NHRA WINTERNATIONALS - ASHER'S NOTEBOOK
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SUNDAY -
We spoke with Pedregon early Sunday morning, before his on-track incident. Just as he was last year at the Finals here in California, Pedregon appeared calm and certain of his future. Like many others we’ve spoken with, he’s most pleased about the new Countdown program, and is looking forward to the year ahead.
We asked him if, because of the format change, he would be changing his approach to the championship run.
“Probably,” he said. “You know, with two races to go (last year), we had a good race (winning the AC Delco Nationals in Las Vegas, one week prior to the Finals), where all three of our opponents got beaten in the first round, so really, our strategy was to come to the Finals where we almost got in the mode of trying to protect our lead rather than just go for it. That may have been a mistake. We wouldn’t do that again.
“With six races (after the Countdown begins), we think it’s going to be more accurate, and a better system. We all knew that with just the two races left (last year) it could turn into a crap shoot. With six races there’s more accuracy, but still not a lot of tolerance (for error). I think that’s going to allow everyone to race pretty aggressively, like they do now. I don’t think it will allow a team to come into that last race like we did last year (with a significant points lead).
“We’ll probably just race all out like we usually do, and we didn’t do that here at Pomona last (fall).”
One thing that Pedregon likes about the new system is that after the points are tightened up following the U.S. Nationals even the drivers back in eighth or ninth place might still have a shot at winning it all. “With 10 point increments separating everyone, anyone could win it,” he said. “All it takes are one or two good races, and those cars that are back there in eighth place could really move up. A lot of it will depend on what kind of setup they have for that time of year, and how they run their cars.
“I think the whole thing’s structured better. It’s kind of like football. If you’re hot late in the year, that’s when you really want to peak, and I think the same applies to these cars. If you have a good run at the end of the year and you’re a seventh place car (when it starts) and you can get your combination right, I think this allows for that. It makes it interesting and exciting for other cars to have that opportunity.”
Pedregon admits to being more emotionally relaxed after having won his second championship. “I think I was a basket case emotionally (before he won), but that’s okay. I went through it,” he said, “and given those same circumstances, if I can do it again late in the year I’ll be a little more stable because that was the first time I’d been through that.”
Winning was important to Pedregon because he did it on his own, not as a part of someone else’s team as he was the first time around as a team driver for John Force. This championship was proof positive that he’s matured as a driver, but more importantly, it proved his maturity as a team owner, which had been his goal for many years.
Will Pedregon repeat? It is far too early to even speculate on that scenario – but a third title would cement his reputation as a major player in Funny Car drag racing.
Bender had a teammate last year in tuner Mike Green and Funny Car driver Tommy Johnson, Jr., but both are now with other operations. Bender is not, however, going it alone because of the tuning arrangement Prudhomme made with independent Funny Car racer Tim Wilkerson. Thus far the new arrangement is working well.
“We’re bouncing things off of Tim,” Bender said, “and so far it’s working pretty good. He’s a little more receptive than what we had last year.”
Bender likes the format change in the Countdown because “the last two races aren’t so important. You can screw up one race,” he said, “and still have a chance to win the championship. I do like that.”
Bender also like the new qualifying system, saying, “I do like that. There are times when you screw up on Friday night that it’s over for you. At least this way, if you can get down there good on Saturday you’ve still got a shot to get in.”
Driver Larry Dixon, Jr. remains the most youthful appearing 41-year-old in drag racing. He looks almost exactly as he did when he first started working for Prudhomme back in, well, it was a long time ago! It’s startling to hear him say, “I’m going to drive until I’m 50,” and realize that’s only nine short years away.
While other drivers might aspire to a faster, slicker street car, or the fast lane lifestyle, Dixon is incredibly grounded. He knows what’s important, and realizes that what he does today will ultimately impact the rest of his life. He has quietly become a mini-real estate magnate in Indianapolis, and now owns three buildings totaling over 125,000 square feet near Prudhomme’s shop in the Indianapolis suburb of Brownsburg. They’re 80% occupied by tenants, many of them in motorsports. Dixon is the landlord for the Morgan Lucas/J.R. Todd team, Mike Ashley and Melanie Troxel, Dexter Tuttle as well as for a Canadian Go-Kart team and a Toyota Atlantic team. Because of his racing background Dixon was able to design the shops with racers in mind, and it’s paid off.
