Whether it was coincidence or not, John Medlen’s timing with Don Schumacher Racing’s Diehard Funny Car could not have been any better.

Shortly after joining DSR in mid-March to serve as co-crew chief with Tommy Delago on the car driven by Matt Hagan, the team started winning.

Hagan reached the winner’s circle at O’Reilly Auto Parts NHRA Spring Nationals in April at Houston and then he won again at the United Association Route 66 Nationals in June in Chicago.

“Anytime you bring a guy in like John Medlen, your team is going to benefit from it, and we saw the benefit from him,” said Hagan, who is competing in the Mile-High Nationals in Morrison, Colo., Friday through Sunday. “We won two races and the first day he was onboard we set a mph record. John, though, really didn’t change anything in our program; he just massaged it a little bit. The biggest thing I saw personally was that John was helping us with calls on the race track. He was really reading the race track and stuff like that.”

Justin Lamb has developed a penchant for winning drag races.  More specifically, NHRA Lucas Oil National Events, as the 23-year old college student just earned his eighth coveted national event “Wally.”  More specifically yet, Lamb has a penchant for winning NHRA National Events along the vaunted Western Swing, the annual stretch of back-to-back summer events in Seattle, WA, Sonoma, CA, and Denver, CO.
 
Lamb’s first NHRA title came in Sonoma, back in 2007 when he defeated Sheldon Gecker for the Super Comp crown.  Last season, he kicked off his Western Swing with a Super Stock victory in Denver, and capped it two weeks later with a near double in Sonoma.  There, he won the Super Comp category for a second time, and took runner-up honors in Super Gas.

Mike Neff is used to challenges.

The championship nitro tuner turned driver returned tuner is faring well in his bid to put one of drag racing’s most prolific racers in the championship hunt. Considering 14-time NHRA Funny Car champion John Force was the first to clinch a Funny Car Countdown to 1 berth, suffice to say, Neff has been an asset to the already colorful tuning crew comprised of the likes of Austin Coil and Bernie Fedderly.

At this weekend’s NHRA Mopar Mile High Nationals Neff will have to rise to the challenge of 5,500 feet when it comes to tuning Force's Funny Car.

Not to worry, Neff already has a plan.

“Denver is a challenge,” Neff admitted. Neff hasn't won at Denver as a driver but in 2006 he tuned Gary Scelzi to victory. “Our strategy is going to be to try to make as much power as we can.

“That’s the problem with Denver. It’s a mile high, roughly 5,500 feet elevation and it’s just hard to make power. We’re going to try to make sure we’ve got the engine tuned up and we’ve done our homework on that. To make sure we’ve got good power will be the first task and then making sure you can make it run on eight cylinders. The trickiest thing going into Denver is trying to get the engine set-up correctly.

“That’s the biggest challenge of the year just because the conditions are so different and you never really know for sure. You’re not really comfortable until you get started and you just have to hope for the best. That’s one place where you’re just happy when it’s over so you can get back down and race in the normal conditions.”

Maybe the only thing better than seeing great Funny Cars of the '70s resurrected by today's drivers is seeing them brought back to life by the original drivers themselves, drivers like Roger Garten and Dale Pulde.
    
Pulde, one of just a handful of fuel racers to have won multiple NHRA national events in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, has driven countless Funny Cars over the past 40 years, but there were just two options when it came time to choose which one to recreate: the "War Eagle" Trans Am that he and partner Mike Hamby match raced from coast to coast in the late '70s and early '80s, or the unforgettable "Miller Warrior" Buick Regal that they campaigned in 1985.
    
"I might have picked the Regal – a lot of people really liked that car – but it wasn't old enough, and John Powers already had a new Trans Am body for me," Pulde says. "I never would have gotten into this if it wasn't for Powers. He's the one who said, 'I think you need to be out here,' and he's the one who said he'd supply the stuff. His body is the one that caused all the controversy when it came out – it's a little too spaceship-looking for some people, I guess. I we knew when I brought it out that it was overkill. But if you think about it, Powers' cars back in the '70s were pretty zoomy, too."

In his first public remarks since the recent on-track drag-racing tragedies, National Hot Rod Association President Tom Compton said the sanctioning body has turned once again to a couple of respected engineers, as well as to the University of Nebraska to sort out causes and find solutions.
 
Compton made his comments Tuesday as a guest on longtime broadcast journalist Larry Henry's "Pit Pass USA" radio show on the Voice America Network's Power-Up Motorsports Channel.
 
The NHRA sought help from experts, Compton, said, following the deaths of Top Alcohol Funny Car driver Neal Parker at Englishtown, N.J., and Top Alcohol Dragster driver Mark Niver at Kent, Wash.
 

Rodger Brogdon and the Attitude Apparel / Kent Services & trucking team will roll into Bandimere Speedway for this week’s NHRA Mopar Mile High Nationals looking to have a weekend as special as last year’s event was.

“This time last year we were beginning to get our feet under us as we were working our way through our first full year of Pro Stock racing,” commented Brogdon. “And we knew we had a pretty good car coming in. The 6 second barrier was still an obstacle in the thin, mile high air of Bandimere Speedway, yet everyone felt going in that 2009 was the year the mark would be broken. Once qualifying was completed we were one of the 6 cars that broke into that magic zone last year and as such we ended up #6 qualifier, our best effort yet as a new team.”

“Race day at the 2009 event found us coming up on the short end of a holeshot loss to Rickie Jones and while that loss was a bitter pill to swallow, we also rolled out of Denver knowing that we were continuing to make progress. This year’s event finds us in much the same position as we are continuing to develop our new chassis set up. We’ve made numerous changes since our crash in St. Louis and our crew chief change in Bristol and we’re continuing to refine that setup. In Seattle we learned some things that worked, yet in Sonoma we went back a couple of steps, but isn’t that how you make progress in this class?”

Fresh off a victory in Northern California's wine country, five-time world champion drag racer Jeg Coughlin Jr. arrives at Denver's Bandimere Speedway confident he's got a car that can win again.

"We had a helluva race in Sonoma," Coughlin said. "From the time we got there until I pulled the 'chutes in the final round Sunday afternoon everything went extremely well for us. The plan is to keep that momentum going at Bandimere.

"We approached the race with a slightly more aggressive tune-up with the thinking that we want to have this JEGS.com Chevrolet Cobalt perfect for the start of the Countdown to 1, which is just around the corner. Obviously, we feel much better after taking the win and now the goal is to keep ourselves at that top level."

When the team from Attitude's CompetitionPlus.com descends on an event, the primary goal is to convey to the readers, the intensity and inside stories from an event. Just as our talented reporting team searches high and low for the scoops, our lensmen wait patiently for those explosive shots. Here's a few samples from what proved to be an expensive NHRA Fram Autolite Nationals in Sonoma, Ca., for some racers.

The rivalry between Pro Stock Motorcycle riders Michael Phillips and Matt Smith has blown up into an intense feud.

On Sunday, Phillips beat Smith in the second round of the Fram-Autolite NHRA Nationals. Following his win, Phillips’ feelings about Smith became apparent in an interview with NHRA announcer Al Reinhart.

“We’re out here just trying to go rounds,” Phillips said. “Matt’s got a little racial issue with me, but I’m not worried about it, he can’t get me out of my game.”