Jeff Arend and the Kalitta Motorsports Funny Car team pulled out all of the stops headed into this weekend’s NHRA Lucas Oil Nationals in Brainerd, Minn.

Arend, along with brothers Cruz and Tony Pedregon, all have mathematical chances of qualifying for the NHRA’s Countdown to 1. Only one will leave this weekend’s event with the berth.

The Kalitta Motorsports team wants the spot so bad they were willing to make wholesale changes to the car following the Summit Raceway Park Night Under Fire match race event two weeks ago.

“We made the decision to front half the car after the event,” said Arend, who ran a pair of 4.19 elapsed times before smoking the tires twice. “The car had a lot of runs on it. We brought it to [chassis builder] Murf [McKinney] on Tuesday and it was ready to go by Friday.”

Jeff Arend and the Kalitta Motorsports Funny Car team pulled out all of the stops headed into this weekend’s NHRA Lucas Oil Nationals in Brainerd, Minn.

Arend, along with brothers Cruz and Tony Pedregon, all have mathematical chances of qualifying for the NHRA’s Countdown to 1. Only one will leave this weekend’s event with the berth.

The Kalitta Motorsports team wants the spot so bad they were willing to make wholesale changes to the car following the Summit Raceway Park Night Under Fire match race event two weeks ago.

“We made the decision to front half the car after the event,” said Arend, who ran a pair of 4.19 elapsed times before smoking the tires twice. “The car had a lot of runs on it. We brought it to [chassis builder] Murf [McKinney] on Tuesday and it was ready to go by Friday.”

The team reassembled the refurbished car and tested on Tuesday at O’Reilly Raceway Park. They were able to get in five test runs before headed to Brainerd for this weekend’s event.

Arend admits in a roundabout way this was their shot at “going for broke”.

“We have some pretty smart guys working on this car and it just hadn’t been repeatable,” Arend said. “We had one variable with a [style of] chassis that no one else runs. Once a car gets about 70 or 80 runs on them, you want to front half them anyway.”

Maybe Arend believed they had pushed the chassis as far as it could go.

“This one had probably about 200 runs on it,” he admitted. “We changed it over to a slip-tube design and it appears to be working fine.”

Arend concluded qualifying as eighth quickest with a 4.165. He was three spots behind Cruz Pedregon and eight spots ahead of Tony Pedregon.

Another added dimension to Arend’s efforts has been the “alliance” with the Al Anabi Racing team Funny Car driven by his former boss Del Worsham. Even though they run different combinations, there is common ground beneficial to the two teams.

“We’ll look at their runs and they’ll look at ours … it’s great to have crew chiefs able to talk,” Arend said. “The more guys you have talking about it. The better off you’re going to be.”

And because of that, Arend likes his chances.