“It works for me,” he says. “I don’t know real estate and stuff like that. From working on race cars I know what a race team needs in a shop, so we laid them out with that in mind. I try to stick with what I know.”
Dixon admits to not being a fan of last year’s program, but he allowed himself to be sold on its merits by what he terms “the powers that be. They told me how exciting it would be, and I bought into it. I was sold. And then it changed again, so like, I think it’s just better for me not to be sold on anything! I’ll just go out there and race the car, and whatever happens, and whatever point format they want to use to decide the championship, I just hope I’m in the middle of it.”
Okay, so he lost in the first round at Pomona, just as he did last year. But, not only did he run harder this year, last year his season went decidedly downhill after the Winternationals, but this year it could be heading in the other direction.
“The (switch) to 90% is going to help us,” Wilkerson said. “The parts look a lot better, and thanks to NHRA for that. That was a needed change for this team, I can tell you that right now.”
Wilkerson is also enthusiastic about the tuning and sharing of information arrangement with Prudhomme. “There’s no doubt about how helpful it’s going to be,” he said. “Donnie Bender and I have been talking for the last two or three years, because I don’t really have anyone to talk to, and he’s been good to talk to about the tune-up. You know, stuff like, Hey, have you ever seen a piston that looks like this? Stuff like that. It’s just a very good deal.
“You never know where that might lead to. Don might want to run another Funny Car some day, you never know. I’m not anticipating anything, but you never know. He’s been really good to me. I’ve got the run of their shop over there, and they’ve already helped me fix a couple of problems I had, so it’s a no lose situation for me.”
Wilkerson correctly notes that towards the end of last season his car was starting to come around, but this year he feels they’re ready to rock. “I was winning some rounds in the last two or three races,” he says, “so I’m hoping that will continue on now. We’ll just try to keep the car consistent and try not to be the guy who beats himself.”
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SATURDAY -
Following that race Fuller
was operated on to repair a torn knee ligament that had been bothering him from
at least the Summit Racing Equipment Nationals in Norwalk. He’s now back in tip top shape, and if anyone
doubts that, just check out this weight lifter’s muscular frame when he’s not
“hidden” inside a firesuit.
With a million dollar
smile and a personality to match, Fuller is also an outspoken driver on a par
with some of the biggest talkers the sport has ever seen, but there’s a
difference. He offers his thoughts in
such a pleasant manner that it’s not until you think about what he’s said later
that you realize he just trashed two drivers, a race official and a race
track. Huh? He said what?
But, like others before him, after you digest his comments you realize
that this diminutive driver has a mind even bigger than those biceps.
Fuller admitted to Torco’s
CompetitionPlus.com that despite his successful rehab from the operation, he’s
still in recovery mode. On Friday he
told us, “I’m walking with a noticeable limp today because I spent too much
time on my feet yesterday. Everything
was fine all through testing, but I kept myself off my feet as much as
possible. It’s hard to do that
here. I’ve got to take better care of
myself because there’s no way I’m 100% right now.”
Fuller is determined to
get back to where he was in ’07, being a serious championship contender. “I know I can,” he said with determination in
his voice. “I would be highly disappointed
if I don’t. Testing was a good
indication of what this team is, and what it’s capable of. We came out there (in Phoenix) and threw out
a 4.46, which was the quickest run in testing, and Schumacher was right behind
us. I can guarantee you that he was
going for (a quicker elapsed time). He
was the last car in the session and they stopped and re-prepped the track for
him, and he ran a ‘forty-eight, so that’s a good baseline for us.”
Surprisingly, a number of
teams have admitted they’re taking a whole different approach to this year’s
Countdown, having learned a great deal about how they have to race in last
year’s program. “We’re taking a whole
different approach,” Fuller said. “Just
because we were strong and won all those races, we know we have to work on our
consistency, and work a little bit more on our tune-up for the last part of the
season. We have to make sure that in
those last six races we’re ready to go.”
The team, under the
direction of tuner Rob Flynn, will run as hard as they can all year to make
sure they qualify for the Countdown, but when it comes to those last six races
it’s going to be a matter of pulling out all the stops. That sounds great now, at the first race of
the season, but a lot can – and will – happen between Pomona and…Pomona!
