Just think, last year people were talking like all the IHRA nitrous Pro
Mod drivers were going to go away. Three drivers and their teams
refused to adopt this mind-set, and their performances this year are
proof enough that IHRA’s Pro Modified class is as strong and
diversified as ever.
Mike Castellana, Jim Halsey and Pat Stoken…you could not find three
more different people. Castellana is a New Yorker who operates a chain
of grocery stores. Jim Halsey, from Street, Maryland, is a drag strip
operator. Pat Stoken is a logger from the great state of Montana. If
you saw them on the street standing next to each other, and someone
challenged you to pick which one was the New Yorker, which was the
logger and which was the drag strip operator there is not much of a
chance you wouldn’t be able to tell which was which.
But on the track and in the pits, they are very similar. They are all
hard workers, they all don’t complain and they all have a specific
goal…to make their nitrous-assisted Pro Modified to go as fast as they
can go. When people were complaining about a perceived disparity
between nitrous entries and supercharged entries, they didn’t join in.
When other nitrous drivers abandoned their IHRA dreams, Castellana,
Halsey and Stoken shrugged their shoulders and continued to work on
their combinations.