Tag: regional (Page 1 of 2)

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 – PHOENIX

February 26, 2024 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley launched her 13th season of Funny Car racing with a fine semifinal finish at the Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series’ Western Region opener. “Not bad,” she assessed. “Things got a little stressful at times, changing the ignition to something we’ve never run before, but, all in all, I’d say it turned out all right.”

Frustrated by an erratic MSD command module that single-handedly cost the J&A Service/YNot Racing team three races last year, crew chief Mike Strasburg made the switch to a FuelTech setup for 2024. “From inside the car, the motor sounds different now,” Whiteley said. “The idle is deeper, a little throatier. We get up there for the first test run and I look out the window at Jeff [Strasburg], like, ‘This thing sounds like a mud truck – you sure it’s OK?’ “

After a couple of test runs – one too soft and one a little too hard – the team got down to business Friday when qualifying officially got under way. Strasburg split the difference and the car charged to the 1,000-foot mark, where, as planned, Whiteley clicked it off, coasting to a 5.71. On her second and final attempt, the “Shattered Glass” Camaro produced a fine 5.47 at 263.82 mph, good for No. 2 behind rookie Maddi Gordon, who went low with a 5.43 in her first start since taking over for her dad, outgoing world champ Doug Gordon.

Saturday afternoon in round one, Whiteley summarily dispatched the decent 5.60/262 of second-generation driver Will Martin, son of former nitro Funny Car racer John A. Martin, with a much quicker and faster 5.46/265. In the semi’s, she lost to eventual winner Brian Hough, 5.47/265 to a right-there 5.48/267, narrowly missing what would have been an all-female final round opposite Ms. Gordon.

Still, it was a decent start to the season and confirmation that the potentially perilous switch to an altogether different ignition system should pay dividends down the road. “That old command module cost us too many runs,” Whiteley said. “We didn’t even qualify at [the West Regional finale at] Vegas last year because of it. Nine cars, and what’s the one team that doesn’t qualify? Us. We kept sending it to them and they kept sending it back, saying, ‘It’s fine – run it.’ “

It won’t be the only major change to Whiteley’s machine for the season ahead. “We’re going to try that thing Hough uses [the newly legalized two-step],” Whiteley said. “I’ve been fighting this clutch-pedal extension and struggling to cut a light for 12 years now. If I don’t roll in deep, I can’t get a light. I can tell you one thing, though – this car is still going to have a clutch pedal, no matter what. I’d quit before I’d drive a car without one.”

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL 2022

November 7, 2022 / Todd Veney

Though she fell short of the ultimate goal – another event title – Annie Whiteley turned in yet another rock-solid performance at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway with a semifinal appearance at the final NHRA regional event of the year. Whiteley, who’s reached at least the semi’s in six of her past seven starts, came out on the wrong end of a tight semifinal match with Chris Marshall after beating him on a holeshot in the same round at the same facility last week at the Nevada Nationals.

The Whiteleys’ Mike Strasburg-tuned J&A Service/YNot Racing machine came off the trailer with a blistering 5.47 at more than 270 mph in the opening qualifying session to set the tone for another successful weekend, a trend long established as 2022 winds to a close. The whole top half of the Top Alcohol Funny Car field, which year after year is the toughest to make in any region in the country, was locked in the 5.40s, with Whiteley in the No. 3 slot, behind the matching 5.42s of Marshall and national championship contender Doug Gordon.

Pitted against No. 6 qualifier Kris Hool in the first round of eliminations, Whiteley, who swept both Vegas regionals in her rookie season of 2012, advanced easily when he red-lighted and smoked the tires just off the line in what might have been his last launch ever in a Funny Car. She got off the line cleanly, and with a steady 5.52/267 powered to an easy win to move into yet another semifinal.

There, Whiteley’s weekend came to a close when, despite the best reaction time of the entire round and despite an even quicker run than she put up in her first-round win (5.528 to 5.523), she still fell to Marshall, who made just one run out of the 5.40s all weekend. Marshall got back in the .40s with a 5.49/266 to run down her early lead and second straight 5.52 to win by a scant 14-thousandths of a second.

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL 2020

November 8, 2020 / Todd Veney

At The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the final race of a trying and largely unfulfilling season, Annie Whiteley wrapped up 2020 with a dispiriting first-round loss to outgoing Top Alcohol Funny Car world champ Sean Bellemeur.

The four-time TAFC Regional Champion (2013-14 in the West, and 2018-19 in the Central) never made a representative run all weekend. Whiteley, a many-time Vegas winner, posted an OK .974 60-foot time in Friday afternoon’s opening qualifying session but had to lift and slowed to a 12.47 at 66 mph, eighth in an eight-car field and the only one not to get to the finish line under power. Under the lights in Q2, she made it further downtrack but ultimately had to back off the throttle again and coasted to an 8.77 at 120 mph to enter eliminations on the bump for the first time in years.

