Shelly Payne, above all the hype of being a woman competing in a male-dominated sport, has always shown the incredible knack and skill to drive a drag racing machine.The former Shelly Anderson, who is married to longtime alcohol competitor Jay Payne, showed it while being one of the more popular Top Fuel drivers in the 1990s, and she's again proving it today while competing in AMS Pro Mod Challenge.

She's also done it while twice coming back from horrific crashes, including rebounding with a solid 2006 campaign after experiencing a spectacular roll-over accident during a qualifying run at the Sears Craftsman Nationals near St. Louis in June, 2005. And yet Payne keeps coming back for more.

Why, some ask? The answer is simple and to the point.

"I work on Jay's (Valvoline Alcohol Funny Car), and I really, really enjoy it," Payne said. "But there's still nothing like driving."

But Payne's career literally turned upside down last season when she crashed during a scorching Friday night qualifying session at Gateway International Raceway in Madison, Ill.

"The track temperatures where really, really high," Payne recalled. "It was hot, and I remember telling my dad (team owner Brad Anderson) that the car didn't have any downforce after halftrack. These cars are hard to drive, and (under those conditions) you really can't drive them. Jay and I knew one of them was going to crash, and it was me."

The Southern California resident appeared to be making a normal qualifying pass when suddenly her Dodge Stratus got out of the groove, wiggled out of control before crossing the centerline and rolled over across the quarter-mile dragstrip. The car flipped twice before finally coming to rest. She exited the car under her own power before being transported to Saint Louis Hospital.

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Payne suffered two broken vertebrae and was fitted for a brace. But the process was slow. She had to have several tests over the next few months before finally having surgery on the injury in late October.

"(The doctors) waited along time and decided they couldn't do therapy because the break had been too long and probably calcified," Payne said. "They did another test, and it was like it broke yesterday. They then where afraid I had bone cancer, which I knew I didn't have, so they had to do a test on that. Finally I had surgery on Halloween."

But it was help from the NHRA racing contingent, most notably drag racing icon Kenny Bernstein, that finally allowed Payne to get on to the road to recovery.

Bernstein, whose son Brandon had suffered similar injuries after his 2003 crash, put Payne in touch with the right specialists who could better diagnosis her injuries and get her on the path to full recovery.

"He got me my doctors," Payne said of Kenny Bernstein. "It was kind of ironic because Don Prudhomme got me my burn doctors when I had my skin grafts (after a '98 crash at Sonoma).
"Kenny got me the doctors, and they are the ones that performed surgery on me. And what had changed? It was almost immediate."

 Then after a few months of rehabilitation, she was once again ready to race. And while others might have balked at returning, Shelly never once thought about saying enough was enough.
"I think my dad thought that," Payne said. "I think my mom did, too. I think one of the reasons my dad is so hard on me when I drive is that I'm not sure if he wants me doing this. He owns everything and is the boss. It's kind of hard for him to tell me no. I think once you've raced, you always want to race."

And Shelly still wanted to race, so after a few months of rehabilitation, she finally got back to what she likes to do best, and was there to compete at the AMS Pro Mod Challenge season opener at the Gatornationals in Gainesville.

And yet, it was almost like the incident at St. Louis had been frozen in time, and now she was back to square one.

"I never made a run until we got in the car at the Gatornationals," said Payne, whose dad had came up with the idea to put a rear spoiler on the car to make it more stable. "I was a little nervous, to say the least. I was told over the winter I would get 30-40 runs, and my dad just got behind in the business, and we didn't get them. I was nervous. But everything went OK."

It went extremely OK.

Payne opened with a semifinal appearance at the Gatornationals and then followed it up with another semifinal showing a few weeks later at the O'Reilly NHRA Spring Nationals near Houston. Her good fortunes continued into the summer as she scored her first runner-up finish in Pro Mod at the O'Reilly Mid-South Nationals in Memphis before breaking through for her first win in more than 10 years with a victory at the O'Reilly Fall Nationals near Dallas.

"It was great," said Payne, whose last win came when she won in Top Fuel at the Northwest Nationals near Seattle in the summer of 1996. "It was a nice win for the team. We all needed this.
"What was really neat was having my kids, Toby and Maddy, there. It was really special. My dad and mom and Jay...but with the kids, it was really nice."

Her trek to victory lane began when she qualified fifth. She then got a leg up on the Payne in-house family rivalry by beating husband Jay in the second round. Shelly then finished off eliminations by defeating Troy Critchley in the finals with a solid 6.091-second run at 231.68 mph.
The win, the first for a woman in a doorslammer class, not only topped off her comeback from last year's horrific crash, but it also proved to show her successful transition to the Pro Mod Series.

"There is no comparison, really," Payne said of the two classes. "The fuel car is a lot of G-force. The faster and quicker the run, the easier it is to drive. It's when it's dropping cylinders and the track's hot and it's spinning the tires...that's when it's more difficult.

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

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