whiteley sailed through qualifying with back-to-back 5.8s, advanced to the middle rounds of eliminations solely on his reflexes, and finally bowed out against career-long nemesis “Trickie Rickie” Smith, the eventual winner, in the quarterfinals.

Whiteley, whose son, Steven, won this race in 2017 on the biggest day of his racing career, cut a killer .026 light and streaked down the track straight and true to a 5.89 at 243.85 mph in the Friday evening session. Saturday afternoon in teams’ only attempt to qualify, he picked up to a 5.86/244 that carried him to the No. 5 position in the final order, his highest all year.

The YNot/J&A Service driver faced Aeromotive owner Steve Matusek, a national event winner himself, in the opening round in Matusek’s first start in a ’20 Mustang that replaced the spectacular turbocharged Tequila Comisario Mustang he destroyed in the first round at Indy in that car’s debut. With a .068 reaction time, Matusek wasn’t exactly late, but Whiteley, reminiscent of his glory days as a Top Alcohol champion, had him all the way with a superior .032 reaction time for a holeshot win.

Matusek’s 5.850 in the unfamiliar new machine was only marginally quicker than Whiteley’s 5.856 in his ’63 ‘Vette, and their reaction times made for a margin of victory of just 11 feet in the traps. For Whiteley, the weekend came to an end in the quarterfinals, when Smith, the former IHRA star and many-time NHRA Pro Mod champ, rumbled to a 5.79/249. Whiteley got loose in low gear, got back in the gas just in case Smith encountered difficulties downtrack, and coasted silently across the finish line four and a half seconds later with a 10.30 at 83 mph.

TAFC – INDY 2020

September 7, 2020 / Todd Veney

The worldwide Coronavirus pandemic that’s brought the sport and the whole country to its knees this year also served to make Indy, in a weird way, somehow bigger than ever. In addition to being drag racing’s most sought-after prize year after year, Indy also represented what many top sportsman drivers consider an honor equivalent to a national event title: victory in the prestigious the Jeg’s Allstars event. For Annie Whiteley’s J&A Racing/YNot Racing Top Alcohol Funny Car team, both races ended in disappointment; she was gone after a single round of eliminations in both, after qualifying high, as always, for both contests.

Limited to just two shots to qualify by the condensed schedule, Whiteley qualified seventh – good for most drivers, but not for her. She’s qualified in the slow half of a national event field only once in her entire career – and barely, 9th – and had lane choice once again at the U.S. Nationals, where she’s a three-time runner-up. A 5.54 at 269.78 mph (top speed of the event) in the team’s immaculate Yenko blue Camaro set up a first-round race early Sunday morning with veteran Dan Pomponio, who won four national events from early 2013 to early 2014 but none since.

Whiteley, who had won 80 percent of their previous matchups, pre-staged, revved it to the moon, rolled into the staged beam, and waited. And waited. And then waited a little more. Having the shortest clutch leg in Top Alcohol Funny Car has always been a competitive disadvantage, but never more so than this weekend. When the RPMs had been up there up for so long that the car was about to start creeping, she pushed her clutch foot in a little harder to keep from rolling through … and that’s right when Pomponio staged.

The former Super Gas racer, who’d been at high C for nowhere near as long as his diminutive opponent, let it fly a particle of a second after the light turned green, while Whiteley was hanging on for dear life, trying to keep from red-lighting more than she was trying to knock down the Tree. In the end, reaction times were immaterial; her car blew the tires off at the hit.

“I don’t know how long I sat there, but it was a long time – four or five seconds – which was weird because I don’t think Dan’s never done that to me before,” she said. “He usually rolls right in. Same thing with DJ [Cox, her opponent in the Jegs Allstars race a day earlier.] It didn’t matter – the car didn’t make it down the track anyway. The clutch wasn’t what we thought it was. [Crew chief] Mike [Strasburg] had it way more aggressive than he wanted it, and we never had a chance.”

PSM – INDY 2020

September 7, 2020 / Todd Veney

Last seen exactly a year ago at the 2019 U.S. Nationals, 2016 NHRA Rookie of the Year Cory Reed made his triumphant return to drag racing back at the motorsports capital of the world: Indy. Running all by himself Friday night to open pro qualifying for the one race every rider most wants to win, he skipped the 6.90s entirely and plunged into the .80s with an off-the-trailer 6.897 at 194.58 that kept him atop the entire Pro Stock Motorcycle field well into the opening session.