Capps acknowledged that he
was up most of the night Thursday because of the irritation, and further
admitted that the eye had been slightly scratched, but there was no cause for
concern, as everything was fine by the next day.
Capps is very pleased
about the Countdown format change, as well as by the addition of the race in
Charlotte. “I think the playoffs will be
100% better than last year,” he said.
“Last year we all raced – ourselves, Robert Hight, the other guys – the
way we thought we should with that format.
We were disgusted because we lost our points lead because we actually
did some testing during the national events because we had such a big lead.
“You know how Ace (crew
chief Ed McCulloch) is. He had it all
planned out. We’re going to do this
here, and this here, things like that.
We learned a valuable lesson by how we raced last year. We’re going to stay on it, wide open all year
long this time. We’re not going to test
at a race like we did last year. We had
such a big points lead that we thought we should test during a national event
to run under those conditions.
“NHRA absolutely should
prep some of the tracks for the Monday test sessions. Some tracks have excellent people doing that,
but others don’t, and when that happens you don’t learn as much as you might
under better circumstances. Last year we
tested during the races, and that cost us.”
Two years ago Capps lost
the title by less than a round, and last year it was a round-and-a-half. “I’ve gotten wise about how important the
points are,” he said. “We used to kid
about how important those little POWERade points are, but trust me, they’re
more important than ever before. We
learned that the hard way by what we’ve gone through the last few years.”
Capps also acknowledges
that the 20 point bonus the points leader will get going into the Countdown
after Indy could very well spell the difference in who wins the title. He would very much like to be that points leader
as the sun sets on Labor Day Monday.
Surprisingly, having been
so close to the title without winning it doesn’t eat at Capps’s soul. “It really doesn’t bother me,” he said. “It’s not like I’ve got this Oh, God am I
ever going to win a championship thing going on. It’s not that bad. The way I look at it, I’m lucky to be where
I’m at. To be honest with you, everyone
on this team is trying to win it for Ace, because he doesn’t have a whole lot
of years left that he’ll want to do this.
We want to give him a championship.
It’s hard to believe that, with all of the races he’s won, he’s never
won a championship ring. He’s won Indy
all those times, and all of those other races, but never the championship.
“Then I’m going to
concentrate on getting one for myself and the guys, but the coolest thing
imaginable is to come rolling in to Pomona (at the Finals) on Sunday morning,
knowing you’re one of the guys who has a shot at winning it all in front of all
these Southern California fans on the last day of the year. That is cool.”
Capps is an optimist about
drag racing’s future. “Our sport’s good
right now,” he said. “No matter what the
economy is like, we’ve got a lot of people coming out to see these cars
run. Sure, it could be better, but it’s
not like we have something like the split between CART and the IRL where it
killed open wheel racing. What we have
is a good, viable product. I feel good
about the future.”
“What happened was that
all of the last minute changes that came down while the car was being built
meant that it couldn’t be ready in time,” Scelzi said. “NHRA didn’t make up their minds until the
last minute. Brad was working on
dragster chassis until the last minute because we didn’t know what the tubing
size was going to be. We thought it was going
to call for .095-wall tubing, but we didn’t want to build a car that we would
have to throw away in June (when all of the new F/C chassis specs go into
effect).
“When we finally got the
call on that Brad busted his balls trying to get this thing done, and then they
decided they wanted an X in the bottom and some other things that we had done
differently, so we had to cut that stuff out of the car and change it. We didn’t have some things at Brad’s that he
needed, and that slowed things down and we couldn’t make it to Phoenix with
that car.
“We got the car to
“Brad took the new car to
Worsham’s shop and finished it there, and they delivered it here to the track
this morning. We’ll run that car in
testing on the Monday after Phoenix,” he said.
Scelzi is concerned about
the way the most recent decisions have been made regarding chassis. He has no basic objection to input from Ford
Motor Company and others, but as he says, “SFI has never built a chassis, and
neither has Ford, as far as I know. My
idea is that they should get all of these chassis builders together and chain
‘em together. Make ‘em work together,
because I think we’re getting into a situation where we’re making these cars so
rigid that they’re not going to do the things they were designed to do.”
