Tag: four-wide

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2023

May 1, 2023 / Todd Veney

Pro Stock Motorcycle star Joey Gladstone navigated the often shark-infested world of four-wide competition at zMax Dragway and came out if victorious at least unscathed. Qualified well into the top half of the field, he advanced to the semifinals only to be denied a final-round appearance by a fraction of a second. “This Four-Wide deal can be tricky,” he said. “The first guy stages and that clock gets going, and you know you’ve only got seven seconds to get in there.”

Riding team owner Cory Reed’s Precision Service Equipment Hayabusa, Gladstone recorded a 6.87 in the first of four qualifying sessions, good for the No. 2 position at the time, improved to a 6.85, and ultimately settled into the No. 6 spot with an aggregate best of 6.82/197.94. “It feels good to be on our own stuff again,” said the 2022 championship runner-up, who spent his off time early this season twirling wrenches for the Greg Anderson/Dallas Glenn Pro Stock team. “I loved working on the Pro Stock car, but I can’t juggle both – Pro Stock and Pro Stock Motorcycle run too close together. I really learned a lot working for them, though – stuff I can apply to our program.”

Gladstone unwittingly became embroiled in the weirdest quad of a weird first round that ended with two of the four bikes quietly pushed off the starting line. John Hall got timed out, Jianna Evaristo never left, and Gladstone and dragbike stalwart Steve Johnson posted identical times right down to the thousandth of a second, matching 6.840s. Even that wasn’t close, though: Gladstone managed his emotions, focused his concentration, and left on Johnson by literally a second.

No one was ready when the Tree came down because all four drivers weren’t staged when the timer hit the seven-second mark, but when it flashed green Gladstone was gone long before anybody else let go of the clutch handle. “I saw Steve go in, and those other two were really taking their time,” Gladstone said, “so I just counted to five and put it on the chip.”

With a clutch performance in the semifinals, Gladstone shot off the line with a near-perfect .002 reaction time and narrowly missed making yet another final. Eddie Krawiec was out of reach with a winning 6.78, but Gladstone came painfully close (12-thousandths of a second) to beating Johnson on a 6.86-6.80 holeshot and making another final.

TAFC – LAS VEGAS NATIONAL 2023

April 17, 2023 / Todd Veney

The once-friendly confines of The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway were anything but this year for Annie Whiteley, who lost the absolute last way she or any driver would ever want to: on a holeshot. This one was particularly frustrating – the dreaded “double holeshot.”

Either of her Saturday qualifying runs would have been more than enough to run down Randy Parker and Jake Guadagnolo in the first round of eliminations, and any other light she had all weekend would have eliminated the need for any come-from-behind heroics in the first place. It wasn’t that the sometimes-confusing four-at-a-time format at NHRA’s Four-Wide Las Vegas Nationals confounded Whiteley, nor were there any staging shenanigans on the part of her opponents.

“I don’t know what the hell it was,” Whiteley said. “Nobody really did anything to mess me up, and it wasn’t a long Tree or a short Tree or anything like that. My light really didn’t feel that bad – definitely not a .180-something. I knew it wasn’t a .020 or .030, but I damn sure didn’t think it was over .100.” But a .180 came up on the reaction timers nonetheless, leaving Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro – recently redubbed “Shattered Glass” in honor of her late father Don, who loved the Brad Paisley hit song of that name – third in a three-car race.

She blew the tires off Friday morning on her first of four qualifying attempts – one in each lane. Sneaking up on the combination from the back side after that, crew chief Mike Strasburg delivered a decent 5.60-flat at 263 mph Friday afternoon and picked up from there, to a 5.56/262 and a 5.53/264 on Saturday that left the team a solid fourth in the final order.

In the first round, Whiteley shook the tires off the line, short-shifted to get out of it, and set sail after Parker, who hadn’t gotten down the track all weekend, and Guadagnolo, who was on the same track as her, just out the side window to her right the whole way down. “I knew I wasn’t going to catch him,” she said, “but I hoped maybe Parker was somewhere behind me on the other track. What a crappy end to a crappy weekend. Losing on a holeshot is even worse than red-lighting. When you red-light, it’s almost like, ‘Well, at least I tried.’ “

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2022

May 2, 2022 / Todd Veney

Joey Gladstone returned to the site of the most unforgettable race of his career – the out-and-out worst one ever and at the same time the absolute best: the 2021 Carolina Nationals, where his best friend, team owner Cory Reed, crashed right in front of him in round two and then a freak mechanical glitch in the final ripped away an in-the-bag first major victory.

Riding the crest of a season-long wave of success, Gladstone landed in a second consecutive Charlotte final – sort of. He was there for the last round, the third Pro Stock Motorcycle quad of the day, but at the Four-Wide Nationals the third- and fourth-place finishers are considered semifinalists. Still, it was a fantastic weekend, yet another late-round finish that catapulted him to fourth in the NHRA standings, the highest he’s ever been this deep into a season.

“I’m living my dream,” said Gladstone, who reached the semi’s at the season-opening Gatornationals and the quarterfinals in Houston. “I can’t express how proud I am of my team.” Led by Reed and longtime crew chief Cecil Towner, Gladstone made his best qualifying run all weekend right off the bat, a 6.80/198, followed by a 6.86/197 under better conditions Friday night and a 6.88/199 and 6.82/197 on Saturday.

