It was great to be back behind the wheel of my 320 MPH top fuel dragster last weekend as we kicked off our 2023 summer season.
I’d like to start off this post by wishing you all a Happy Memorial Day. As you relax with your family and friends, it’s a great time to remember all of those that gave their lives in service or passed away as veterans who made it possible for us to continue to do what we love.
Going into Friday night we were pretty confident that the changes we made over the offseason were beneficial, but not monumental, and we planned to run the car to stripe. Unfortunately, we underestimated the tightness of the track and we were bitten by shake like many of the other cars. On Saturday, we knew we needed to make a clean A to B run with 21 cars on the property but at the same time, we needed to put a good ET on the scoreboard. Thankfully, that is exactly what Stu and Dom dialed up. We clocked a 3.780 at 319.90 MPH which put us in the 13th qualifying position. Looking at the run in retrospect, Stu and Dom figured we more than likely ran a 3.76 because I rolled into the beams a little deep. We talked about it and decided to not really make any changes and try to go up there for Q3 and have me shallow stage and see if it runs the 76. I was able to put it in shallow, but the track grabbed the rear tire a little more than we planned and slowed us down to a 3.18 run. However, after that qualifying session was over that put us in the 14th qualified position out of 21 cars. This matched us up against Doug Kalitta for Sunday morning. We looked at the forceccast and decided that Sunday was going to be a completely different day than Friday and Saturday. We were the 5th pair of cars to run Sunday and unfortunately no cars up to us had made it down the right lane. Doug and his crew decided to do a lane swap and put us into that right lane. Stu came over and said we have two choices: to keep everything the same and more than likely blow the tires off or slow it down and maybe it will make it down. We decided to slow it down to see what would happen. When I hit the gas, the car washed out and was trying to spin the tire. It pushed me over to the right near the wall, but it was making it down. I knew I was out of the groove a little, but I also couldn't see Doug. But, being out of the groove caused the tires to loose traction and this allowed Doug to pull away to win the round by .06.
What we learned was that we are all confident that we have a car capable of winning some rounds. No matter how we placed, this was a definite win for our team.
I’d like to start off this post I need to say thank you to all of the gentlemen that give their time to help me out. Thank you to Tim, David, Phil, Alex, Darrel, Dallas, Randy, Arnie, Jeff, and AJ for all of your support—without you, this would be impossible. Also, I’d like to offer a big thank you to Mike Wolfarth for getting everything prepared to go racing, and John Stewart and Dom Lagana for making great tune-up calls during the weekend.
We hope to see you at one of our other races this summer. Check out our schedule to find a date to join us!