Tag: nhra

PRO STOCK – POMONA

November 18, 2024 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed could’ve decided the 2024 NHRA Pro Stock championship. He didn’t – nobody was keeping Greg Anderson from his sixth title, not even teammate Dallas Glenn – but Reed was right there, shift-for-shift in the second round of one of the truly memorable races of the legend’s long, prolific career.

What Reed did do was kill the Tree all weekend with one .020 light after another; he never had one not in the .020s. “I’m starting to realize that I don’t have to get jacked up or be in some certain state of mind to cut a light,” he said. “I just need to see the light, let go of the pedal, and – bam: .020 light.”

In qualifying, which was reduced from the usual four sessions to just two by persistent rain Friday afternoon, Reed had .022 and .023 reaction times. His K-B/Titan-powered Camaro performed well, too, propelling him to the middle of the field with an aggregate best of 6.534 at 210.01 mph for the No. 9 spot.

Reed faced the Elite team’s Jerry Don Tucker in the first round, and, as he has every time they’ve ever raced, beat him. He was out first with another .022 light and won what would have been an exceptionally close race, 6.558 to 6.563, by a comfortable margin, snapping a nasty streak of first-round losses and setting up a David vs. Goliath quarterfinal matchup with Anderson, who was chasing history.

“Since about St. Louis [Sept. 27-29], I’ve been figuring this deal out – where I have my foot on the [clutch] pedal, how hard I push it, the whole mental side of it,” Reed said. “Ever since then, I think I’ve found a groove.”

It carried into the quarterfinals, but Anderson was not to be denied. With a .026 light Reed was off like a shot, but Anderson erased the lead by 3rd gear and tied Low E.T. of the Meet to that point in a 6.492/211.63 to 6.564/209.56 decision.

“When we took off, we were close,” Reed said. “I couldn’t really tell who left first [he did, .026 to .030], but by about half-track, I could see his nose and knew he was going to outrun me. He deserves this. He had the best car all weekend, right from the start. No way was he going to slow down that time, and whatever he’s figured out with that car should trickle down to the rest of us next year.”

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL

November 11, 2024 / Todd Veney

“Double bulbing” – going from not staged to pre-staged to fully staged in one swift motion to catch an opponent off guard – blindsided Annie Whiteley at the final regional event of 2024, where she absorbed a exasperating holeshot loss to Ray Martin.

In the Top Alcohol Funny Car semi’s at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, site of her first major victory a dozen years ago, Whiteley, who’s cut some of her best lights ever this season, got caught flat-footed when Martin rolled right into both beams. When the Tree flashed, he was ready, she wasn’t, and her best of four great runs went for naught in a 5.52 to 5.46 loss. “When I let go, I just thought, ‘Damn…’ ” she said. “I knew I was late.”

The weekend had gotten off to a promising start when Whiteley stormed to an outstanding 5.47 at 266.79 mph right off the trailer for the early qualifying lead. A subsequent 5.49/265 positioned the J&A Service/YNot Racing “Shattered Glass” team well for eliminations … until the ladder came out and she found herself paired up with husband Jim first round.

As it turned out, mechanical gremlins sidelined Jim’s team, and alternate Hunter Jones, who enjoyed the finest day of his career here earlier this season, assumed Jim’s spot on the ladder. Annie drilled him on the Tree and drove away for an easy 5.50/265 win while Jones, who’d mustered a best of just 5.97 in qualifying, rattled the tires, pedaled, and briefly gave chase before lifting for a 7.46/142 loss.

In the semifinals, Whiteley picked up to the 5.46 at more than 266 mph but couldn’t run down Martin’s engine-damaging 5.52 at 252. “As soon as you pre-stage, Ray just rolls right in,” she said. “I wasn’t ready – the whole way downtrack, I was just hoping he’d break something. Ray bracket races all the time now, so he’s got this whole deal figured out and just cuts .020 or .030 lights every time.”

TAFC – LAS VEGAS NATIONAL

November 4, 2024 / Todd Veney

The same thing that’s plagued Annie Whiteley’s Top Alcohol Funny Car team all year struck again at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway: the clutch – or, more specifically, its sporadic inconsistency.

“The discs are wearing in the middle now,” Whiteley said. “It’s like we’re ‘clutch light’ [not enough counterweight] but we’re not. It just looks like we are. If we really were, this would be something completely different. It’s not like it happens once every 10 runs – it’s more like once every five or six. It happened in the final round at Reading [where she blew the tires off after running five straight 5.40s], and the same thing happened again here.”

