There are times when Joe Hartley feels like a mackerel in a sea of
sharks.

Except this little fishie bites back.

Hartley has shown this season he definitely has the ability to run
with the big boys of the NHRA POWERade Series tour, scoring a career-high five
round wins while running in four of seven national events. He's achieved a
career-best elapsed time while also scoring a round win against three-time
defending Top Fuel champion Tony Schumacher and advancing to the first final of
his career.

Yes, for this family-operated organization, it’s been a very
enjoyable start to the 2007 season.

"It's just a family team here," Hartley said. "To
at least be at the same level and beat some of these guys (like Schumacher) is
just a rewarding experience. To just qualify out here is a feat. There are so
many good cars out here, so to do what we've done feels pretty awesome.

"We do it on our own. We don't pay anybody the big bucks to
tune our car. So to tune it on our own and have the success we've had is pretty
awesome."

It's been a tough trek for Hartley Racing to reach this level of
competition.

Patience is proving to be quite a virtue for Jeff Arend.

The Canadian native, who after years of a part-time ride here and
another one there, has found a home driving the Blue Checker Schuck's Kragen
Funny Car for Worsham Racing. He's enjoyed a solid campaign through the first
portion of the 2007 POWERade Series season.

"This is what I worked my whole life for," Arend said.
"I'm kind of like the 10-year overnight sensation. I've known Del (Worsham) for a long
time and had some good rides. I was with (veteran crew chief/owner) Paul Smith
a lot and he always gave me a good, safe race car, and was a good teacher, but
this is where I want to be -- (with) a bigger funded team with a great sponsor
like Checker Schuck's Kragen and running the full year."

But getting to his dream job has been a long trek for Arend.

His road to success began in 1994 when he earned his NHRA Funny
Car competition license. In between then and now, there were stops with mentor
Paul Smith, who tuned him to his only win in 1996, as well as stints as a
fill-in driver for Al Hofmann and Chuck Beal.

It used to be different. Very different.

Long before the dominance of General Motors and drivers Greg
Anderson, Warren Johnson, Jason Line, and Jeg Coughlin, and to a lesser
extent, Mopar and Darrell Alderman, Ford carried the biggest stick in
NHRA Pro Stock, and the man who wielded that stick with deadly
efficiency was Bob Glidden.

The quiet man from Indiana won an unprecedented 10 NHRA championships
in 16 years, including five consecutive titles from 1985 to 1989, and
amassed 85 national event victories before retiring at the end of the
1997 season. In the summer of 1978, he embarked on a remarkable winning
streak that included nine straight national event victories. He
qualified No. 1 at a record 23 consecutive races, including all 14
events in 1987.

The glory days for fans of the Blue Oval were doomed to be short-lived,
however. Glidden’s retirement and Ford’s exodus from NHRA Pro Stock
racing dealt the class a one-two punch from which it never recovered.
Long-suffering GM and Mopar supporters, who had had nothing to cheer
about since the late Lee Shepherd took his Camaro to four titles
between 1981 and 1984, weren’t sad to see Ford go.

The old racing cliché goes, Speed costs money – how fast do you want to go?

That’s true more than ever in this day of highly professional drag racing with its mega-dollar sponsorships. A financial underdog who rises up and challenges the big names, even for just one national event, causes wonder and amazement - witness the attention given to Top Fuel pilot Joe Hartley’s runner-up spot at Houston earlier this season.

Now imagine such a team, living race-to-race, taking on a full season of NHRA national events against a combination of proven dynasties and fast-rising stars, all fully sponsored – and winning a world championship.

That may never happen today. But it did 25 years ago, when a team that made its name at the dawn of Funny Cars added the NHRA trail to its guaranteed-money match race schedule for the first time in its legendary history, and defeated the giants of the sport.

Kenny Koretsky sat in the lounge portion of his transporter at Texas
Motorplex, relaxing and having a sandwich to calm his nerves.

It has been two years since the horrific accident involving both he and
Bruce Allen during the 2005 NHRA Fall Nationals at the Texas Motorplex.
But to Koretsky, sitting in his transporter wondering if he would be
capable of answering the call to qualify, the incident might has well
have been yesterday.

Koretsky returned to part-time driving in 2006 but elected to skip the
Motorplex date. He said he just wasn’t ready to face the track where he
experienced the worst accident of his career, one that sent him away
with two broken ribs, a bruised heart, broken right hand, a sore neck
and a concussion.

Allen also suffered a concussion and abrasions and promptly retired from drag racing. Koretsky stayed in the game.

However, to truly be back in the game, Koretsky was going to have to
open up and face his worst fears not just in his own mind, but in the
minds of all those who wanted to know how he was really feeling about
that fateful afternoon.

“I try to block the crash out of my mind,” Koretsky said. “I've thought
about it a few times this week, and asked myself ‘why am I even doing
this?”

Lindsey Wood just couldn’t
pass up valuable seat time and a good view of the professional starting lights.

For the young driver, there is so much to learn, so much to prove.

“It’s what I love to do,” she said without hesitation.

Wood ultimately wants to beat the best in the NHRA Pro Stock ranks, but to get
there she will need to take the highs with the lows of experiencing quicker
times, faster speeds, and occasional tire shake.

Given the history of Jerry
Darien and Ken Meadows and their heralded Top Alcohol Dragster, however, Wood
appears to be in good hands.

The California-based
A/Fuel dragster team has been a proven training ground for several NHRA pro
drivers currently on the circuit, notably Ashley Force, Morgan Lucas, Brandon
Bernstein, Melanie Troxel, and Gary Scelzi.

Could Wood be next?

The
second-generation competitor has made a successful return to NHRA drag racing,
scoring a pair of top five qualifying efforts at the two POWERade Series
national events. But it wasn't too long ago when most wondered if the Northwest
native would ever return to the straight-line set. Even Kalivoda had some
doubts.

"There's
a tendency to want to (give up)," Kalivoda said. "But as soon as that
thought enters your mind, and I'll speak kind of in the third person here, as
an aspiring driver you just have to push (those thoughts) out, if you made a
determination that this is what you want to do.

"That's
what I have done. It's taken a lot of persistence to get to the point to be
able to drive these things. It's taken a lot of hard work to get here. I've
told a lot of folks that I'm not going to go away that easy. It took a lot
persistence of knocking on doors to get back out here. So there's a tendency to
want (to give up), but you just have to remain positive and put the next foot
forward, and if you've decided you want to do this, you have to dedicate your
life to it and do it."

Which
is what Kalivoda has done.

Just hearing his grandfather’s stories
was enough to make Bob Tasca, III want to go to the drag races. Watching the
cars run as a kid made him want to do more than just
watch.

The third generation of the legendary
Tasca family will do what no other racer outside of John Force has done since
1998; he will race a Ford in the NHRA’s POWERade Funny Car
division.

Tasca will make his driving/team owner
debut at the 2008 NHRA CARQUEST Winternationals in Pomona, Ca. He will do so in
a 2008 Mustang tuned by the duo of Mike Kloeber and Chris Cunningham. The Ford
Mustang body, which will be prepared by John Force Racing, will carry the major
backing of Ford’s Motorcraft and Quick Lane brands.