When the NHRA was making history at the inaugural Four-Wide Nationals in Charlotte, N.C., late last month, T.J. Zizzo was busy.

The 34-year-old Top Fuel driver was delivering on a promise he made to his wife, Jen, 15 years earlier.

“The whole situation boiled down to my wife quitting smoking 15 year ago,” Zizzo said Friday. “I told her back then if she quit smoking, I would take her to Spain. Needless to say, as a good husband usually does, we’re always a little bit behind on our promises, but last October I told my wife that she deserved to go to Spain because she had quit smoking many, many years ago.”

Zizzo and his wife, who teaches Spanish at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., made the trip to Barcelona during the week of March 22.

When the NHRA was making history at the inaugural Four-Wide Nationals in Charlotte, N.C., late last month, T.J. Zizzo was busy.

The 34-year-old Top Fuel driver was delivering on a promise he made to his wife, Jen, 15 years earlier.

“The whole situation boiled down to my wife quitting smoking 15 year ago,” Zizzo said Friday. “I told her back then if she quit smoking, I would take her to Spain. Needless to say, as a good husband usually does, we’re always a little bit behind on our promises, but last October I told my wife that she deserved to go to Spain because she had quit smoking many, many years ago.”

Zizzo and his wife, who teaches Spanish at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., made the trip to Barcelona during the week of March 22.

“We went there, I fulfilled my promise, and we just fell in love with the city,” Zizzo said. “I had been to Europe before to visit my grandma who lived in Sicily, so I had been through Europe and Italy and that area, but Barcelona was just so much fun. As the Four-Wide Nationals were going on in the United States, I was in Spain, checking out the sites of Barcelona. The funny thing is I heard so many things about how the Four-Wide National went, and I don’t know anything about it. I thought ESPN2 would be in Barcelona, but I couldn’t find it.”

Now, Zizzo is back on American soil and he’s making his season debut in his Peak/Herculiner sponsored dragster at the 23rd annual O’Reilly Auto Parts NHRA Spring Nationals in Houston Raceway Park Friday through Sunday.

Zizzo’s team is owned by his father Tony and it is based in Lincolnshire, a northern suburb of Chicago.

“Our test pass (for this season) will be my first round of qualifying today,” said Zizzo, who is in his 19th year of racing. “That will be our test session. I feel like an egg out here and I want to be cracked and see how well we do.”

Zizzo’s team obviously would never get mistaken for the high-dollar operation of Don Schumacher Racing, but T.J. is more optimistic than ever about what his team can accomplish in 2010 and next season, racing a limited seven-race schedule.

“We have a two-year contract that we just came up with Old World Industries, which owns Peak antifreeze,” Zizzo said. “We have a two-year contract to go to seven races a season. So, this year we will go to Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Las Vegas and Pomona. These are all pretty much new tracks to us, other than Chicago and Houston. Signing a two-year deal is neat for us because now we can plan our expenses for the next two years, not just year-by-year and that will help us out tremendously. Old World Industries is not new to drag racing. I think they sponsored Jim Yates back in the 1990s. Then, they kind of pulled themselves away from marketing and motorsports and drag racing. We got back affiliated with them (Old World Industries) with one of our marketing partners (Champion packaging) who packages for Old World. Now, we’ve kind of grown over the last six or seven seasons with Old World Industries to get to this point we are now. With more cash flow, we’re able to do bigger and better things because they (Old World Industries) have stepped up to the plate.”

Even with his new deal in place, Zizzo is realistic about his team’s chances.

“I’m stacked against the world over here,” Zizzo said. “Some of the members on our team have been with us for 19 years, and I have confidence in our team. I have confidence in our abilities, but we don’t have the resources teams like Don Schumacher Racing have. With the resources teams like that have, I need to be lucky. That’s just how this works and how this sport is and it’s OK to be lucky. In drag racing, you have a 50-50 chance of winning when you go to stage your car and those are pretty good odds. I’m happy with that. We do not come to races unprepared. We do a lot of homework at home. Do we have the technology and the fancy parts the rest of the guys have, absolutely not. We’re a couple of years behind in our technology, but at the same time, I know we’re going to go out there and put on a good show and we’re going to make good, clean respectable passes. If we go to first round and we luck out, I’m the happiest guy in the world.”