“It felt so good to know right away that we had a bike that could go rounds,” said Reed, the relief evident in his face. The next afternoon, appearing in the second-to-last pair because he had run so well in Q1, he laid down a quicker, faster 6.894/195.76 to maintain his grip on the fast half of the field, then wrapped up the preliminaries late that afternoon with an even better 6.881/195.51 that eventually slotted him 10th in the final order.

When qualifying was complete and eliminations commenced, Reed drove to an especially satisfying first-round victory over Hector Arana Jr. before narrowly disqualifying himself in the quarterfinals against many-time world champ Eddie Krawiec with a close -.013 red-light that just as easily could have been a holeshot win. “That time, I held nothing back,” Reed said. “I actually didn’t know I could react that quickly. That’s everything I had. I knew ‘everything I have’ is better than a .000 light, but I haven’t thrown it all out there looking for my best possible reaction time in I don’t know how long, basically forever.”

Slightly less than Reed’s best possible reaction time actually would have been better in this case – it would’ve earned him a win, and not just any old win but the best possible kind of win for any driver – a holeshot win – because his bike was right there with Krawiec’s vaunted Harley-Davidson machine in performance, 6.85 to 6.90. Anything .035 or better on the Tree – in other words, his average reaction time – and Reed would’ve been a hero holeshot winner. “It was still a great weekend,” he said. “Haven’t raced in a long time, qualified, ran good all five runs, didn’t hurt a part, went rounds, beat Arana, could’ve beat Krawiec … I’ll take that. We’ll see when we run again. It’ll be whenever it’ll be, but I feel a whole lot better than I did when we got here.”

PRO MOD – INDY 2020

September 7, 2020 / Todd Veney

Without making a bad run all weekend, 2013 Indy winner Jim Whiteley still left the 2020 U.S. Nationals empty-handed. Despite turning in easily the most consistent qualifying performance of his seven-year Pro Mod career, leaving on time in the first round of eliminations, and pounding out a fourth straight competitive run, he left town stinging from a dispiriting first-round defeat.

The 2013 Indy Top Alcohol Dragster champ ran hard right off the trailer, laying down an excellent 5.806 in the first of three scheduled qualifying sessions, backing it up with a slightly quicker 5.802 in Q2 and a consistent 5.811 in last-shot qualifying Saturday afternoon, yet entered eliminations mired in the bottom half of the field, 11th on the final grid with an aggregate best of 5.802 at 246.75 mph.

Under threatening skies on a rare raceday Sunday at Indy (other than the rained-out 2003 U.S. Nationals, the race has been contested on Labor Day Mondays for half a century), Whiteley strapped in for the first round of eliminations three different times. He first climbed out when Kris Thorne, who had just upset No. 1 qualifier Jason Scruggs, crashed in the shutdown area, plowing into the wall on his side of the track, then sliding upside-down in a shower of sparks through the shutdown area until he hit the sand trap, flipped again, and softly landed right-side up in a cloud of dust.

Three pairs after the track was cleared and the sand trap swept, Steve Matusek destroyed his immaculate one-week-old Tequila Comisario Mustang, handing the win to 2019 championship runner-up Todd Tutterow. It soon began raining, the track was down for hours, and when racing resumed, Whiteley’s weekend came to an unceremonious end when his respectable 5.85 wasn’t enough against nemesis “Tricky Rickie” Smith’s 5.76.

TAFC – ALLSTARS 2020

September 6, 2020 / Todd Veney

Top Alcohol Funny Car star Annie Whiteley was out early at theoretically the toughest race of the season, the prestigious Jegs Allstars, held this year in conjunction with the granddaddy of them all, the U.S. Nationals.

Shifted to Indianapolis from its originally scheduled June date in Chicago, the invitation-only race-within-a-race attracted the biggest names in the country – just about everybody but the two biggest: 2018-19 NHRA world champion Sean Bellemeur and yearlong 2020 points leader Doug Gordon. Eliminations had to be wedged into an already jam-packed U.S. Nationals schedule, and Allstar drivers got just a single qualifying attempt because all eight were seeded into the starting lineup anyway.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing team made the most of its one shot with a businesslike 5.56 at 267.22 mph, top speed of the event to that point and good for No. 3 on the grid and a first-round matchup with former East Region champ DJ Cox. Whiteley, the defending Central Region Top Alcohol Funny Car champion, had lane choice and seemingly had the upper hand, but when she rolled in to stage, Cox uncharacteristically took several seconds to follow her into the beams, which, with the engines screaming at 7,500 rpm and her red-hot clutch getting tighter and tighter, felt to her like several minutes.

