Terry McMillen already had a bittersweet experience when he tried to invest in his NHRA Top Fuel team’s future.

He had poured an extravagant amount of time, energy, and good faith in a young car chief who appeared to be the heir apparent to the cockpit of his Amalie Oil/UNOH Dragster. Different expectations and ambitions bubbled to the surface and the longtime racer and his protégé parted ways in three years ago at the Heartland Park Topeka race.

That set McMillen back a bit. But he soldiered on, trying somehow to focus simultaneously on winning elimination rounds, lining up marketing partners, and pondering the NHRA’s need to develop new, young mechanics into tomorrow’s leading crew chiefs.

That’s a hard task to accomplish, and McMillen found himself making not as much progress as he had hoped by the close of the 2014 season. He had yet to make the Countdown to the Championship, despite noble runs at it. He had run through 11 – massively expensive – superchargers and detonated about a quarter of a million dollars in parts last season alone.

Again he reached a crossroad. The status quo surely would have put him in the poorhouse eventually, perhaps sooner than he imagined it might. So he couldn’t go through the same motions and expect different results, he figured.

He concluded that he needed to do something bold. And he did. Steeling himself against the respect he had for his crew members and the fun times and hard work they had shared, he made a choice that he said was the toughest he ever had to make. He let them all go.

He knew a clean sweep would be risky, would alienate some of the people he had been closest to, and would make him feel like Scrooge right before Christmas. But the way he saw it, he had no choice.

"So I said a prayer and went with my gut," McMillen said when he cut ties with his entire crew during the past offseason. "It was probably the toughest decision I've ever made in my life – and scary, too. My crew is like my family. I spend more time with these guys than I do my family, and they’re some of the best guys I’ve ever worked with in my life. But like any other business, there are tough decisions that have to be made. This was by far the toughest of my career."

But McMillen will be 61 years old at the end of August. He has grown sons and a lively little one, Cameron, zooming up on age two. And like it or not, he knows he has to plan for the organization’s future. And despite fresh knees, he knows not everything has a surgical rescue, and if he’s going to build the record he dreamed of he has to start posting quicker progress.

He always had tried to keep up with the latest and most affordable new key parts for the dragster. Drag racing’s Little Engine That Could always needed a little more coal for the furnace, always needed to chug faster to keep up with changing technology.

But McMillen tried another bold move. This past winter, he concentrated more on personnel than he did on parts. He did buy an updated hauler and move into a 20,600-square-foot shop at Elkhart, Ind., after considering a move to Indianapolis. He hired former Don Schumacher Racing tuner Rob Wendland as crew chief and made a huge investment in his crew.

He added two extra fulltime mechanics and has a total of seven: Duane Doffing, Cole Fergen, Robert Knudsen, Ben Lacher, Chris Newton, D'Andre Redfern, and Cody Yeager. Lane Gortney is his intern from sponsor University of Northwestern Ohio.

But the unique part of his plan is centered on a project four miles away from the shop.

McMillen purchased a four-bedroom house for his team’s use. It’s complete with a two-and-a-half-car garage stocked with the company van to get them to work.

His is not the only case of a racing team owner making such a non-traditional investment. World of Outlaws team owner Dennis Roth has done so. And Jimmy Carr, race director for Tony Stewart Racing, lives in one of two apartments at the WoO sprint-car team's shop at Brownsburg, Ind. The other is open to crew members as needed. But McMillen is the lone team owner in drag racing to provide official team quarters.

After a start to this Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season that has seen more encouragement than backsliding, McMillen said, "We're a team on the move right now. I really believe we've put ourselves in a position to win rounds and hopefully get into that top 10. We have to start moving. Every team's getting better. We're all gaining momentum. We've got to gain momentum plus."

Veteran NHRA crew chief Johnny West and even part-time Funny Car racer Jeff Diehl have pitched in early on to help guide the team.

"We're just finding a rhythm," McMillen said a quarter of the way through the schedule. "We're about ready to turn the corner. We're not hurting parts. It's been a little more fun."

He might have wanted to take that back after a failure to qualify at Houston, adding insult to injury after the air conditioning went out in the hauler on the hot, muggy Baytown weekend.

However, he bounced back at Atlanta with a semifinal finish, beating Dave Connolly and Clay Millican but losing to Antron Brown, whom no one could stop that race day.

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