So close to the title, so far away

The phrase ‘agonizingly close’ doesn’t begin to describe Tony Gillig’s shot at the Torco’s CompetitionPlus.com Pro Stock title during IHRA’s UTI World Finals. With his race team due to be dismantled at year’s end, Gillig came into Rockingham, NC with high hopes and a hard-won points lead. But then the winds changed, the signs became unfavorable, omens adverse…

Tied at two wins a piece with Frank Gugliotta, Pete Berner and Robert Patrick, Gillig succeeded in holding off these competitors for most of the year. “We had qualified bottom half four times before in the season,” the Lake Bluff, IL native explained. “I was 9th in Grand Bend and won first round…Budds Creek we beat Robert Patrick first round, then went on to runner-up the event [after a 30 second staging battle, Gillig lost on a holeshot to Ricky Smith]. When I get past first round I go to the semis, that’s just how it worked out for us. It just didn’t happen for us at Rockingham.”

Once more qualifying 9th, Gillig first drew a short straw when an inverted ladder pitted him against #1 Patrick in the first round. “We qualified crummy, if you want to call 6.37 crummy,” Gillig recalled. “We went a .39 to (Patrick’s) .34, but I didn’t have enough at the tree to beat him. I lost by 1/100; I was .050, he was .090. If we had run 4/1000ths faster and qualified in the top half, that would have been a cure for the problem, or if we would have let the clutch out a hundredth quicker we would have been victorious.”

Ultimately it was Pete Berner who was victorious. Trailing by only 31 points, Berner wound up going the two rounds needed to beat his fellow Illinoisan to the Pro Stock championship. “He knew what he had to do,” commented Gillig. “First round he had Mike Corvo, in his first national event as an IHRA Pro Stock driver. The odds were on Pete’s side. Things didn’t go my way, they went his way.” As an added irony, his dad Bob Gillig was once Berner’s crew chief.

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“He started helping Pete out at the end of ’02 as a favor to Pat from Ram Clutches,” Gillig related. “Pete was having a lot of troubles and couldn’t get down the race track… Pete actually won his first national event with my dad as crew chief.”

After joining Tim Huston’s Team ASSC Racing four years ago, Gillig capped his first season by winning the '03 Fast Ford Weekend Pro title and the Orlando Pro Street race with the Ramco 5.0 Mustang, a small block with a ProCharger. Switching to Pro Stock in 2004, Huston commissioned a mountainous 814ci motor from Jon Kaase to be mated to a Rick Jones-built '03 Mustang Cobra. Bringing Bob Gillig onboard in 2005 as crew chief completed the recipe; the hardworking racer was steadily working his way up to IHRA Pro Stock’s Number One, finishing 10th in ‘04, 6th in ‘05, and having his most successful season ever in ‘06. Yet it was all set to end.

“(Huston and I) had decided before the (2006) season had started that at the end of the year, win, lose or draw, we were going to split the race team up, and we did it because we both agreed upon it,” said Gillig. “Tim had been racing for a long time before I ever came onboard and I think he’s a little burned out. He kind of wants to take a little breather and regroup. Maybe he’ll race again, maybe he won’t. I think if he did we’d probably get together and do it again as a team. And I could use some time to spend at our family business,” a pizzeria Bob Gillig founded in Lake Bluff 31 years ago. “I’ve been working there since I was 14.”
 
So he got his racer’s edge from delivering pizzas, right? “Not really,” Gillig laughed. “My dad’s been into race cars ever since he was 15 years old. He stopped for awhile after I was born, but he took it back up when I was 10 and we’ve been racing together ever since, 26 years.

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“As much as I don’t want to admit it,” Gillig continued, “I’ve got to spend some time with the restaurant, and deal with my dad stepping away from the business. It’s in my best interests, it’s my future. I’d like to say I could make a living driving a Pro Stock car for the rest of my life, but that’s not feasible, nor do I believe a smart move by any means. It’s a hard deal. Racing takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and unfortunately monetarily the returns aren’t there to do it for a living.”

Gillig had to make such a decision before, when he had to park his own Rick Jones Olds Cutlass, which he raced in IHRA and NHRA Pro Stock from 1997 to 2001. “Coming back to IHRA [in 2004], this class in the last three years has made leaps and bounds in technological advancements, and in the amount of effort, time and money it requires to perform at a level to be a contender. The data logging on these cars is unbelievable nowadays. Keeping up with research and development as far as making horsepower, working with John Kaase at our end here, it’s gotten pretty insane, even at the IHRA level. IHRA Pro Stock is as tough as they come, a lot tougher than it was just three years ago.”

Hopefully this time Tony Gillig won’t be gone so long that the field will get too tough for him to re-enter. “It’s a hard deal there,” he agreed. “In fact when I first came back here, all you had [as engine builders] was John Kaase and Sonny Leonard. There were a lot of other guys that just did it as a hobby. Now there’s rumors of other guys taking their motors to 500 cubic inch engine builders to work on their stuff. It’s getting to the point in IHRA Pro Stock where it’s going to be like NHRA with your own engine program. (Racers) don’t want to be 1 of 12 customers, they want to be one step ahead of the game. Guys are starting to turn IHRA Pro Stock into NHRA Pro Stock. So it’s going to get pretty ugly, let me tell you that.”

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But before Gillig turned in the keys to his ASSC Racing Mustang, there was one last race. Heading to Orlando for the Real World Street Nationals in October, the team competed for the last time in the Super-Pro Street class, running all the way to the final, beating Chuck Samuel, 6.59 to 14.81, repeating his 2003 victory over Tony Christian, neatly bookending his career with the team.

“Well, it was no secret that we were done and the team was being dismantled, the car sold. And in a situation where you know you’re not going to race next season, you don’t know what pass it’s going to be where you’re buckling in the for the last time. You’re going up there to win the round; you’ll be in high gear thinking, ‘gee, this could be my last pass,’ but not even know it. We gave it our best shot and actually won the race. So it was nice getting in the car and knowing it was my last run. That was cool.”