Tag: 2020 (Page 3 of 3)

TAFC – DENVER 2020

June 22, 2020 / Todd Veney

Perennial Top Alcohol Funny Car contender Annie Whiteley, who won Denver in 2018 and was runner-up in 2014, 2015, and last year, suffered a rare middle-round loss at her home track, one-of-a-kind Bandimere Speedway in the Rocky Mountain foothills just west of Denver. The many-time national event champion and current national speed record holder qualified high, as usual, but came up just short of yet another final-round appearance.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot team, based just four hours from Bandimere in scenic Grand Junction, Colo., began eliminations from the fast half of the field, as always, No. 1 for the third time in four starts this year with an aggregate best of 5.734 at 258.91 mph. Pole qualifier for the fourth time in her career on the mountain, she actually got the top spot by less than a thousandth of a second by virtue of winning the best-speed tiebreaker over eventual winner Doug Gordon, who also ran a 5.734, by 5 mph – 258.91 mph to 253.90.

Crew chief Mike Strasburg, from neighboring Utah, cooked up a high-altitude combination for the first round of eliminations perfect for the unique conditions all mile-high racers face. Whiteley reeled off another winning run, a 5.73/257, but a similar 5.74/256 in the semifinals left her just short. Torque converter driver Bill Bernard got off the starting line a little quicker for a 5.75/248 holeshot win. From here, Jim and Annie Whiteley’s YNot team heads into an uncertain future – who knows when COVID-19 restrictions will permit another race? – with a win and three semifinals finishes on its 2020 score card.

TAFC – DALLAS 2020

May 24, 2020 / Todd Veney

In her first official outing since the COVID-19 pandemic brought NHRA drag racing to a standstill, defending event champ Annie Whiteley just missed back-to-back titles at the Texas Motorplex, dropping an ultra-close final-round bout against the toughest possible opponent, 2018-19 Top Alcohol Funny Car world champ Sean Bellemeur.

“It feels like it’s been a year since we were at the track,” Whiteley said, “and I’ll admit it – I was a little nervous. The whole routine … ‘Am I going auto remember everything?’ You don’t know till you do it. But once they started the car, it was like, ‘I got this.’ ” She definitely did, qualifying No. 2 with a 5.52 at 268.60 mph en route to yet another final-round appearance on the all-concrete Motorplex surface.

Masked like everybody else in the oppressive Texas heat, Whiteley’s YNot/J&A Service team, led my crew chief Mike Strasburg, headed to the line for the first round against former national event finalist Steve Burck. They slowed to a still-good 5.58/267, but it was more than enough to subdue Burck’s 5.70/259 and set up a semifinal showdown with early season points leader Doug Gordon.

That one went much easier than expected when Gordon got caught looking at the tach as his car inched from the pre-staged beam to the staged beam while he was trying to figure out why the throttle pedal wouldn’t move. (The blades froze up in the injector.) Gordon was still looking down when the tree came on, and Whiteley was long gone with her quickest run of the weekend to that point, a 5.51/268, for a surprisingly easy round-win, her fifth in a row at this event. “He went to bring the RPMs up and was trying to get the blades to open and didn’t realize he’d bumped in and lit the light,” she said. “When he looked up at the Tree, it was already on.”

A couple hours later in the final, Whiteley cut her best light of the day and made her best run all weekend but still fell just short of the vaunted Bellemeur/Boggs/Bartone juggernaut, which got the best of by far the best race of the entire event, 5.494 to 5.496. “The tire was just stuck to the track or we would’ve run better,” she said. “It was a good race. We both had .960 60-foot times and when I got down there – I never look over in the other lane – I was saying, ‘Come on. Did we, did we?’ We came so close to winning – I never saw him – but even though we didn’t quite win, it was still nice just to be back at the track.”

PRO MOD – ORLANDO 2020

March 9, 2020 / Todd Veney

Always ready to race – anytime, anywhere – Jim Whiteley leaped at the chance to be part of the inaugural World Doorslammer Nationals at Orlando Speed World Dragway. Like Don Garlits’ revolutionary National Challenge ’72 in Tulsa or Drag Illustrated‘s World Series of Pro Mod events decades later in Denver, the groundbreaking event guaranteed the biggest payout in history. “No way I was going to miss this deal,” Whiteley said. “There were a lot of good cars here – a lot of good cars.”

In the end, more than $300,000 was divvied up among the absolute biggest names in drag racing’s premier door-car classes – Pro Mod legends Rickie Smith, “Stevie Fast” Jackson, Todd Tutterow, Jason Scruggs, and Mike Janis, and NHRA Pro Stock stars Jeg Coughlin, Greg Anderson, Erica Enders, Jason Line, and Alex Laughlin, the only driver to compete in both categories. Enough Pro Mod cars to fill two 16-car fields poured through the Orlando gates, and when all four qualifying sessions were complete, Justin Bond had run quicker than the incoming NHRA national record with a 5.623 for the pole position and veteran Steve Matusek established the record bump with a 5.739.

Whiteley’s show-stopping ’63 Corvette slipped to the 14th spot with a 5.73 in the opening session that had him, at the time, fourth-quickest of the 27 drivers who took the Tree that round. In all, 33 teams attempted to qualify, more than three-quarters of them ran 5s, and five ran 5.70s and still didn’t make the cut. Whiteley’s J&A Service team, led by crew chief “Stevie Fast,” drew Laughlin, the No. 3 qualifier and reigning NHRA U.S. Nationals Pro Stock champion, in the first round. Running one pair ahead of them opposite Michael Biehle, Jackson, the defending NHRA Pro Mod champ, crashed into the left wall beyond the finish line. (He was uninjured, and the car is repairable.)

