On the surface, Top Fuel owner/driver T.J. Zizzo would have made his return to racing – after 19 months away – because of the temptation of racing at his hometown track in Chicago.

The decision for Zizzo to come back had many layers, however.

Zizzo is returning to compete at the Gerber Collision and Glass Route 66 NHRA Nationals presented by PEAK Performance May 19-21 in Chicago.

“Truthfully, it’s all a great question, right? Thankfully we have kick-ass marketing partners, right? That’s the number one reason we’re coming back,” Zizzo said. “But two, we have been working diligently to debut new equipment. We’ve been working very diligently. And I mean that. To get things done in 2023 is certainly different than how we got things done in 2019. So, it has taken a long time. It’s piece by piece. I always joke now when I open up a box; 80% of it is correct, but it’s the 20% that bites us every time.

“It’s just taken us a long time. We saw (Route) 66 come out on the horizon. It was a goal, but truly it wasn’t until... Well, I guess that’s a lie. I’m going to tell a lie, and then I’m going to back up what I’m going to say. I didn’t know until one week ago. So, one week ago (from) Wednesday that we were going to go to Joliet.”

Zizzo said the mindset of his team is to perform well when they do show up at national events. However, there was no question the team wanted to return in Chicago, which hasn’t been a part of the national event circuit since 2019. 

“As you know, we haven’t changed our philosophies,” he said. “We’re very diligent in working on our race car. So about two months ago, we were having lunch on a Sunday, talking about the possibility of testing what that looked like, and we knew we were kind of getting close and the possibility of Joliet if testing went well. I told our entire staff, and I said, ‘If we don’t get a chance to test before Joliet, I do not want to compete at Joliet.’ because we have been working very hard at getting a new car done.

“Everybody looked at me with that look like, ‘Expletive.’ We’ve been working really hard. I don’t care what happens. If we don’t get a chance to test, we are still going to Joliet. So, I looked at everyone, and my dad and our crew chief looked at me again and they said, ‘Yep, that’s what we’re going to do.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I guess that’s fine. I will adapt.’”

 

Zizzo said it would be a frantic race to prepare everything for Chicago.

“So, of course, let’s go back to that 80/20 rule,” Zizzo said. “80% of stuff is good, and 20% is not. I wish I could take a picture of where I’m standing right now with a stack of head gaskets everywhere. So, we were able to get enough parts and pieces together to go testing last week in Indy, and it was like a private test. We didn’t expect it to be a private test, but nobody else showed up because nobody else didn’t want to fight the elements of the cold. NHRA postponed it on the Tuesday we were supposed to test, or the track postponed it because it was cold and cloudy. Then everyone was on their way to Charlotte (N.C.) on Wednesday (for last weekend’s race). We were the lone soldiers there. We had our own little private test day. It was fantastic.”

The test in Indy was literally a shakedown for Zizzo’s team.

“We made one pass 400 feet. One attempt again, and then the final attempt. So, we made essentially three attempts to go down the track,” Zizzo said. “Everything is different. We are no longer running the five-disc (clutch). We are no longer running blowers that are weaker than those that everyone else is using. We are no longer running different equipment than everyone else. We now have assembled everything that we need to compete at a high level. Unfortunately, throughout this whole process, I found that we were probably a decade-and-a-half behind everyone else.

“I didn’t know this. I don’t know what a modern car looks like. We kept in our own corner. And I didn’t know what other people had for valvetrain. I didn’t know what other people have for camshafts. I don’t know what other people have for superchargers. I don’t know what they have in their bell housing. I don’t know what their chassis looks like. I don’t know what their wings look like. I mean, I guess that’s an exaggeration because I could see their wings in the staging lanes. But it’s like, I never knew. Then we started gathering modern components to a race car, and we realized how behind we were.”

After the test session, Zizzo liked what the data said.

“Our results were positive,” he said. “They were positive. But anytime you have something new, it could also throw you a bone. To the eighth mile, shut off at 600 feet, we went 298 (mph). It shows some real, real potential, but we’ve got a lot to learn. I mean, this is just putting our same knowledgeable team members together. Nobody has left. Our same knowledgeable friends outside our pit area, and we put things together that showed real potential. But until we hit the gas another 40 times, we won’t know a thing.”

In 2020, Zizzo had a runner-up finish at one of the Indy races, which he still can’t imagine.

“I look back at what equipment we had and who we were trying to compete against, and I don’t know how we even got that close,” Zizzo said.

In 2021, Zizzo only competed in two races – Brainerd, Minn., in August and St. Louis in September. 

 

 

 

“It was at St. Louis in 2021 when we kind of just said, ‘There’s just, we can’t go any faster. We’ve done everything. We can’t do it. Is it us?’ Or is it the equipment? So that’s when we started on the path with the new stuff. That’s exactly what it felt like. It felt like our backs were against the wall. We had tried everything, and we were trying different things all the time to go faster. Every single time, we just saw a 3.75 on the board. Every time, no matter what. But it was getting frustrating and if we didn’t run 3.75, it would go out and smoke the tires.