Whiteley’s weekend came to an unceremonious, abrupt end not far off the line in the first round. Bellemeur, who had more than a tenth on the field going into last-shot qualifying with a 5.48/268 and ran in .40s in the only other qualifying session (combined .40s for all other teams: 0), claimed a lopsided victory. The 2019 series champ was long gone with a with a winning 5.50/269 in the left lane while over in the right, Whiteley’s suddenly stubborn, uncooperative machine refused to respond to crew chief Mike Strasburg’s between-rounds adjustments. Again she was forced to lift almost immediately, slowing to a 9.23 at 106 mph and winding up an up-and-down season on a decidedly down note.

“Too much wheel speed,” Whiteley said. “It’s been that kind of year.” She closes the door on 2020 second in the Central Region standings behind returning veteran Bob McCosh and sixth the national rankings. It wasn’t the best season the YNot/J&A Service team ever had, but in the end Whiteley qualified No. 1 four times (all in the first half of the year), racked up three final-round appearances and a win (at the 2020 opener in Belle Rose, where she’s still never lost), and finished with a 12-12 win-loss record, including a respectable 10-9 mark in NHRA competition.

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL 2019

November 11, 2019 / Todd Veney

In her 17th and final start of 2019, Annie Whiteley won her third race of the season to lock down yet another Top 5 finish in the NHRA national standings. The J&A Service/YNot Racing driver established top speed of the meet, as usual, and came out on top of one of the toughest fields in Top Alcohol Funny Car history with her sixth career final-round appearance at the fabulous Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and sixth win.

“I don’t know what it is about this track,” she said. “I always say that, I know, but there’s just something about this place and Sonoma.” Qualifying began with a thud when she blew the tires off, but, after a subsequent 5.52 at 268.60 mph (top speed of the meet to that point) run, she entered eliminations fifth on the final grid, paired against a driver who has more lifetime appearances than anyone in alcohol racing history (even Frank Manzo): Jay Payne. He clocked a 5.523 on his final attempt to move around Whiteley by one spot, but that just meant that he had lane choice – they were already 4 and 5 and destined to meet anyway.

When the Tree flashed, Whiteley was out first and made the third-quickest run of the entire weekend, a 5.500 at 269.67 mph (top speed of the meet) to hold off his right-there 5.56. That set up a semifinal match with the most feared driver in Top Alcohol Funny Car, back-to-back world champ Sean Bellemeur, who was sidelined by, of all things, a stuck throttle on the burnout. “I was just putting it into reverse when I heard this weird revving sound as he went by me,” she said. “He kept rolling down there and it hit me: ‘We just won the semi’s – we’re in the final.’ ” The resultant bye couldn’t have come at a more opportune time – after the .50-flat in the first round and another .50-something run in the final, she blew the tires off at the hit and coasted across the finish line at a speed that wouldn’t have gotten her a speeding ticket out on I-15, 74 mph.

In the final against Brian Hough, who’ll finish second in the championship standings this year, Whiteley blasted off the line right on time and came out on top in a close race, 5.54 to 5.56. “I told myself, ‘Relax, relax, relax,’ before I went up there, and I did,” she said, “I thought, ‘You know you can do it, so just do it.’ My clutch pedal is fixed now, and I am too. I’ve never been much of a gambler, but I guess in Vegas I’m lucky. I have no clue why we always run so good here – maybe I just save all my luck for the race track.”

TAFC – GAINESVILLE REGIONAL 2019

March 10, 2019 / Todd Veney

Rained out before a wheel ever turned at what she thought was her season opener – the Central Regional in Belle Rose, La., where it rained so much there was never any reason to bother unloading the car – Annie Whiteley instead began her 2019 campaign with a thud at the Gainesville Regional, where, for just the second time in her entire career, she didn’t qualify.

At the wheel of a brand-new Yenko blue Camaro, the last Top Alcohol Funny Car legendary fabricator Brad Hadman will ever build, Whiteley never made it to 2nd gear in three qualifying attempts. “I’ll be honest,” she said. “We were all a little worried about this new car. After the second qualifying session, I started thinking, ‘This thing is going to give us fits…’ ”

With an aggregate best of 7.71 at 162 mph, Whiteley wound up dead last in the final lineup, 11th of 11 potential qualifiers. “It would make it just far enough that you’d think you were good,” she said, “and then it would take the tire off right before the gear change. We switched transmissions, but obviously it didn’t like that ratio, either.” When qualifying was over and she found herself in the unacceptable and completely unfamiliar role of non-qualifier instead of being No. 1, as she was five times in a row to open the 2018 season, Whiteley and crew made one last test run Sunday afternoon to prepare for next week’s Gatornationals. The result: a more-than-competitive 5.53 at 271 mph.

“We finished last season with [John] Lombardo’s old car after I went into the net at Dallas, but that was Lombardo’s car – not my car,” Whiteley said. “I never did feel right in there. This new car … I just liked the way I fit in it right away. The guys measured every little thing and had everything placed just the way I like it before I ever got in the car. I never even sat in it till just before the first test run, but everything was right, right away. If it runs anything like it did in testing, we should be fine this year.”