Admitting he’s not a
chassis builder, he does recall that back in the 70s, when dragster chassis got
stiff they’d shake severely and, in his words, “knock tubing out of ‘em. I also
know that when they had those flexi flyers they’d bend, but they wouldn’t
break. Somebody has to do it, so if
Ford’s gotten involved, I’m for it. I
hear a lot of things, but one thing I do know, and that’s that we’re building
tanks, and I think these cars are getting heavy.
Scelzi believes that more
builders need to be involved in the decision making regarding chassis
construction techniques, and his is not an isolated viewpoint. Other drivers have expressed the same beliefs
to CompetitionPlus.com. Those sentiments
have also been voiced in PRO general and board meetings, and we’re now hearing
that the organization may pay to have as many as a half dozen independent chassis
builders fly in for a meeting during the Phoenix race.
It’s hard to disagree with
Scelzi when he says, “Eric (Medlen) was killed in Gainesville, but we didn’t
get any new chassis information or specs until December. That’s too long.”
Like every other driver
we’ve spoken with, Scelzi very much likes the new Countdown format. “If we’re not in the Top 10 by the time we
get to Indy we must suck pretty bad,” he said.
“You need to win to be the champ.
We really didn’t have a strategy before.
We tried to run hard in Vegas and Pomona, and it cost us the
championship, but I wouldn’t do it any differently. In both of those races we just got after
it. Nobody did anything wrong. We just didn’t get it done.”
Scelzi has often been
critical of the NHRA, and while he acknowledges his friendship with Dan Olson,
he says that “he has worked his balls off, getting as much (chassis)
information as he can, but Dan is one person, and I don’t know if there were
enough people working on this problem.
He’s one man. I just felt we
should have put more people on it to get a broader range of ideas.
“I appreciate what Ford
has done. These Delphi boxes thing, with
these earplugs that we poured in
The new procedure was really
put into effect for races later in the season, when an
under-ideal-running-conditions-Friday evening followed by a 20 degrees and 15
humidity percentage points higher Saturday could effectively end all hopes of
outsiders making the field.
Unquestionably this has
been a major problem. We can recall more
than one U.S. Nationals when there was but a single night session on Friday,
and if you didn’t make it into the show then you would be making useless
“demonstration runs” for the remainder of the weekend. The same situation has occurred at other
venues, with this new plan designed to enhance qualifying prospects for the
competitors while at the same time insuring the spectators of a better show.
While only 12 times are
advanced forward after Friday qualifying, there are no protected positions.
Everything’s still up for grabs.
In theory, at least, if the field is deep enough (Pro Stock is the only
category in which this is even remotely probable), it’s possible that Friday’s
Number 1 provisional qualifier could become a DNQ by the end of Saturday. Unlikely, of course, but remotely
possible. There are no guaranteed starting spots after Friday. Only those 12 best elapsed times remain on
the board.
As NHRA Sr. VP Graham
Light explained, “One of the Chicago races is the best example I can use to
explain this. After Friday night the
bump in Top Fuel was a ‘fifty-nine. On
Saturday it warmed up, and we know what happens. I had a conversation with Tim Richards (crew
chief for Brandon Bernstein), who wasn’t in the show. He said, We’re in a no win situation. With these conditions we can’t run better
than a 4.61. It’s too hot, we’re going
to smoke the tires if I set it up any quicker than that, but we can’t qualify
with a ‘sixty-one. I have to come up
here with a ‘fifty-five tune-up, but the track’s not going to hold a
‘fifty-five tune-up, and it didn’t.
“Not a single car
qualified on Saturday, and most of the cars smoked the tires. Well, that wasn’t fair to the fans or the
racers because they had missed it on that one (Friday night) session. Now, on to this scenario. There’s at least four open positions on
Saturday, so even if it was so good Friday night that that Number 1 to 12 is
secure, that nobody can run that good on Saturday, at least now that ‘sixty-one
we were talking about would get you into the show. At least there are some spots available for
those last two runs on Saturday.
“It’s the same as if we’d
only run 12 cars on Friday and it had rained out the rest of the session. When we go to Saturday it’s still the
quickest 16 cars that are going to race on Sunday.”
