Tag: Norwalk (Page 2 of 2)

PRO MOD – NORWALK 2017

June 27, 2017 / Todd Veney

Steven Whiteley came through under huge pressure in last-shot qualifying at the NHRA Summit Racing Nationals to make the cut and extend the longest active consecutive-race qualifying streak in Pro Mod. Twenty-fifth on the list with a shutoff best of 9.13 when the session began, Whiteley was the first one down the track in the left lane. Charging off the line and speeding through the mid-range, he clocked a strong 5.87 at 248 mph – his highest speed since a 249-mph blast at Charlotte – for the No. 10 spot on the grid.

In the opening round, Whiteley cut one of the best lights of the entire event, .033, only to fall to Jonathan Gray when the former Pro Stock racer was even quicker with a .023 reaction time and a 5.83 opposite Whiteley’s otherwise fine 5.93. Whiteley, who opened the season with a victory at the Gatornationals, remains in the Top 5 in the J&A Service Pro Mod Series despite a second straight early exit in eliminations.

“It’s been a little rough the last two weeks, but it’s still the best season we’ve ever had, by far,” said Whiteley, who currently stands fourth in the rankings. “[Crew chief] Jeff [Perley] and all the guys have worked their tails off to make this car consistent, and you can tell by the number of rounds we’ve won and the number of times we’ve beaten higher-qualified cars.”

After racing on back-to-back-to-back weekends in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Ohio, teams get a two-month reprieve before the series picks back up with the biggest race of the season, the U.S. Nationals, in Indianapolis over Labor Day weekend. “That’s a lot of time to work on the car, test, and make everything better,” Whiteley said. “If we can stay in the Top 5 all season, maybe even move back up a couple spots, that would be incredible. You start out in this deal and you just want to qualify. Then you want to win rounds, and then you want to win a race. We’ve done all that now. We just need to keep going in this direction.”

PSM – NORWALK 2017

June 26, 2017 / Todd Veney

At the NHRA Summit Racing Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio, an hour outside Cleveland and 10 minutes from the shores of Lake Erie, Cory Reed and Team Liberty kept alive their perfect streak of qualifying both his and teammate Angelle Sampey’s bikes at every event before both bowed out in the opening round.

“It probably doesn’t look that great from the outside – losing first round again – but you have to look at the big picture,” said Reed, NHRA’s 2016 Rookie of the Year. “We continue to make progress, little bits at a time. Chris [Rivas] knows what he’s doing. Ken [“Big” Johnson] knows what he’s doing. When we have a dyno like everybody else, we’ll be faster – a lot faster.”

Reed, who has qualified as high as fifth in his young drag racing career, began eliminations from the No. 9 spot – his highest to date with the newly formed team. He came within a scant thousandth of a second of the top half of the field, matching No. 8 Mike Berry’s 6.932 right to the thousandth of a second but losing the speed tiebreaker, 189.04 mph to Berry’s 192.03.

Already established as a known “leaver,” Reed figured to have the upper hand in such an even matchup, but Berry got the jump, .030 to .064, and slightly outran the second-year racer for a 6.95 to 6.99 win. “When the bike’s not leaving hard, it doesn’t just hurt your e.t. – it hurts your reaction time, too,” Reed said. “I like Mike – he’s a good dude. If somebody had to beat me, it may as well be him. But this sucks. Losing sucks. We ran that 6.93 in the first session, and when you run that good that early you know you’re going to be in the show and can really focus on stuff to make the bike faster. Only this time, we never got any faster.”

TAFC – NORWALK 2017

June 26, 2017 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley set low e.t. of the meet and had top speed until the penultimate round of eliminations en route to a quarterfinal finish at the NHRA Summit Racing Nationals that solidified her hold on a Top 5 spot in the national standings.

Whiteley, a four-time winner on the national circuit with more than a dozen victories in regional competition, qualified the J&A/YNot Racing Camaro a solid 3rd in the Top Alcohol Funny Car field with an outstanding 5.53. She unloaded a 5.50-flat at more than 270 mph in the opening round of eliminations to establish low e.t. for the entire weekend and easily eliminate Canadian Tyler Scott, whose Larry Dobbs entry now is tuned by ex-YNot crew chief Roger Bateman.

In the second round against Chris Foster, who would go on to his third career runner-up finish at this event, Whiteley slipped to a 5.59 and lost a photo-finish match to Foster’s 5.62. Foster fought his car off the wall for much of the run but maintained the lead to win by the invisible margin of just seven-thousandths of a second.

