Tag: Norwalk (Page 1 of 2)

It doesn’t usually take Annie Whiteley too many races to bag that first NHRA win of the season. For five years now, it’s taken exactly one: Belle Rose.

But now we’re halfway through the year, and Whiteley’s vaunted J&A Service/YNot team has been largely absent from the NHRA scene, relegated to appearances on the Mid-West Drag Racing Series tour, where, over the past few years, she’s really made a name for herself. “It’s not like I didn’t want to be out here,” Whiteley said of her second NHRA start of 2022. “It’s been my back. People would call, asking if we’d be at Belle Rose because we always start out [winning] at that race, but this year, I couldn’t because my back wouldn’t let me. Now it is.”

Other than a single NHRA outing at the Dallas Regional, where she got just one qualifying attempt and went out first round, Whiteley hadn’t driven 1320 feet since late last season in Las Vegas. “It’s nice to be back on the quarter-mile,” she said at Norwalk, one of her favorite tracks on either tour. “I love the Mid-West deal, but I prefer the quarter-mile. And I like this track. Always have.”

Whiteley made quality runs on two of three qualifying attempts – all but the first, when it seemed no one could get down the barren right lane. She pounded out back-to-back 5.50s in the remaining sessions to secure a spot in the fast half of the field and another in the first round to send driver Tyler Scott and team owner Larry Dobbs back to the Great White North. Both were right on time with .051 reaction times, but Whiteley pulled further and further ahead of the Canadian driver with every shift of her B&J trans for a 5.57/266 to 5.75/249 win.

That same run with the same reaction time in the quarterfinals would have been enough to turn back DJ Cox, but by then conditions had changed. Both cars slowed – just about everybody in that round did – but Whiteley lost three-hundredths of a second and Cox just two in a tight 5.58/261 to 5.60/266 match. “It was almost like the car was shaking the tires,” she said, “but it really wasn’t. I don’t know you’d call it – ‘rough?’ It wasn’t full-on tire-shake, but it was something – something just enough to make me lose.”

You can’t cut a light when the clutch pedal doesn’t feel right and you definitely can’t win when your blower belt decides it’s had enough halfway through high gear. Thwarted by both, Annie Whiteley pulled out of the Summit Nationals with a disappointing quarterfinal finish despite never making a bad run all weekend.

The J&A Service/YNot Racing driver sped to a 5.60 at 267 mph Friday afternoon in the first of what turned out to be just two Top Alcohol Funny Car qualifying sessions, and followed with a 5.57 at 266, settling into the No. 5 position on the 15-car grid. In the first round, home-state veteran Tony Bogolo offered little resistance, running a polite 5.73/251 that she easily overpowered with a 5.57/267. Whiteley advanced, and on the surface all was good, but .115 reaction times weren’t going to carry her to victory.

“The car kept lurching when I’d go to roll in,” she said. “You’re bearing down as hard as you can on the clutch and the brake, and every time you’d rev it up, it was like, ‘Whoa,’ and you’d have to shove down harder on the clutch and pull harder on the brake, and how can you cut a light like that?”

Sunday afternoon in the rain-delayed quarterfinals, Whiteley was well on her way to another 5.50-something against eventual winner DJ Cox’s, 5.57/264 until the blower belt broke, slowing her to a 5.73 at just 213 mph and costing her any chance at winning. “I don’t want to jinx us, but that’s the first blower belt we’ve broke in probably six years,” she said.

But the problem right now isn’t blower belts – it’s the uneasy relationship between the clutch pedal and Whiteley’s left foot. “I need enough air gap so the car doesn’t go anywhere when I try to roll in,” she said. “Jim told me, ‘Annie, you should be able to roll that car into the beams with two fingers on the brake handle.’ It’s just so frustrating sometimes. Doug Gordon’s team was nice enough to give us a base setup with everything you need to get started with a Molinari clutch, and I really hope that works because we’ve got to get this figured out.”

After winning two of her three previous starts and three races overall this season, Annie Whiteley was upset in the first round of the NHRA Nationals in tiny Norwalk, Ohio. As in her only other first-round loss all year, at Topeka, rain played havoc with the schedule, in this case reducing qualifying to a single session. She and other Top Alcohol Funny Car drivers couldn’t have known it at the time, but their opening qualifying runs Friday afternoon would be the only ones they’d get. She charged off the line and sped to a 5.57 at just short of 270 mph for the No. 2 spot on the grid, her third No. 2 in the past four races after opening the season with five No. 1s in a row.

That set up a first-round match with the No. 15 qualifier – only this time, No. 15 wasn’t the normal second-slowest car in the field; it was Chip Beverett and his 5.40-capable Camaro. Beverett may have run just a 5.84 on his lone qualifying attempt, but he picked up three-tenths of a second to a 5.54 in the first round that edged the YNot driver’s 5.52 at 270.64 mph (top speed of the meet).

“The car started creeping on me at the starting line,” said Whiteley, who’s off until the Northwest Nationals in Seattle (Aug. 3-5). “When I brought the motor up, it kind of staged itself. That just kills your concentration – you’re going back down on the pedal, and, naturally, that’s right when the Tree comes on so you’re late.”