The reality is that this
plan is a heck of a lot simpler than it may sound. It provides the racers with a Saturday
opportunity regardless of how much hotter or humid it is than it was the night
before, and it also insures that the fans will see exciting racing, because if
the field is deep enough, and that Friday night session was a barn-burner, you
could see eight or 10 cars really battling it out for those last four spots. Their elapsed times might be slower than
Friday evening’s, but the show will still be excellent.
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FRIDAY -
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION - In our story on nitromethane (“Nitro Price Increase –And That’s Just The Beginning”) we were incorrect in the price increases we outlined. Further investigation has shown that last year’s price was approximately $16.34 per gallon, not $16.38. Additionally, the 2008 price is approximately $18.44 per gallon, not the $22.12 we reported. CompetitionPlus.com regrets this error and apologizes for any confusion that might have resulted.
COLOR COMMENTATOR – AT LEAST FOR NOW - Top Fuel driver Clay Millican’s car is not in action at the Winternationals, but the colorful Tennessee driver is on hand offering succinct commentary alongside stellar announcer Bob Frey. Millican’s car is owned by Evan Knoll who, as everyone knows, has taken a leave of absence from his drag racing endeavors because of health reasons. Since there are a lot of rumors circulating about the status of Knoll’s teams, we sought out Millican for clarification of the situation.
“All of the guys who have been with me for years and years are still with me. The whole team is still intact. Lance (Larsen) and Johnny (West) are still working. Our team is continuing to move forward. We’re putting new race cars together literally every day. We just signed the lease on a new shop that Even wanted us to move into, so we’ve kinda spent the last few days as construction workers. It’s really going to be a cool shop. It’s got a paved Go Kart track behind it. My shins are sore because we’ve been out there crashin’ into each other!
“The team’s fine. I don’t know when we’re going to go racing, but nobody’s frustrated yet. The majority of those guys have been with me for years and years, and that’s home for everybody. We all live there, and we’ve been as busy as normal. Now, I don’t know what’ll happen a few months from now.
“It’s a normal work day for us. We start at 8:30 and work until at least 5:30. Usually it’s later than that even though we’re not going to the race track. We’re going to have some really nice stuff. Johnny West, Mr. Wizard in the machine shop, is doing some really cool things. It is different, though.
“My main concern is that the quicker Evan gets healthy, the quicker everything returns back to normal. That guy’s done so much for so many people. For him to keep all of us employed is phenomenal. I’m in constant contact with Latrell Preston, who’s handling everything right now. He and I talk every day or so.”
Millican indicated that his expenses had been paid to come to Pomona, because Knoll wanted him to be seen. “As you can see, I’m wearing Torco gear, so it’s all good,” he said. “They wanted me to be here to let everyone know that they are coming back. They will be back next year. They’ve got the J.R. Todd car here that’s running under the Morgan Lucas banner. Everything’s going to be back to normal. They’ve just to give Evan time to get healthy. He’s such a hands-on guy and pretty wide open that it’s hard for him to stay settled down.
“Evan kind of takes care of everybody. To put it in kind of a different way, say he carries 50 of his buddies to go golfing, pays for everything. Well, he gets sick, and his buddies still want to go golfing, well, why should he pay for it if he can’t enjoy it? That’s just me talkin’ of course, but you see what I mean.”
Millican will celebrate his 42nd birthday on Saturday, but as he says, “It’s just another day to me.”
“I’ve never been like a follow-the-leader guy. I’ve always been like the leader and then hoped people would follow me. I like to do things the way I see them. I think our sport fell into these paradigms, these habits that that’s the way it is. You get these uniforms, and you go up (to the starting line) with skulls or whatever’s on them and that’s it. I kind of felt like this is a sport and it takes a team to win or lose these things. If you look at other sports you see jerseys in those sports, and I felt like I wanted to unite or people into a real team.
“There were a couple of reasons I did it. One of them is that I’ve got two teams. I don’t have a Team 1 or a Team 2, or an A Team or a B Team. I’ve got one team with two cars, so I thought if we put our jerseys together and made them all look the same, and then just had the representative driver’s name on the back it would bring unity to the entire thing. The second thing is that it’s different. It’s just the next step. I thought that there was no real value in the look of the uniforms the way they were before whether it was on TV or off TV. I just didn’t think they brought any brand value, so we decided to do this. Actually, so far people kind of like them.”