“(Don Schumacher) and I have been personal friends for a long time. Probably six years or more, and he’s asked every single time we get together and have a cigar, every time we together and go to dinner or have lunch or go to his boat or whatever, he’s like, ‘Hey, is there anything that I can help you with?’ And I would say, ‘No, Don. We’re a part-time team and we do the best we can and with our stuff.” And he goes, ‘Yeah, I’m impressed with what you guys do, but is there anything I can do for you?’ And every single time he asked me, I said, ‘No, Don, we got it handled.’”

As fate would have it, Schumacher called Zizzo following St. Louis in 2021, and his timing was right. 

“He called me the Monday after St. Louis,” Zizzo said. "I was actually outside washing our hauler. And he goes, ‘Hey T.J., is there anything I could help you with?’ ‘No, Don, I think we’re okay.’ And he goes, ‘Stop right there.’ He goes, ‘This is what I offer you. I’m offering to help you guys out with modern equipment and building you a race car from the ground up.’”

“I said, ‘Wow, really? You want to build this car from the ground up?’ He goes, ‘Yep, I want my guys in the shop to build you a race car.’ And he goes, ‘Unfortunately, I won’t know anything until January 1st if that’s possible or what we can do. But this is what I want to do.’ Because, of course, the smart people in the sport see what the Laganas have done for Tripp Tatum. That’s just one example. And Don said, ‘I want to do exactly for you what the Laganas have done for Tripp Tatum. I want to build you equipment that could run well,’ and so on. I said, ‘All right, Don, I’ll talk to you in January; let me know how it all goes.’ I got a phone call from Todd Okuhara (former DSR crew chief) in early January of that year. So that was 2022. He said, ‘I just got off the phone with Don. Don wants to do this for you, and we’re going to build you a car.’

 

 

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At that point, Zizzo asked about the next steps in this process.

“So, I said, ‘Okay, well, what does that look like?’ He went down the list of all the things that we need to change,” Zizzo said. Six-disc and superchargers and fuel system and out train. Oh, he’s going down his whole list. I’m like, ‘Holy sh*t.’ I got together with our team, and we met with Todd Okuhara in April of last year. We told Todd, ‘We would really like to do this in-house. Because if something goes wrong, we’ll know how to fix it. If your team or your people or DSR builds us a car and we bring it home, we won’t know how to work on it.’”

“Todd and Don got together and said, ‘Okay, we’ll sell you guys all the parts and you guys start assembling it. They had a chassis that they front-halved for us. And then we started getting parts and pieces from Tony’s (Schumacher’s) car last year as the year progressed. They were getting new parts, and we were getting their used parts. They just started showing up and we started picking them up. We got a car here. We started putting everything together, and we just went through and massaged all these parts and put them together the way we wanted to put them together. And 19 months later, we finally had a car that took us five hours to figure out how to start. Then two or three or four or five days later, we rolled it out to test it. I mean, it was just like that. When I was standing in the staging lanes, this car rolled toward me at our test session because, of course, we had the whole place to ourselves, so I got in at the starting line. When this thing rolled up there behind the tow vehicle, I said, ‘That looks like everyone else’s car now.’”

Having similar parts as his competitors also benefits Zizzo in other ways.

“The nice thing about having equipment like everyone else is that now we could go to our friends and neighbors that like us, that respect us, and ask them questions,” he said. “I mean, first of all, the Lagana boys have been instrumental in this. Instrumental. I’ve been on the phone with Dom Lagana every day for five months. Dom has been instrumental in this. Bobby has been instrumental. Don’s been instrumental. (Rahn) Tobler has been instrumental, and Todd Okuhara has been helpful. Yeah, it’s been good.”

Despite all the new things about his dragster, Zizzo keeps things in perspective when he arrives in Chicago.

“I have zero expectations for Chicago,” he said. “I hope we know where to plug in our extension cords on our semi. I hope we know how to put the car up in the air. I hope the car starts. We are raw. We are absolutely raw right now. We are working diligently to do the best we can, but I truly, and I know this sounds crazy, we’ve been doing this for a long time, but I have no expectations. My expectations are to roll to the water box and do a burnout.”

Zizzo told CompetitionPlus.com Chicago isn’t a one-off race for him.

“We will absolutely be going to more races,” Zizzo said. “I hope by the end of the year; we will have a race car that we know how to manage. That’s the goal. So, we will be going to 66, we’ll be going to Norwalk, Ohio, we’ll be going to Indy, we’ll be going to St. Louis, and we’ll be going to Vegas in the fall. Yeah, and like I said, Rust-Oleum has stood behind us. They’ve really been wonderful to deal with through all of this. They continue to impress me every day. They care about what we do on and off the racetrack and they see the value in what we do for them every day. That is the reason we are continuing this adventure.”