You can’t argue with the results. Thanks to Billes, Raymond Commisso and John Russo attained career-best performances during the 2006 season. Commisso, a fellow Canadian, roared out of the North Country to post some of the lowest elapsed times of the season in both IHRA and NHRA competition, including 6.01-second efforts at Indianapolis and Rockingham.

A competitive Al Billes has gotten even more competitive after a devastating accident

What makes Al Billes so popular in Pro Modified? Well, for one thing, he’s Canadian, with a genetic predisposition toward politeness. For another, out of nine NHRA Pro Mod Challenges he attended in 2004, he won four. But most importantly, he’s one of the pioneers of the Pro Modified class, having played with nitrous oxide back when it was part of IHRA’s Top Sportsman class. Those years of experience are currently being put to great use as Billes has become a sought-after engine builder/tuner/consultant after a pair of crashes sidelined him last year.

You can’t argue with the results. Thanks to Billes, Raymond Commisso and John Russo attained career-best performances during the 2006 season. Commisso, a fellow Canadian, roared out of the North Country to post some of the lowest elapsed times of the season in both IHRA and NHRA competition, including 6.01-second efforts at Indianapolis and Rockingham.

Billes tuned three of the four semifinalists at the NHRA’s U.S. Nationals -Commisso, Tony Pontieri, and Doug Palmer -. At the IHRA Finals, four of the top eight qualifiers benefited from the Billes touch. Russo, Pontieri, Scott Cannon, and Ed Hoover all recording passes in the low six-second range. 

Always quietly competitive, Billes never made a really big splash on the drag race scene, usually carrying the day through hard work and consistency. This ethic probably goes back to his father, Dave Billes, who arguably built the first round tube-chassied Pro Stock out of a Pontiac Astra back in the early ‘70s. “NHRA banned it for a year, saying it wasn’t North American built,” said Billes, who was about seven at the time. “And then Grumpy Jenkins and all those guys came out with their round tube cars after that.”

This foray into drag racing was an unusual gambit for the elder Billes, though. An engine builder since the 1960s, he specialized in small, high revving road race and stock car engines, leaving drag racing wide open for his son. Eventually Al Billes Racing would be established next to his dad’s Performance Engineering shop in Barrie, Ont., Canada, where this scion would become one of the premier engine builders for the burgeoning Pro Mod class.

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“I bracket raced for quite for a few years,” said Billes, “but then it got boring, so it was either quit racing or move up. So in the late 1980s I bought a used Pro Stocker, put a nitrous engine in it and ran it for a year in Top Sportsman. Then we built our own car, a 1990 Camaro with a dual element rear wing.”

In Pro Mod’s first couple of seasons, Billes came in second in championship points to the Scotty Cannon, who dominated the class throughout the 1990s. “Around ‘93 I got frustrated with the rules changes and went alcohol Funny Car racing for a couple years,” said Billes. “Then I quit racing for awhile, got married and bought a house. When I came back in ‘98, I started racing Pro Mod again strictly as a part-time hobby.”

Then at the end of the 2004 season it was announced that Al Billes would replace the retiring Fred Hahn on Jim Oddy’s Summit Racing team. “I do have one personal goal,” Billes said in a press release, “and that is to be the first Canadian Pro Mod driver to win a World Championship.

“Finances were getting really tight,” Billes said, “so we tried things out to see how it went.” He ran four or five races before he crashed his ‘53 Vette during a match race against Mike Janis at Lancaster Raceway Park near Buffalo, NY. “(Jim) wanted to use my car to do some other IHRA races. The left rear wheel broke in the car and I went into the wall. It wrecked the car and hurt me a little bit, a concussion. But I got back into (Oddy’s ‘05 Stratus) three weeks later.”

On his second qualifying pass during the Dukes of Hazzard Motor City Nationals, July 15 in Michigan, Billes ran the fastest Torco Pro Mod pass in the history of Milan Dragway at 231.08 mph. But then the chutes failed to open and the car went up against the wall and began bouncing. Standing on the brakes, Billes attempted to turn off at the top end, but a front tire caught the sand trap, causing the car to barrel roll. Although he was able to climb out of the wreckage under his own power, Billes, who was not fully recovered from the first concussion, knew he had a problem.

“That really messed me up,” said Billes. “I spent six months on the couch, could hardly do anything. Now I’ve got a lot of fuzzy, nasty sort of stuff from that. It’s not really dizzy spells; there’s no loss of balance, anything like that, it’s more fuzzy, like when you’ve got a cold, a ‘punky’ feeling in your head.” In medical terms this is called post-concussive syndrome, common among hockey players, football players and boxers.

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“The doctors have since signed off on my competition license,” Billes said. “They said physically, mentally, there’s absolutely no reason why I can’t drive a car right now. But I’m not 100 percent, so if I have another wreck before I’m fully healed--if you fully heal--it could be a nasty thing. They say you’ve got to give it two to three years--insurance companies won’t even resolve a head trauma claim for three years.”

So what is Billes going to do? “I just hope I get better first,” he said. “My wife Donna and I had our second child in March ‘06, so I think first and foremost I need to be well enough to take care of my family.” Only able to go down to his shop for two to three hours a day, Billes is comfortable picking up the slack by becoming a valuable asset in the Pro Mod pits.

“We have a really good engine program,” Billes said. “I don’t really want to quit racing--I love it; it’s all I ever really wanted to do. We’ve always worked real hard, we’ve run fairly well; we don’t get as much accolades as a lot of the folks, even though we may have achieved more, but it doesn’t really matter. People see us and know we do most of our own stuff, and I think people respect that.”

It’s been about a year and a half since the last crash, and Billes says he's going to wait another six months to a year before he decides on what he’ll do. “There’s no sense pushing myself to get back into a car,” he said. “I made that mistake when I got into Jim’s car. I didn’t understand the whole head trauma thing; I felt fine. But apparently I shouldn’t have been back in a car for one to four months. We’ll just wait. I mean I’m only 40 years old, so I can wait four or five years to race again. Once you’ve driven them for so many years, it’s like riding a bicycle, a few runs you’ll be rusty, but then you’re ready to go again.”

Billes currently has a ‘67 McCandless Camaro ready to race, but he’s probably going to sell it. “I could always order another one,” was his comment. In the meantime his knowledge and experience are in great demand--but what about when he goes back to racing - how is he going to maintain this? “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Billes said.

Enthusiastically looking forward to next season, Billes will be working with fellow Canadians Commisso and Pontieri again, as well as Russo and possibly Cannon. “I really wouldn’t call myself a guru,” he said, experience and engineering background to the contrary. “We just work hard. We never got to do the racing that we really needed to do--living up north here, we can’t race all year. We’ve never won a championship. There are lots of guys who have done better than us. By just sticking with it and working hard you start getting good at it.”