Whiteley laid down one good lap after another in qualifying, as she almost always does, charging past the half-track mark at more than 210 mph and storming to a 5.51 at 265.12 mph right off the trailer. She followed with an unerringly consistent 5.52/264 and a steady 5.519/263.87 in last-shot qualifying that left her No. 6 on the grid.

A huge favorite in the first round against No. 11 qualifier Doug Schneider, Whiteley didn’t disappoint, trouncing Schneider, who competes infrequently and qualified with a career-best 5.59, by almost two tenths of a second on the leave, .059 to .252. She pulled steadily away for a runaway win with a pass almost identical to her qualifying efforts, a 5.52/262, while Schneider trailed with a distant 6.81/239.

It was in the quarterfinals that misleading clutch readings doomed the J&A Service/YNot team. It wasn’t that the car smoked the tires out of nowhere; it’s that crew chief Mike Strasburg didn’t have as much clutch in the car as he otherwise would have, so it didn’t run as quick as it could have. Whiteley got opponent Bob McCosh, who’s rumored to be moving to the fuel ranks next season, at the Tree with an excellent .039 light, but he outran her, 5.49/262 to 5.54/263, to win by about a car length.

“Mike will say, ‘I think I know what’s wrong,’ and then we’ll make a run and he’ll say, ‘Well, that wasn’t it. That didn’t fix it,’ ” Whiteley said. “It’s bitten us several times this year, and it’s driving him nuts. It doesn’t make any sense.”

TAFC – DALLAS

October 14, 2024 / Todd Veney

With both engines screaming at 7,000 rpm, one car staged and the other about to be, the table was set for Annie Whiteley. Then she rolled in, the Tree flashed, opponent Shane Westerfield streaked for the finish line in the left lane, and she sat there flat-footed at a dead idle in the right.

“All four lights were on, and … I have no idea why … it just didn’t register that I was staged,” Whiteley said. “I thought, What the hell’s going on here? Why isn’t your foot going down on the throttle?’ Shane was seven cars out ahead of me and I hadn’t even left yet. I thought, ‘Come on [Westerfield’s] blower belt – break. Please break.’ It didn’t. Of course. I took off after him, but eventually it got to where even if it broke I was never going to catch him.”

Until then, everything was going according to schedule for Whiteley’s J&A/YNot Racing team. She’d qualified in the top four at the original supertrack, the Texas Motorplex, as she has in 80 percent of her starts this year. She’d knocked off one of Top Alcohol Funny Car’s top young drivers, Hunter Jones, despite his great light (.027) and solid run (5.54), outperforming him with a perfectly fine .061 light of her own and a superior 5.47 that just missed Low E.T. of the Meet at a booming 268.29 mph that fell just short of Top Speed.

“The car was running good,” Whiteley said. “We ran a .49 in qualifying, which just shows that [crew chief] Mike [Strasburg] and the guys are onto a tune-up for places like this. We got back after that run and Mike said, ‘We might’ve just figured something out. I think I know how to get down these hot tracks.’ “

Then came the quarterfinals and an abrupt, bizarre end to what had been a great weekend. “This sucks,” Whiteley said. “We were doing so well. Then Shane was so far out there that I was like, ‘Why are you so far ahead of me? And why the hell am I still on the throttle?’ “

TAFC – CHARLOTTE

September 23, 2024 / Todd Veney

After perhaps the most consistent three runs any Alcohol Funny Car driver ever made anywhere and an even better one in the first round, Annie Whiteley inexplicably blew the tires off in round two. And it wasn’t just a barrage metronomically consistent E.T.s; it was all the progressive times, too. Thousands of horsepower to control and varying, ever-changing track and weather conditions to account for, yet every run looked exactly like the last: smooth.

“I knew the car was consistent,” Whiteley said, “but I didn’t realize it was that consistent – I never pay attention to the little numbers [the thousandths of a second]. But you look back on it, and it’s like, ‘How did we do that?’ “

As the race wore on, Whiteley’s times grew infinitesimally quicker and faster at each increment down the zMax Dragway quarter-mile: 2.497, 2.491, and 2.490 to the 330-foot mark; 3.679, 3.673, and 3.668 to the eighth-mile; 209.98, 210.64, and 210.97 mph half-track speeds; and 1000-foot times of 4.683, 4.676, and 4.671 led to increasingly quicker E.T.s of 5.530, 5.522, and 5.520, the last of which left her No. 3 in the final lineup.