Sunday in the first round, Gladstone edged reigning NHRA world champ Matt Smith, 6.84/200 to 6.86/198, to finish second behind Angelle Sampey’s outstanding 6.76/199. (Under the four-wide format, the top two in each “quad” of four bikes advance.) With a 13.43 at 45 mph, Kelly Clontz finished a distant fourth.

In the semi’s, in one of the more memorable moments of his entire career, Gladstone lined up against three former world champions and whipped all three – Eddie Krawiec, Sampey, and Jerry Savoie – with a 6.81/198. He outran Krawiec, beat Sampey on a holeshot, and Savoie, who was quicker than any of them with 6.78/199, red-lighted.

“That’s three gangsters in the other three lanes,” Gladstone said. “Last year, I really got my heart ripped out in the final, and this year I’m going to ride my heart out.” He did, drilling winner Krawiec and winner Steve Johnson with a .037 reaction time, but slipped to his worst run of the long weekend, a 6.90/199 that left him well short of Johnson’s winning 6.74/200.

“A four-wide isn’t like a regular final,” he said. “You know in the back of your mind the whole time what your odds are. Instead of having to beat one guy, you’ve got to beat three, so the pressure’s not the same. We may have slowed down and finished fourth, but I’ll take it. That first win is coming.”

PRO MOD – CHARLOTTE 2019

April 28, 2019 / Todd Veney

Steven Whiteley was riding high coming into Charlotte for the Four-Wide Nationals, a Top 5 driver in the standings and one of the odds-on favorites to win the race. Three days later he pulled out of ZMax Dragway a non-qualifier, clearly aggravated and dead set on turning things around after his first first-round loss all year.

Friday was a complete disaster for the young driver, one of the more consistent qualifiers on the J&A Service NHRA Pro Mod circuit year after year. Rain and 41-mph winds killed one qualifying session, and he was timed out on the line in the other one. After a shake-plagued shutoff blast Saturday morning, things weren’t looking good for the YNot team heading into last-shot qualifying, but as it has many times before, they came through under pressure with a 5.78 at nearly 253 mph to make the show.

Anything close to that Sunday morning in the first round and Whiteley would’ve been in the semifinals because only one car in his quad made it to the finish line under power. Whiteley was second off the line, trailing only Sidnei Frigo’s telepathic .015 reaction time with an outstanding .033, and they all crossed the finish line in the inverse order of how they left the starting line. Rickie Smith cut just a .090 light but laid down a 5.77 to finish first, and Chad Green’s 8.27 at 120 mph was enough to advance, literally hundreds of feet ahead of Whiteley’s aborted 10.19 at 87 mph and Frigo’s distant 13.95 at 47 mph. In one of the more unusual heats in the anything-but-orderly history of four-wide competition, nobody was within two seconds or 30 mph of anyone else.

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2018

May 1, 2018 / Todd Veney

After what transpired at the Four-Wide Nationals, former NHRA Rookie of the Year Cory Reed is probably better positioned than ever to take down that elusive first NHRA title. In the first quad (round) of eliminations under the sometimes-confusing four-lane format, Reed trounced not only Ryan Oehler in the lane next to him but both Joey Gladstone and reigning world champ Eddie Krawiec on the adjoining track to his right for the most significant round-win of his young career.

“I knew I was going to win that time,” said Reed, who pulled out the zMax gates 5th in the NHRA standings, the highest he’s ever been at any point in any season. “The way I feel now is the mindset it’s going to take to win one of these things. I feel this way and act this way because I really do think we can wax anybody at any time.” Such optimism is hardly unfounded – the addition of all-time Pro Stock greats Larry Morgan and Jim Yates has clearly transformed Team Victory, which is sneaking up on the long-established Pro Stock Motorcycle elite a little more each time out.

Reed found himself in the No. 1 qualifying position after two complete sessions of Friday qualifying for the first time in his career with a 6.83. His winning first-round time against Oehler (who also advanced to the semi’s – second place in each quad moves on, too), Gladstone, and Krawiec was a 6.81, his quickest time to date. The .81 stood as Low E.T. for all 16 bikes in that round – another career-first – but according to the driver himself it could have been a few ticks quicker. “It spun the tire,” he said, “I got a little excited and short-shifted three gears or that seriously would have been about a .77.”

“The motors go Columbus [Ohio with Morgan] after every race,” Reed said. “We do all the chassis stuff at the shop, and at the track Jim [Yates} has spreadsheet after spreadsheet of gear ratios to try. You can really tell the difference. I was at about mid-track on the first run we ever made and thought, ‘This thing really sounds aggressive.’ It just sounded mean, like some kind of growl. There’s so much power, every time I shift, it spins the tire for a split second.”

Early in the semifinal quad it spun a little too hard, and Reed slipped to a 6.94 and fell to Scotty Pollacheck, who won with a 6.84, and Matt Smith, who also made it to the final by finishing second with a 6.88. “The 60-foot time sucked,” Reed said. “It spun so bad, it killed the momentum for the whole run. We’re still trying to find that sweet spot and it’s a little hit-or-miss right now because we don’t have enough data with this much power. But when we hit it, we really hit it. I have to say, right now is the best things have ever been.”