Ashley: I think Melanie’s proven that she’s an excellent driver. I think she’s got the natural instincts to be able to drive. Yesterday she went right down the track in that car, so the expectation is that, on the race track, she’ll be able to perform very, very well. She’s good on the Tree, she’s good at driving the car, she’s got really great instincts.
Off the track she brings the kind of professionalism and character that I want on my team, especially as I try to build this into a major organization and bring in sponsors and partnerships.
I expect that she’ll definitely make the Countdown and contend and that we’ll be in the thick of it through the final races.
CP: How many races are you going to run personally this year?
Ashley: If you look at what’s going on in the mortgage industry, I’ve been through a crisis before where I lost my business because I didn’t pay attention to it. I won’t go through that again. I owe it to my family not to do that again. I’m focused on my mortgage business this year (Lend America). As much as I love driving and being out here it’s like torture for me to know that I’m not going to race the whole season. I might race six races. I’ll probably defend the titles at the races I won last year, so that means Norwalk and Indy, and some others, until we get some funding to run them all.
CP: Will Todd Veney (recently hired from National Dragster) drive at the other races?
Ashley: Frank Hawley will drive the car. Todd will start to test in the car during testing sessions. We’re going to get Todd his license and then we’ll see where that goes from there.
CP: Other than the races that you won, how many others might you compete in?
Ashley: Right now, already on the slate, are Gainesville, Atlanta, Englishtown, Indy, Norwalk and back here at Pomona. Six races.
CP: Are you bummed about this?
Ashley: Yes, I am. I’m bummed about it, but I’m excited about my role as a team owner. This partnership with Roger Burgess of Pro Care RX is terrific because he’s got the same kind of commitment to excellence that I do. He wants to build a major drag racing organization, and that means creating our own path. We’ll do things differently, just like the uniform jerseys. Like a lot of the things on our car that Chuck Haase built. They’re different, and we think we can be successful at it.
CP: From the businessman’s perspective, what’s your take on the HD Partners acquisition falling to go through?
Ashley: I was totally shocked. I could not believe that that deal did not go through. I thought NHRA was perfect for a SPAC like that, especially with an acquisition corporation that was put together just to look for something like (purchasing NHRA). I agree that NHRA is probably one of the most untapped assets out there right now. It’s really just wanting to go to the next level, and I thought that that acquisition would be huge. Why did it fall apart? The only thing I can think of is maybe the uneasiness in the (stock) market, with the country maybe facing recession. Maybe with real estate values going down and the values placed on (the NHRA properties) also going down I thought that the investors would have a level of security based on those properties. Maybe that brought them to the point where they thought, You know what? We don’t have that safety net. The real estate values won’t be there, so…
WJ: It’s being delivered to the shop on February 11th, I believe.
CP: Who built the car?
WJ: Jerry Haas
CP: Is this going to be your last year driving?
WJ: I don’t know. I’m being perfectly honest: I don’t know.
CP: This is your last contracted year, isn’t it?
WJ: Right.
CP: If you don’t drive next year, will you put someone else in the car?
WJ: If it was financially worthwhile I would. I’m not going to finance it out of my own back pocket.
CP: Anything else?
WJ: Everything’s about normal. We’re just working away at this stuff. We just take our budget as it is. Maybe we’re a little slower than some of the other people in developing stuff because we have to count our money. Some people weigh theirs!
NEW CAR, OLD APPEARANCE - Kurt Johnson’s Chevrolet is a brand new Jerry Haas-penned ride that appears to be last year’s model only because the graphics have remained the same. Johnson has had the car for 10 weeks, telling Torco’s CompetitionPlus.com that the car “arrived at our shop on a skid.”
Because Johnson and his team planned on completely disassembling the car when it arrived from Haas they suggested he send it stripped and they would then hang their own hardware on the frame rails, which is what they did.
“We were going to take it apart anyway,” Johnson said. “It was just easier to get it pretty bare, and then we did everything from there in our shop. Top to bottom, front to back, we did the whole thing. We fine tuned it and paid attention to detail, and it ran great right off the bat.”
KJ put 15 runs on the car in Las Vegas prior to coming to the Winternationals, where he’s performed well through two qualifying sessions.