“I sat there for a while – 4 or 5 seconds, according to the computer,” Whiteley said. “As high as we’re leaving now, it’s hard to hold it that long.” Right as she shoved down on the clutch pedal to keep the car from creeping through the beams for an automatic disqualification, Cox lit the fourth and final light and the Tree came down. She was caught off guard, and the Maryland driver opened a noticeable lead in low gear and advanced with low e.t. of the round, 5.51. Whiteley streaked to a 5.54 – quicker than anybody but Cox ran that round – at a speed of 269.78 mph (top speed of not just that round or of the Allstars competition, but of the entire weekend), but by then the race was lost.

TAFC – YELLOWSTONE 2020

August 30, 2020 / Todd Veney

When the smoke literally had cleared from three qualifying sessions on the unfamiliar Yellowstone Drag Strip quarter-mile, Annie Whiteley, No. 1 qualifier at virtually every race she’s been to all year, pulled it off a fourth straight time with both ends of the track record: 5.633 at 263.26 mph – two-hundredths quicker than No. 2 qualifier Brian Hough and nearly 5 mph faster than any other car on the grounds.

Several of the nation’s premier Top Alcohol Funny Car teams converged on the farming community of Acton, Mont., 675 miles north of the YNot Racing/J&A Service team’s Grand Junction, Colo., base and smack dab in the heart of Big Sky Country. With all the other sportsman teams on hand, drag racers accounted for two-thirds of the population of the town of Acton (which counts just 183 souls for 51 weekends a year) for two long days of racing before almost everybody headed east for the biggest race of the year, the U.S. Nationals.

It truly was an all-star cast, with five of seven entrants former national event champs: Whiteley, Hough, points leader Doug Gordon, back-to-back U.S. Nationals runner-up Chris Marshall, and veteran Kris Hool. Even the Nos. 6 and 7 qualifiers – former nitro driver Steve Macklyn and newcomer Doug Schneider – dipped into the five-second zone at the high-altitude (3,800 feet) strip.

As the No. 1 qualifier in a field with an odd number of cars, Whiteley was the deserving recipient of a bye in the first round, where she was out of the gas early and coasted into the semis with an abbreviated 15.75 at just 65 mph. For Whiteley, who dominated the season-opener in Belle Rose, La., where she’s never lost a round in her life, and reached the final four in her other two regional starts this year – in Gainesville, Fla., and Denver – the weekend came to a premature end in the semifinals, where again she encountered traction woes immediately, rolling to a 10.55 loss to Marshall’s steady 5.72.

TAFC – ST. LOUIS 2020

August 16, 2020 / Todd Veney

TAFC – ST. LOUIS

Admittedly unnerved at having a Funny Car body lowered over him for the first time in his already legendary driving career and well aware that he’d have to crank the wheel harder than ever before to maintain control, door-car superstar Stevie “Fast” Jackson just missed winning in his Alcohol Funny Car debut. At the Summer Speed Spectacular in St. Louis, Jackson narrowly red-lighted in the rain-delayed final against another reigning NHRA world champion, 2018-19 Top Alcohol Funny Car champ Sean Bellemeur.

At the wheel of series sponsor Jim & Annie Whiteley’s Yenko-blue YNot/J&A Service Camaro, “Stevie Fast” refined the team’s torque-converter combination while simultaneously familiarizing himself with the unfamiliar confines and sometimes confounding characteristics of a dragster-style center-steer chassis. All he did was set top speed of the entire event (214.11 mph) and nearly win the first time he ever raced a Funny Car. Jackson put away 2017 champion Shane Westerfield in the first round with a 3.68 and vastly improved second-generation driver Kyle Smith in the semifinals with a lethal 3.62 before red-lighting by a fraction of a second in the final.

As expected, it took Jackson, who said he’d win the NHRA Pro Mod world championship last year and actually did, little time to adapt to a Funny Car. The versatile, talented old-school pro’s 3.64 in the final was just a tick slower than Bellemeur’s 3.63, and he’d have been a hero holeshot winner had his finger come off the button just .002-second later. “They’re hard to drive,” he said of his first Funny Car race. “They’re nothing like a Pro Mod. You have to line up in a different spot – it’s kinda weird being right in the middle of the lane like that – and nothing that works for one kind of car means anything with the other. A Funny Car doesn’t pull as hard early in the run as I thought it would, but you really have to get aggressive steering it downtrack. It’s gonna take a little time to be good, but if it’s got wheels on it, I can drive it.”