When the wreckage was cleared, Laughlin rolled into the staged beam immediately after Whiteley pre-staged, Whiteley quickly followed, and they left as one and charged side by side the length of the quarter-mile. The YNot team captain ran within mere thousandths of a second of his qualifying time, but Laughlin edged him out in a photo-finish that typified the entire event, 5.71/249 to Whiteley’s right-there 5.73/246. Laughlin ran just a 5.82 in the following round but went on to win the event, pocketing $50,000 – five times the winner’s share of an NHRA Pro Mod race – and Coughlin collected $75,000 for winning Pro Stock.

TAFC – GAINESVILLE 2020

March 9, 2020 / Todd Veney

All Annie Whiteley did at the Southeast Regional in Gainesville, Fla., days after winning the 2020 season-opener in Belle Rose, La., was make the fastest Top Alcohol Funny Car run of all time: 276.18 mph. “I had no idea it was that fast,” she said of what’s basically a brand-new car. “It’s kind of picky, actually, almost like the chassis is too stiff. Sometimes it doesn’t want to respond, but it sure did that time.”

After qualifying No. 1 by more than half a tenth with the only run in the 5.30s all weekend, a 5.39 at 274.66 mph (top speed by nearly 5 mph at that point), the new pipe answered crew chief Mike Strasburg’s calls with the first 276+ mph run in NHRA history. More than half of the qualifiers found the 5.40s, but the bump ended up being just a 5.89 by Josh Haskett, who wasn’t around when eliminations got under way.

Instead of Haskett in the opening round, Whiteley, who has perfected the art of drawing inordinately tough first-round opponents despite almost always qualifying near the top, got alternate Ulf Leanders, one of the few Top Alcohol Funny Car racers to ever run in the 5.30s. She upped the NHRA national speed record to 276.18 mph on a 5.43 while the dangerous Leanders fell back with a harmless 6.85.

For the YNot team, already owners of seven of the 10 fastest Top Alcohol Funny Car speeds ever, it all came to crashing down in the semifinals when their temperamental new machine went up in smoke instantly opposite perennial bridesmaid Doug Gordon, who went on to a long-overdue final-round win over Bellemeur. Whiteley may not have left with a second straight victory to start the ’20s, but she did walk away with the pole, low e.t. by a mile, and the fastest speed of all time.

TAFC – BELLE ROSE 2020

March 2, 2020 / Todd Veney

Every year at the first hint of spring, Annie Whiteley and the J&A Service/YNot team abandon the natural beauty of Grand Junction, Colo., for the swampy Louisiana bayou, and every year they win. After perhaps her strongest performance ever in tiny Belle Rose, La., the diminutive, soft-spoken driver, now 12-0 lifetime in eliminations at No Problem Raceway, has amassed four victories in four career stops at the aptly named track.

Whiteley smashed both ends of No Problem’s Top Alcohol Funny Car record in 2017 in her first appearance there, dropped Kris Hool in a pressure-packed winner-take-all final in 2018, established low e.t. and top speed en route to victory in 2019, and made it another wire-to-wire sweep this year with the pole, low e.t., and top speed. “I have no idea why we always do so well here,” she said. “It’s crazy. I mean, it’s definitely not the easiest track to get down.”

The Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series Central Region season opener couldn’t have started any better for the YNot team when crew chief Mike Strasburg dialed up an off-the-trailer 5.52 to give Whiteley the provisional qualifying lead over a field of past national event champions. “The track was better than ever this year, but it’s still a little bumpy,” she said. “It almost gives you false readings – you have to be careful.” Strasburg was anything but in the Saturday afternoon session, when Whiteley steamed to low e.t. of the meet, a 5.49 that earned the team a bye run in the first round of eliminations, which came in extra-handy this weekend as near-sea-level density-altitude readings and a tricky track conspired to confound top tuners.

Tiptoeing through the early portion of the quarter mile and legging it straight and true through the lights on her first-round solo, Whiteley recorded another 5.52 at more than 268 mph that stood up for low e.t. and top speed of the round. Semifinal opponent Kris Hool, who’d been all over the track in a 5.98 first-round win over surprise Winternationals winner Aryan Rochon, ran an even more all-over-the-track 7.21 against Whiteley in the semi’s, allowing her to advance with just a 5.88. Shake forced her to lift early and Hool almost crossed into her lane on two wheels at the top of low gear; she slammed back down on the gas to win, blissfully unaware that Hool had ever flirted with the center line.

That .88 cost Whiteley lane choice for the final against returning veteran Bob McCosh, who, with legendary Fred Mandoline, Top Alcohol Funny Car’s third-ever world champion , calling the tuning shots, hadn’t made a bad run all weekend. McCosh and Mandoline forced Whiteley into the right lane, which those with lane choice had avoided all day, but Team YNot remained unfazed. “They’ve fixed some of the bumps so the left lane is a little smoother than it used to be,” she said, “but the past two years the right was actually the better lane. We knew we could get down it in the final.”

Both drivers were ready to stage and race – no games – and Whiteley, for once, went in last. After nearly identical 60-foot times, she opened a noticeable lead at half-track and was going 15 mph faster by then and pulling comfortably away from McCosh (211 mph to his 195), but McCosh wasn’t letting his first NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car event title get away that easily. He hung with it as long as he could, and not just in low gear – in high gear, too, at way beyond 230 mph. Whiteley never saw him, though, sailing down the so-called “bad” lane with a 5.55/268, safely ahead of McCosh’s valiant 6.02/203 and into the record books with her fourth straight Belle Rose win.