“It shook and I had to short-shift 2nd gear,” Whiteley said. “That 5.50 was perfect, and you can’t help but wonder, ‘Why couldn’t I have run the .59 in the first round, when anything would have done, and the .50 that time?’ but there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s just the way things have been going lately.”

PSM – NORWALK 2016

June 28, 2016 / Todd Veney

Norwalk represented a weekend of firsts for Pro Stock Motorcycle rookie Cory Reed – first official 6.80, first start from the top half of the field, and, most important, first career round-win in NHRA professional competition.

“I wanted to do better – and we could’ve done better, and we will – but this was a great weekend,” Reed said at the conclusion of the Summit Raceway Equipment Nationals. Reed, son of champion racers Jim and Annie Whiteley, has impressed in his short time as a professional drag racer, but never more so than at the supertrack in the middle of nowhere in tiny Norwalk, Ohio.

“I think people already knew what we could do, but now they really know,” said Reed, who cut a .009 reaction time in his first-round win over veteran Scotty Pollacheck, a former national event finalist. “I kinda wanted to sneak up on them, but I think they know we’re coming now.”

Reed drove away from Pollacheck for a 6.95 to 7.73 win and was poised for another round-win over a name driver and a first career semifinal appearance but, again, he was too quick for his own good. By the smallest possible margin, one-thousandth of a second, Reed disqualified himself in the second round with a -.001 red-light start, just a blink of an eye from a perfect .000 reaction time.

“I saw it when I went by the Tree and knew it was over and just hit the [shift] button, or that run would’ve been a lot better than that,” Reed said of his short-shifting 6.94 against many-time world champion and eventual runner-up Andrew Hines. “I’m still mad about that – it was so close – but I feel good about where we are right now, probably better than I’ve ever felt. We’re halfway through the year, but we’re nowhere near halfway through the schedule.”

Norwalk marks the halfway point of the 24-race NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series tour, but for motorcycle teams, which run 16 of the 24 NHRA national events, Norwalk is less than a third of the way through the season. “There’s a long way to go,” Reed said, “and we’re just getting started.”

TAFC – NORWALK 2016

June 27, 2016 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley qualified No. 1 for the third race in a row, but for the second straight time her J&A Service/YNot Racing team struggled off the line in the opening round of eliminations and suffered an upset loss.

“Maybe we shouldn’t qualify No. 1 anymore,” joked Whiteley, who was also No. 1 at the Summit Racing Equipment Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio, last season. “I don’t know what’s going on, I really don’t. We did about four different things to make sure the car didn’t shake the tires on that run, and it did it anyway. It’s the same thing that happened in Denver, and we still don’t know why.”

Whiteley charged off the starting line with a slight lead on rookie Chris King, a newly licensed Chicago fireman who was making his national event debut, but the lead didn’t last long. Her car went into violent shake, slowed to a troubled 12.44 at 78 mph, and King was long gone. Even though his fire bottles discharged around half-track and he had to lift, King had enough momentum to coast to an unlikely win in by far the biggest upset of the entire event.

“It’s disappointing, but what are you going to do?” Whiteley said. We’ll keep testing, and we’ll get this thing figured out.”

Qualifying, as has been the case almost all year, was a huge success. Whiteley was No. 1 for the second year in a row at this race and for the third time in a row this season, including Houston, where she reached the semifinals, and Denver.

Whiteley paced the field with a 5.531, the exact same e.t. that was good for the top spot last year, right down to the thousandth of a second. Her speed was within 0.05 mph of the 266.16-mph blast she ran for top speed last year.

Heading into the West regional at Woodburn Dragstrip just outside Portland, Ore., Whiteley is tied for 14^th in the national standings, 52 points outside the Top 10.

PRO MOD – NORWALK 2015

July 6, 2015 / Todd Veney

At the SummitRacing.com Nationals at Norwalk, Jim Whiteley qualified higher than he ever has in his brief Pro Mod career – No. 5 – and then proceeded to run even better in eliminations. But, tired of watching turbocharged and supercharged clutch cars drive around him on the top end, he’s taking out his torque converter setup after this race and going back to a clutch for the U.S. Nationals.

The two-time Top Alcohol Dragster world champ backed up an out-of-the-box 5.91 with an outstanding 5.90 in the second qualifying session, just missing the 5.80s and claiming the provisional No. 4 spot on the grid. He ended up fifth, ahead of 23 of the 28 entrants in the typically huge Pro Mod field and in the first round faced Pro Mod rookie Troy Coughlin Jr., son of the 2012 NHRA Pro Mod champ and 2013-14 championship runner-up.

Whiteley cut a decent .089 light, young Coughlin was off like a shot with a .024, and Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Chevelle immediately overcame the Jegs car’s quicker start and sailed into a sizable lead. He was out front by more than half a tenth at the 330-foot mark, still held a noticeable advantage at half-track, and finally relinquished it around the 1,000-foot mark.

