Clay Millican has no need or desire to change his appearance, but his Peter Lehman-owned 104+ Performance Additives Top Fuel Dragster is going to flash a radically new look later this season. 

It'll make the fans gasp and squeal, "Ohmygosh!" -- and make them realize that they, too, are going to be coaxed from their comfort zone. The 8,000-horsepower race car, the one that qualified 10th at Pomona and took out Doug Kalitta's powerful Mac Tools Dragster on a holeshot in the second elimination run of the Winternationals, soon will carry a monostrut wingstand reminiscent of the one on Don Garlits' novel "Swamp Rat 32." 

"We're in the process now," Lehman Racing crew chief Mike Kloeber said. "We finally have a design. So now it's just a matter of time, getting it out of the engineers' hands and into [those of] the people who have got to bless it: let them look at it and do what they have to do with it: the design and all that structural analysis. It shouldn't be very much longer after that. Then we'll build it." 

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He said at Pomona that he expected to be making some parts "in a couple of weeks." 

So when does Kloeber expect to debut the mono-chic dragster? "I won't say two months or two weeks, but I'm pretty sure before the year's over, we'll have a pretty good working monostrut car," he said. "This car sat for four months last year, waiting. We were "two weeks away" for two or three months. We're getting much closer now." 

He said the hold-ups right now are design approval from NHRA and the SFI Foundation and the physical parts to implement the plan. 

(The SFI Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit organization established to issue and administer standards for specialty/performance automotive and racing equipment. Often motorsports sanctioning bodies incorporate SFI's standards into its rules. Consumers eventually benefit, because SFI establishes recognized levels of performance or quality for an automotive product.)  

"The Werner people have put up the money. The money's all been spent to make the car a monostrut," Kloeber said. "We just don't have the actual parts to do it, because we haven't made them yet. They're paid for. That isn't the issue. It's just getting a design that everybody's happy with and something we can live with that'll be safe." 

NHRA officials issued a statement in mid-December that included a statement that it would be testing monostrut wing technology in 2005. The sanctioning body ratcheted up its attention to safety following Darrell Russell's fatal crash last June. However, Kloeber has been pursuing his engineering project since late 2002 /early 2003.    

"We've been working on it for a little more than two years," Kloeber said, acknowledging help from associate sponsor Werner Enterprises. "I would've thought we would've been done in six or eight months. It's been the better part of two years." 

He said Lehman Racing is "not going to test it specifically for NHRA. We're going to run it for our own purposes."  However, he added, "We'll certainly run it with their blessing and can't do it without it."  

Kloeber said he and Lehman discussed their intention with NHRA and SFI officials from the start. He said NHRA "has been on board" but "they really haven't changed anything, other than circulate a couple of memos around that they want  people to come up with ideas for new products, with new ways to do what we do that's safer than what we're doing right now. Other than that continuing encouragement, nothing has really changed." 

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Kloeber has established himself as one of drag racing's premier crew chiefs, although he might be better known in IHRA circles for helping Millican earn four Top Fuel titles. However, he has an impressive NHRA dossier, as well. At age 29, he was Don Prudhomme's crew chief. He tuned Jim Epler to the first 300-mph Funny Car pass in 1993, and he guided Cristen Powell to her distinction as the youngest female Top Fuel winner in NHRA history. So the NHRA brass knew they weren't dealing with an unknown quantity. 

They trusted Kloeber but made one request. "They've been very helpful and encouraged us to go in a direction they could work with," he said. However, they asked him "not to make some 'Buck Rogers' kind of spaceship that nobody would ever want to see us all have to race." 

He said he understood their viewpoint: "There's no point in building a race car that no one will allow you to race." 

For a long time, Kloeber has had the sense for several years that Top Fuel dragsters needed to undergo a revolutionary change to keep pace with technology. So his design didn't seem all that shocking to him.   

"It was obvious what we were going to do in the future," he said. "We weren't going to keep running a 1960s look to these fairly modern race cars."  

As for the monostrut design, Kloeber said, "We like the concept. Our goal is to make this something that all cars can just refit their race cars they have right now and put a monostrut on their car." 

The wingless, sometimes-clunky, front-engine boxes that left a driver's upper body exposed have evolved, through trial and error as well as technological advances, to the sleek, rear-engine, 300-inch wheelbase nitro-belchers that rocket down a race track on fat Goodyear rear slicks and bicycle-sized front tires. Kloeber wants to play a key role in shaping the look of the new-millennium machines.    

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"We want to continue to evolve the dragster," Kloeber said. "The Funny Cars have had the ability to change their bodies quite a bit over the last several years, but the dragsters haven't had those same kind of performance improvements in their race cars. We hope that the monostrut wingstand will help move us in that direction." He said he wants to "get it to run better and make it a better package." 

It hasn't been as easy as he might have thought.  