After progressively better reaction times of .077, .054, and .033 in qualifying, Whiteley left on first-round opponent Chris Foster, the former U.S. Nationals winner, by more than a tenth and got the best of a 5.50/266.58 (top speed of the meet) to 5.575/261.83 decision not nearly as close as the E.T.s alone would indicate. In the quarterfinals, Whiteley, who last scored here in 2018, faced three-time national event winner D.J. Cox, who won this race in 2016.

That’s when the J&A Service/YNot team’s unerring consistency vanished, tire smoke billowed from behind the car, and the weekend ground to an unceremonious, premature halt. “This car has kicked our ass a couple times now, hasn’t it?” Whiteley asked. “They don’t tell me what they’re doing – it’s more like, ‘Get in it and drive.’ But it’s been taking the tire off every once in a while, and we’ll think, ‘Why did that happen? There’s no way it should have smoked the tires that time.’ “

TAFC – POMONA 2023

November 13, 2023 / Todd Veney

At the season-ending NHRA Finals, for the first time all year, Jim Whiteley ran an NHRA national event without making it to at least the semifinals. He was stopped in a one-sided quarterfinal match against three-time Top Alcohol Funny Car world champ Sean Bellemeur, who closed out 2023 with his third straight victory.

In a way, Whiteley was fortunate just to be in the second round after careening through the shutdown area with no brakes following a first-round win over the last driver he’d ever want to race (but races absolutely all the time), wife Annie. “It’s not like I can’t get a car stopped with one parachute,” he said. “I’d like to think I could do it with no parachutes, but you can’t get it to a complete stop if you don’t have any brakes at all, and I had no brakes at all.”

Jim, who, just for fun, also ran his B/AA Cobalt in Comp Eliminator (and cut a near-perfect .002 light first round), ran just a thousandth of a second quicker than Annie in qualifying with a 5.447 for the No. 6 spot. Her seventh-best 5.448 is by far the quickest run ever to fall into the slow half of a TA/FC field, as a record eight drivers delved into the 5.40s.

In the last pair of the first round, Jim and Annie, like virtually every previous driver in the 12-car field, slowed from their qualifying times, but Jim managed to hold off her fast-closing 5.46 at 268 mph with a 5.49/258. That’s when the fun started.

While Annie’s Yenko blue “Shattered Glass” Camaro slowed to a safe, uneventful stop, Jim’s matching white machine rocketed ahead toward potential disaster. One of two chutes blossomed, but with no brakes he was destined to land in the sand trap. The packed sand slowed the car significantly, but not enough to keep him from nosing into the safety net. “A heim broke on the linkage to the master cylinder,” he explained, “and at that point there’s not much you can do.”

With minimal damage and all day to get the car back in shape for the under-the-lights quarterfinal round, Whiteley was more than ready for Bellemeur, but that race didn’t last long when he ran into trouble right off the line. Bellemeur, who had barely beaten him two weeks ago in the Las Vegas final, was long gone this time with a tremendous 5.39, duplicating his Low E.T. of the Meet qualifying time. “The blower belt broke,” Whiteley said. “I was never going to catch him anyway, so that just got two losses out of the way in one round.”

PSM – POMONA 2023

November 13, 2023 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed and Joey Gladstone never made a run at the NHRA World Finals, where last year the team reached the final to lock up a second-place finish in the final Pro Stock Motorcycle standings. That was never the plan this time anyway – the team was at Pomona strictly to further rider Blaine Hale’s career, and they did.

“I don’t know why or what the deal is, but when I help somebody else reach a goal, the feeling of accomplishment is the same as if I’d done it myself,” Reed said. “Not riding would be harder if Joey or I really wanted to drive this weekend, but right now he has enough going on that doesn’t even care, and at this point neither do I. Blaine’s really coachable, and we just want to help him.”

With the 2023 championship long decided and Reed Motorsports’ focus squarely on 2024, the team concentrated on giving Hale, a former national event winner who made his team debut last month in Dallas, the best bike possible. Hale qualified 16th and drew the utterly unbeatable Gaige Herrera in an impossible first-round matchup in which the impossible nearly happened.

Herrera, who won the 2023 championship in a landslide with an incredible 50-4 win-loss record, qualifying No. 1 at 13 of 14 events and winning 11 of 12 finals, lurched off the line and was, for once, vulnerable. He stumbled to one of his worst runs of the season, a 10.89 at 77 mph that left him hundreds of feet behind Hale at the finish line, but Hale invalidated a sure win with a -.256 red-light.

“It’s too bad,” Reed said. “With his leathers on, Blaine’s probably 200 pounds, but it’s not like he’s lost out there. He’s not out of control or anything. Every time he gets off the bike, he’s like, ‘this happened here,’ or “the bike did this here.’ He knows what’s going on.”