“I never saw him until the very end,” said Whiteley, whose reaction times usually are in the .030s and .040s. “Those turbocharged cars have 6 or 7 mph on the converter cars at the top end, and he got around me. When the converter slips like that, you just give away too much speed, and that thing’s about to come out of there. It’s not easy to make a change when the car runs as good as it did this weekend, but in the end, I think this will be for the best.”

TAFC – NORWALK 2015

July 6, 2015 / Todd Veney

Until the car inexplicably went up in smoke in the semifinals, Annie Whiteley utterly dominated Top Alcohol Funny Car at the SummitRacing.com Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio. She ran not just low e.t. of the meet, but low e.t. of all three qualifying sessions and each of the first two rounds of eliminations. Her worst run of the entire event to that point, an off-the-trailer 5.57, was better than any other driver’s best run.

“I have no idea why it went up in smoke that time,” said Whiteley of her J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro. “The car was set up just about the same and everything had been going perfectly from the time we got there.”

Whiteley was the only driver in the 5.50s in Friday’s first qualifying session with a 5.579 at 264.96. She followed with a 5.570 later that afternoon, then lowered the boom in last-shot qualifying Saturday with a 5.531 at 265.06 mph, putting more than a half a tenth on the No. 2 qualifier, Sweden’s Ulf Leanders.

The bludgeoning continued in eliminations when Whiteley left on John Headley in the first round and unloaded a consistent 5.55 at the exact same speed at which she’d already established top speed of the meet to that point: 265.06 mph. The car ran even better in the quarterfinals against 2013 Norwalk winner Kris Hool, but that one could have ended in disaster.

For the first time in memory, and for no known reason, the Tree took about twice as long to come down as it normally does, affecting both drivers’ concentration – it was so long that NHRA Official Starter Mark Lyle threw his hands up in the air. Hool was unable to hold his car on the starting line and rolled through the beams for an instant disqualification, but Whiteley hung on, left at exactly the right rpm, and laid down low e.t. of eliminations, 5.553, and a track-record speed of 266.16 mph.

“I didn’t think that Tree was ever going to come on,” she said. “It gets you completely out of your normal groove, but I waited for it.” In the semi’s, Whiteley smoked the tires like a fuel car right off the starting line and could only watch as D.J. Cox scooped up the win with a 5.74 – about two-tenths slower than she’d been running all weekend.

Norwalk was just the first of back-to-back-to-back races for the YNot Racing/J&A Service team. This weekend is the Route 66 Nationals in Chicago, where in 2013 Whiteley picked up the first national event victory of her career, and the following weekend the team will be all the way across the country in Woodburn, Ore., for the fourth race of the seven-race Western Region schedule.

TAFC – NORWALK 2014

July 8, 2014 / Todd Veney

At the Summit Racing Nationals in Norwalk, Annie Whiteley, tied for seventh in the national standings, was upset in the first round of eliminations for the second week in a row – again after a particularly strong performance in qualifying. Whiteley, a Top 5 driver in each of her two years in Top Alcohol Funny Car, qualified the J&A Service/YNot Racing entry second in the field with an outstanding 5.56 at 261.78 mph and also ran a 5.60-flat during qualifying, but she went up in smoke right off the line in the first round and fell to 2011 event winner Fred Hagen Jr.

“When it smoked the tires at Chicago, there was nothing I could do,” said Whiteley, who had been a finalist at three of four races before this recent slump. “This one was my fault. The rpm was too high when I let the clutch out because I didn’t get the swap right – I led a little too much with my right [throttle] foot.”

“No way that thing’s going to make it when there’s 18 pounds of boost at the hit,” said crew chief Roger Bateman, a veteran of more than 3,000 runs as a driver. “I don’t care how good the starting line is; that’s too much.”

Teammate Mike Strasburg, fresh off his first Top Alcohol Dragster win in 13 years, scored for the second time in three outings and for the first time ever in national event competition with a final-round victory over Mark Taliaferro. In his first season back in the class since beginning his Top Fuel career more than a decade ago, Strasburg is up to fifth in the standings.

Driving the car that Jim Whiteley wheeled to the 2013 national championship, Strasburg banged out back-to-back high-5.30s to qualify for a field so tough that early season points leaders Duane Shields and Joey Severance missed the cut. He marched through the preliminary rounds of eliminations with one 5.30 after another against past national event winners Robin Samsel, Bill Reichert, and Rich McPhillips, then topped Taliaferro in the final, 5.45 to 5.68.