He had to scrap the first design because the single strut simply wasn't as strong as it needed to be. "It probably would've gotten the job done," he said, "but when you're using computer models to do FEA analysis, you see the weaknesses right away. So we just basically started over. 

"We weren't happy with how heavy our structure was getting, relative to the increase in strength that it had," he said. "So it was time to stop and start over and rethink it, and we got some new people involved in it. That's when we really started moving forward, about two months ago." 

What helped Kloeber and Co. so much also proved to be a stumbling block -- computer modeling. It was his first real experience with the process, and he used it for what's referred to as a CFD study and for FEA research.  

"CFD" stands for Computational Fluid Dynamics, the science which tracks the way flowing fluid changes speed and directions, consequently generating significant forces inside and around objects. On a computer, engineers can see what that means on a virtual 3-D mesh that has tens of thousands or millions of imaginary grid points. It is helpful in calculating a fluid's velocity, direction, pressure, density, and temperature. 

"FEA" means "finite element analysis," and it pertains to the safety of structures. The procedure comes from the aerospace and nuclear industries and consists of a computer model of a design that is loaded and analyzed for specific results. Its purpose is to verify that the proposed design will be able to perform to the desired specifications before the product, in this case a monostrut wingstand, is manufactured. 

Kloeber said his group got sucked into a computer-modeling vortex. "You get into a situation where every time you make a run on the computer, do the simulation, that answers a question, which leads to another question," he said. "So you say, 'Let's do another run!' Then you get in a constant design revolution, where you're kind of in a revolving door and you never go out. We got stuck in that a little bit because of all these wonderful things we dreamed up for the race car when we did the CFD study." 

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Then, when they approached the FEA portion of their testing, "That was big task, finding somebody who understood what we were trying to do and actually could do the study," he said. "Our design was inadequate, by our standards. Now what do we do? We have to change engineering firms . . . and then we had to get a design that was lot closer than what we were working with. Then we made 40 runs on a bad design. That took up two months." 

Kloeber is much more confident now with the new monostrut wingstand that he said is stronger than what the current struts are. The new design, he said, has "already passed all the FEA work that we need to do." 

Time is worth it, as long as the time is invested wisely, Kloeber would say. "It has taken a little longer than I would have hoped, but we're getting close to something now that's real good," he said. "The most important thing is that the wingstand will be good, that it'll be strong." 

Kloeber knows how to accomplish his mission in unconventional or difficult circumstances. After all, he lives in Vancouver, Wash., across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore., and communicates with Chicago-based team owner Peter Lehman and driver Millican and crew, who operate in West Tennessee, north of Memphis. But the crew chief admitted the monostrut project has been "a very slow process to do right, when you're venturing into territory nobody's ever been before.  

"You want to make sure that you do everything right, Kloeber said."That's why we've taken the time that we've taken and haven't panicked and put our first innovation together and put it on the race track, because whatever we use we're going to be stuck with for a little while. So we want to make sure that whatever we put on the race car the first time is what we're going to be able to live with." 

He said that in one way, "it's been a little bit embarrassing how long it has taken to get where we are, close to making parts." 

Kloeber said it was "a time-over-money thing. When I say I was embarrassed, I didn't estimate that it would take this long to get this accomplished. It didn't -- it doesn't -- look that difficult from the outside, but once you're inside and you're working with these models, it gets to be a long and arduous process. I can't do all the modeling. So I can't just invest a lot of time in it, like we would if we were trying to make something on our own at the shop. We're subject to what other people's hours are and what they think a project is worth. It takes a lot longer than what you hope it would take. 

"We didn't know what 'reasonable' [timing] was in the beginning. We had a lot higher hopes," he said. "It's a project for me that's still on the front burner, but it's a back-burner kind of thing. Right now, it's completely out of my hands. I just call the people I need to call and bug them every few days: 'How we coming along? How we coming along?' 

Garlits so far has the lone functional monostrut-wing dragster. Kloeber said he consulted with the legendary "Big Daddy" but struck out on his own for the design. "I talked to Garlits a little bit about it when he was running it, a couple of years ago. So it's not like we haven't talked to him, but we don't call him up and ask him, 'Hey, what should we do about this?' or 'Hey, what should we do about that?' " 

Werner Enterprises helped with the CFD work, partly "to see what we actually had" and to analyze whether Garlits' monostrut dragster was an anomaly. "In fact, it's not. It ran well. It had back-half numbers most of the other cars don't have," Kloeber said.  

"So there were a lot of intriguing things in the beginning" with a monostrut design, Kloeber said: performance and aesthetics, as well as safety. The design kind of stands on its own. Once everybody gets a look at it, I think they'll be as excited about it as we are. 

"I don't know why the other guys haven't done it," he said. "I understand there are people talking about it."

Mike Kloeber has done more than talk, and because of that, he'll be the talk of the industry.

What do you think? Drop us a line at comppluseditor@aol.com.

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