TAFC – LAS VEGAS REGIONAL 2018

November 5, 2018 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley took her rightful place in the quickest, fastest Top Alcohol Funny Car field of all-time, but at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, site of so much success in years past, she was gone early. Driving the repurposed John Lombardo/Rick Jackson Camaro she’d strapped into for the first time a week earlier at the Vegas national, Whiteley ran a 5.52/267 and an even better 5.51/268 that surprisingly didn’t land her in the fast half of the field.

It took a run in the 5.40s to do that and an unbelievable 5.53 to make the record bump. Newly crowned world champ Sean Bellemeur, who entered the event on a five-race win streak, locking up the first perfect 10-win season since Frank Manzo’s glory days, failed to qualify, and perennial contender Doug Gordon nearly did. Whiteley’s 5.51 was good only for the No. 6 spot, which set up a first-round match with Lombardo, who’d run a 5.47 for No. 3.

“[Crew chief] Mike [Strasburg] was saying at Dallas that the car wasn’t running that great, wasn’t doing what it was supposed to,” Whiteley said. “He could tell that something in the ignition wasn’t right because he was putting in timing maps all weekend that have never worked before but that the computer told him to run. Turns out the spark plug wires weren’t right, so we weren’t making the power every other part of the tune-up told him we should be making. Every run, he’d say, ‘It should have run better than that,’ and he never says stuff like that.”

Strasburg and crew threw a new set of wires on it for eliminations and voilà – instant power. Only now, with the rest of the tune-up hopped up to compensate, the car made too much power, and Whiteley blew the tires off right at the swap, allowing Lombardo to survive with a run barely over 200 mph. His engine blew in a flash of flame, slowing him to a 5.73/202, but he still made it across the finish line well ahead of Whiteley’s coasting 12.67 at 85 mph. “That showed Mike that the power had been there all along,” Whiteley said. “We just couldn’t run what we should have been running because the wires were bad. This was one time we almost didn’t even mind losing a round because now we know the car will be right for Pomona.”

TAFC – GAINESVILLE REGIONAL 2017

March 13, 2017 / Todd Veney

In her first outing of the 2017 season (but not her car’s first), perennial championship contender Annie Whiteley was unceremoniously upset in the first round of Top Alcohol Funny Car eliminations by veteran Kris Hool after qualifying way up in the No. 2 spot.

At the Eastern Regional in Gainesville, Fla., one week before she would win the prestigious Gatornationals at the same facility, Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing Camaro inexplicably blew the tires off in low gear, costing her the race. “We have no idea why,” she said. “It was running perfect in qualifying, then in the first round, ‘poof‘ – up in smoke.”

Until that point, Whiteley was perfectly positioned for another win. Qualified No. 2, behind only Sweden’s Ulf Leanders, she ran an outstanding 5.502, missing the .40s by a mere three-thousandths of a second. Weeks earlier in mineshaft conditions at the Western Regional event in Phoenix, substitute driver Greg Hunter reestablished his career best seemingly every time down the track in the YNot Camaro with one solid run after another, including his first 5.40s.

“We got back to the pits after first round, and Mike and the guys were all scratching their heads,” Whiteley said of crew chief Mike Strasburg, a former national event champion in Top Alcohol Dragster. “There was no way they were trying to do anything except what they’d already been doing. That’s OK, though – that’s why they have the next race, right?”

TAFC – LAS VEGAS NATIONAL 2016

November 1, 2016 / Todd Veney

Annie Whiteley’s snake-bitten J&A Service/YNot team qualified in the fast half of the field for the 12th time in 13th starts this season, but for the third race in a row was out early with a disappointing first-round loss.

At the Toyota Nationals at her best track on the NHRA circuit, The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where she won the first race of her career as a Top Alcohol Funny Car rookie in 2012, she fell to former Gatornationals winner Ulf Leanders in what, by the numbers, should have been the closest race of the first round.

They qualified eighth and ninth with matching 5.60s, Whiteley in the No. 8 spot with a 5.603 and Leanders No. 9 with a 5.606. Such matchups usually go to the driver with the better reaction time, which, in this case, was Whiteley, who bolted off the line first with one of her best lights of the season, an outstanding .039.

Leanders matched their qualifying times with another 5.60-flat, so Whiteley would have won with anything better than a 5.63, but she knocked the tires loose in low gear. Racing in the first pair of the first round, at the ungodly hour of 8:30 a.m., she recovered quickly and charged after him, but a 5.77 at just short of 260 mph left her J&A Service/YNot Camaro a few car lengths behind at the finish line.

By any metric, it was one of the toughest Top Alcohol Funny Car races ever held. It featured one of the biggest fields in years – 28 cars attempted to qualify – and one of the fastest, with a bump of 5.66 and former NHRA event winners in the first five alternate spots on the final qualifying ladder.

Whiteley stands seventh in the national standings, with two more races coming up at Las Vegas – the makeup of the rained-out West Region opener scheduled for April in the middle of the week while the SEMA show is going on 15 miles away, and the regularly scheduled West closer set for next weekend.