As for his team rider, Gladstone, Reed said, “We’re both looking forward to next year. Joey’s my best friend in the world. Even last year, he was like, ‘Are you sure you’re OK with me doing so good when you can’t even walk around yet?’ I told him, ‘When you’re riding the bike, I feel like it’s me on there.’ I get that much enjoyment out of it. We’ve got big plans for next year. Joey’s a winner. He’s not out here just to be out here, to be sixth or seventh or tenth in points. He’s here to win races and championships.”

TAFC – WOODBURN 2023

July 17, 2023 / Todd Veney

Clearly distracted by real-life issues bigger than anything that could transpire on a drag strip, Annie Whiteley trudged through a forgettable weekend in Woodburn, Ore., bowing out in the first round of both events of a double regional. “I don’t know what the heck was going on this weekend,” she said. “And right now, I don’t really care. I had a lot of things on my mind, things a lot more important than how I staged the car.”

The Top Alcohol Funny Car field at Woodburn Dragstrip, just south of Portland, was chock full of truly accomplished drivers: four of the six are past national event champions, and it wouldn’t have been an upset no matter who won. All six ran low- to mid-5.60s in qualifying, from the .60-flat of No. 1 Brian Hough, tuned by 2015-16 world champion Jonnie Lindberg, to the 5.65 of veteran Bret Williamson, who’s been building and driving Funny Cars since the 1980s.

Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing “Shattered Glass” Camaro began eliminations right from the middle of the field with a 5.64 that placed her fourth on the grid and a speed of 264.31 mph – top speed of the event through three qualifying sessions. Racing Jake Guadagnolo, who won the Northwest Nationals at Seattle last year, at the track operated by the family of her pseudo-teammate, five-time Top Alcohol Dragster world champ Joey Severance, Whiteley came out on the wrong end of an aggravating first-round race.

Guadagnolo, an accomplished bracket racer with tons of trans-brake experience, got off the button for a typically quick .023 reaction time and an early lead. Whiteley chased him down with top speed of the meet by a mile and an E.T. quick enough to have landed her No. 2 in the field had she run it in qualifying, but it was to no avail. His 5.63 at 261.55 mph in the Miner Bros. machine run by second-generation racer Greg Miner held off her slightly quicker 5.61 at a booming 266.74 mph.

“I double-bulbed when I rolled up there,” she said. “I never do that. Both bulbs came on at the same time, and I thought, ‘What the hell are you thinking?’ I didn’t mean to do it, but by then there was nothing I could do about it.”

PRO MOD – LAS VEGAS 2021

November 1, 2021 / Todd Veney

Laser-focused on the burgeoning Mid-West Drag Racing Series all year, Jim Whiteley simultaneously pieced together a successful season in his infrequent appearances on the NHRA tour. Whiteley, who barely missed winning the 2021 MWDRS Pro Mod championship, finished just outside the NHRA Top 10 despite skipping nearly half the races (5 of 11).

On his first qualifying run at the 11th and final event of this year’s NHRA series, the Dodge NHRA Nationals in Las Vegas, Whiteley’s sleek ’69 Camaro shook hard and coasted silently across finish line at 100 mph. Saturday afternoon in the second and third sessions, he pounded out two runs as close to each other as any two runs have ever been: .968-.970 at the 60-foot mark, 2.574-2.574 at 330 feet, 3.857-3.855 to half-track at 192.11-192.30 mph, 4.957-4.954 at 1,000 feet, and 5.886-5.882 at 242.06-242.36 mph across the finish line.

The first one, recorded early Saturday afternoon, put him eighth in the order, and the follow-up, recorded in the gathering gloom of dusk that evening, was truly a thing of beauty. Wheels up, charging hard through the middle of the course, it was, barley, his quickest pass of the weekend, but it still didn’t improve his standing in the final lineup. He wound up ninth in the final order, matched against teammate Brandon Snider in the bright sunlight of Sunday morning’s first round of eliminations.

Once again, Whiteley made his quickest run of the entire event, but Snider did him one better at both ends of the dragstrip. Whiteley cut a .042 light, but Snider nipped him with a slightly quicker .031, and when Whiteley picked up considerably from his best qualifying time (four-hundredths of a second and 2 mph, from 5.88/242 to 5.84/244), Snider picked up even more (four-hundredths and 3 mph, from 5.83/244 to 5.79/247) to win by a car-length.

“We’ve got some big plans for next year,” Whiteley said. “All kinds of plans. With all kinds of people and all kinds of cars. That’s all I’m going to say right now. But trust me, it’s gonna be good.”