Bob Yonke wants to become a killer—on the starting line, at least.

Back in the mid-‘80s, Yonke was a defensive-minded shooting guard for the Emporia State University Hornets basketball team, a position that taught him a lot that still applies to his new role as a first-year NHRA Pro Stock driver.

“From an individual standpoint, basketball’s a game of concentration and from a team standpoint you’ve got to get along with others and understand what they bring to the table, what their strengths and weaknesses are, just like a drag racing team, whether they’re driving, or setting the clutch, or adjusting the four-link, or tuning the carburetors,” said Yonke, who after nine races this season has made it to a pair of final rounds (Phoenix and Charlotte), but also suffered five first-round losses and a couple of DNQs.

Bob Yonke wants to become a killer—on the starting line, at least.

Back in the mid-‘80s, Yonke was a defensive-minded shooting guard for the Emporia State University Hornets basketball team, a position that taught him a lot that still applies to his new role as a first-year NHRA Pro Stock driver.

“From an individual standpoint, basketball’s a game of concentration and from a team standpoint you’ve got to get along with others and understand what they bring to the table, what their strengths and weaknesses are, just like a drag racing team, whether they’re driving, or setting the clutch, or adjusting the four-link, or tuning the carburetors,” said Yonke, who after nine races this season has made it to a pair of final rounds (Phoenix and Charlotte), but also suffered five first-round losses and a couple of DNQs.

Qualifying issues can largely be addressed through good, old-fashioned teamwork back at his race shop near Dallas, Texas, but Yonke realizes his race day results primarily remain a personal responsibility.

“The biggest thing I probably lacked playing a team sport like college basketball is the killer instinct, whereas I think people who play individual sports are more likely to have that from day one. And in drag racing you’ve got to have that killer instinct,” he stresses.

“To be honest I think what’s cost me a couple of first-round wins this year is that I’ve not sized up my opponent enough and gone up there with that killer instinct to knock down the tree every time.”

It’s something Yonke feels he had when the 2010 campaign began, but somewhere along the way it seems to have slipped away.

“The first two events I was cutting teens and .20 lights, and now I’m cutting .40s and that’s hurting us,” he admits. “You know, Rickie Jones and Greg Stanfield, they don’t have the fastest car, but they’re going rounds because they’re cutting those good lights and I have to get back to that, too.”

Since running a part-time Pro Stock Truck schedule back in 2001, by NHRA standards Yonke can’t be considered a true rookie this year, but he calls his first full-time commitment to the series “an eye-opening experience” and one he expects to get even tougher in the coming weeks and months.

“We’ve got seven races in the next nine weeks and it’s going to get brutal. Really, it’s going to test me as an individual, it’s going to test our team as a group, it’s going to be interesting and what I need to do now is focus back on my driving,” he says.

“Right now I’m hanging on to 10th place by a thread and there are too many people within striking distance who could take it away from me if I have one slip up and I can’t afford to do that.”

Yonke has received some much-appreciated sponsorship from John Woods at Performance Auto in Oklahoma City this year, but he’s also carrying the message of Pints for Prostates, 501(c) non-profit corporation founded by three-year prostate cancer survivor Rick Lyke, who met Yonke at the NHRA national event in Charlotte earlier this year.

“Basically, the personal language of men is often through sharing a beer. We sit down and have a pint of beer at the bar and talk about cars and sports and women and we rarely talk about our health,” Yonke says. “But prostate cancer will affect one in six men today and if we live long enough that goes up to about one in three, so it’s a serious disease that needs to be discussed and brought to the forefront because early diagnosis is very treatable.”

So Bob Yonke aims at being a killer—but he wants to help save lives, too.