While Bellemeur, who also scored last month at the Xtreme Texas Nationals, kept his lifetime record in Keith Haney’s Mid-West Drag Racing Series unblemished – two starts, two wins – Jackson padded his extensive, varied résumé with another massive success in a completely different kind of race car. “This was awesome,” concluded “Stevie Fast,” who, unbeknownst to most, has actually held a Top Alcohol Funny Car license for 12 years – he just hadn’t raced one until now. “I just can’t thank Jim and Annie enough for letting me drive her car this weekend.”

PRO MOD – INDY III 2020

August 10, 2020 / Todd Veney

PRO MOD – INDY III

The inaugural Dodge NHRA Indy Nationals, a pseudo-national event staged at half-speed in the heart of the Coronavirus panic, didn’t quite feel like a national event, and Jim Whiteley didn’t quite feel like himself behind the wheel of his ’63 Corvette. Whiteley, who almost never loses on a holeshot – or even gets left on, for that matter – lost on a holeshot.

“I just lost focus that time,” said the two-time world champ of by far the worst light of his entire career, an unimaginable .313 in the second round against 2018 series champ Mike Janis. A reaction time half that bad (.157) would’ve been easily the worst light Whiteley ever had, Pro Mod or otherwise, but he got caught off guard that time and Janis had it the instant he launched with a .035 light, advancing with a passable 5.97 at 240 mph. “I don’t know what the hell I was looking at up there,” Whiteley said, laughing. “All of a sudden I was staged, the Tree came on, and I thought, ‘I should probably leave now.’ “

Until the Tree flashed, everything had been going just fine. Whiteley wheeled the J&A Service/YNot Racing ‘Vette to a competitive 5.85 in the first pair of the first session of Pro Mod qualifying and wasted Pro Mod/Funny Car driver Chad Green in the first round of eliminations, leaving first and leading wire to wire, 5.88/241 to 7.14/138. With fields this tight there really are no underdogs, but both he and Janis technically “upset” higher-qualified drivers in the first round, Whiteley over No. 5 qualifier Green with a 5.88 and Janis over No. 4 Jeff Jones with a 5.94.

With no better option than to flush the whole forgettable weekend in this utterly forgettable year, Whiteley is shifting his focus to the Midwest Drag Racing Series’ Summer Speed Spectacular next weekend in St. Louis. He’ll jump into “Stevie Fast’s” world-famous “Shadow 2.0” and Jackson will test the viability of a torque-converter/automatic-transmission setup in Annie Whiteley’s record-holding Top Alcohol Funny Car.

TAFC – FERRIS 2020

July 12, 2020 / Todd Veney

Drawn by a potential $20,000 payday – the biggest winner’s purse in the 40-year-history of Top Alcohol Funny Car racing – Annie Whiteley and name drivers from around the country headed to increasingly popular Xtreme Raceway Park for the Xtreme Texas Nationals, the first time Alcohol Funny Cars have ever been part of Keith Haney’s fast-rising Midwest Drag Racing Series.

Whiteley, whose YNot team has reached at least the semifinals at every stop all season, absorbed a dispiriting, uncharacteristic first-round defeat in their first appearance in Ferris, Texas. With $20,000 on the line, it wasn’t a bunch of patsies filling the Xtreme Raceway Park pits. The toughest teams in the country made their way to the underrated eighth-mile facility just north of the Texas Motorplex: besides Whiteley, red-hot 2020 NHRA points leader Doug Gordon and two-time reigning world champ Sean Bellemeur, there was veteran Mark Billington, Texas talents Bryan Brown and Jonathan Johnson, and emerging contender Bob McCosh from Missouri.

Racing under the lights before a packed house, with fans closing in around both cars as they inched toward the beams in the finest match-race tradition, Whiteley lined up opposite Gordon, one of the two toughest possible opponents today (Bellemeur being the other). Whiteley’s beautiful Yenko blue Camaro Funny Car laid down one of the strongest runs of the entire event, a 3.72 at a booming 210.77 mph that would’ve beaten almost just about anyone else. But, just a few feet ahead on her right, Gordon produced an even quicker 3.68 208.72 in his new red Beta Motorcycles colors to advance.

Earlier in the day, way down at the end of the shutdown area, Johnson plowed into the guardrail in Gordon’s lane, destroying one of the best-looking Funny Cars of all time. Gordon managed to avoid him and went on make to the final, where he lost, earning $5,000 – exactly what NHRA national events pay to win – for runner-up honors, while Bellemeur collected the 20 grand, the richest prize in class history, for the Bartone Bros./Hussey team led by all-time-great crew chief Steve Boggs.