When we asked Johnson what he felt it would take to win the Winternationals his answer was succinct: “The biggest thing to win this race is to stay in the left lane,” he said. Johnson’s computer readout confirmed the existence of several fairly severe bumps near the eighth mile mark in the right lane, and showed us video of his previous run that confirmed it. “It’s rough out there in the right lane,” he concluded.
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THURSDAY - ABOUT THE SPECIAL NITRO MEETING
NITRO PRICE INCREASE – AND THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING - On Thursday morning there was a meeting between team owners, NHRA,
representatives of VP Racing Fuels, various and sundry attorneys
representing different parties, and individuals from the federal
government.
The stated purpose of the meeting was to discuss the dangers inherent
to the use and transportation of nitromethane, but our sources report
that the discussion ultimately covered numerous subjects, some of them
not directly related to nitro and drag racing.
New federal standards call for a maximum amount of nitro allowed in a
racer’s pit area at any given time to be limited to 398 lbs. total.
That means that while 55 gallon drums continue to be used, they only
contain approximately 40 gallons when delivered by VP (the number of
gallons may vary slightly due to the percentage of nitro in the drum).
In order to transport nitro special licensing and documentation is now
required. Two of the attorneys present, Mike Young and Donna Diamond
of Western & Benshost, showed the audience a large binder,
reportedly claiming that its extensive paperwork would have to be
filled out and approved before an individual would be allowed to
transport and store nitromethane. However, one competitor reports that
he was able to quickly and easily fill out the same paperwork online,
and is anticipating receiving approval in short order.
During the meeting a representative of VP reportedly admitted that he
was the one who sold Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh the three
drums of nitro that were used to enhance the explosion that took down
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 and injuring over
800. McVeigh was later tried, convicted and executed for the crime.
Ironically, fuel supplier Steve LeSeur was reportedly approached by
McVeigh at the same event, but refused to sell to him because he didn’t
like the way McVeigh answered LeSeur’s questions as to his planned use
of the fuel. LeSeur reported the incident to the FBI and later
provided sworn testimony as to what had taken place.
All of those in attendance in the meeting were asked to sign a
five-point pledge that included promising not to sell any nitromethane
to anyone, including other racers. They were also asked to make sure
all of the nitro in their pits was kept in a secure area, that not more
than a single drum of fuel would be in their pits at any given time and
that they would return all nitro at the end of each event so that it
could be secured and transported to the next race by VP.
The bottom of the document asked for Social Security and driver’s
license numbers, which some racers present apparently weren’t happy
about, assuming such information would result in their names being
placed on a government file somewhere.
This raises a number of questions, of course, including how testing or
match race situations would be handled, and as of Thursday evening we
just don’t have the answers.
Steve Tanzler of the Department of Transportation, who made a
presentation during the meeting, warned the racers that more stringent
times were ahead in terms of the transportation and storage of nitro.
While this may be just the beginning of this issue, what can’t be
ignored is the very real price increase that VP has foisted off on the
competitors. They may be using the excuse of higher prices to
transport and obtain the fuel, but the bottom line is crystal clear:
In 2007 a 55 gallon drum of nitro cost $885. In early 2008 the price
is still $885 – but for 40, not 55 gallons of fuel. Last year’s
per-gallon price was approximately $16.38. Now it’s $22.12 – a
whopping 31% increase.
When VP put together its exclusivity program with NHRA they had two
sources for the fuel, but are now down to one. VP is, in effect, a
re-seller and not a manufacturer of nitromethane. This means the
racers are going to continue paying higher prices because VP’s
“handling charges” are probably going to increase as well. Were VP a
nitro manufacturer with competition in the marketplace, it’s possible
that fuel costs would be somewhat lower than they are now, and
certainly lower than they’re projected to be later in the year.
You do the math, but it’s clear that by year’s end a racer’s budget
could be shot to hell just because of the increased costs of nitro. As
of this writing there are 17 Top Fuel cars in competition at the
Winternationals. Increased fuel costs alone could cut that number
significantly by mid-summer because it’s obvious that a number of teams
out there are barely scraping by as it is. A 31% immediate increase in
fuel expenditures could translate to a 40% or more increase by the end
of the year, and that’s definitely not good news.
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