Jim Halsey considers himself a confident drag racer but up until the time he crossed the finish line ahead of Billy Harper, he didn’t concede the victory was his. The Street, Md.-based veteran, along with a handful of nitrous racers, had waited a long time for what transpired in the finals of the IHRA Texas Nationals, a nitrous winner and even better in an all-nitrous final round.

The last time a pair of nitrous entries battled in a final round of a Pro Modified event was the 2006 IHRA Motor City Nationals in Milan, Michigan. There has only been two nitrous winners in the last two seasons in IHRA competition. 

 

Jim Halsey considers himself a confident drag racer but up until the time he crossed the finish line ahead of Billy Harper, he didn’t concede the victory was his. The Street, Md.-based veteran, along with a handful of nitrous racers, had waited a long time for what transpired in the finals of the IHRA Texas Nationals, a nitrous winner and even better in an all-nitrous final round.

The last time a pair of nitrous entries battled in a final round of a Pro Modified event was the 2006 IHRA Motor City Nationals in Milan, Michigan. There has only been two nitrous winners in the last two seasons in IHRA competition. 

Credit the eighth-mile drag racing for this turnaround.

Halsey readily admits the nitrous combination has a reasonable chance in eighth-mile combination. The quickest nitrous combination was only .029 behind the top qualified blown doorslammer.

“The blower cars make a lot more power from the last half of the track than we do, they can run 2.04-2.05 back halves and I think the best we'd ever run was a 2.09,” Halsey added. “Having more eighth-mile races would make the class more entertaining. When you see guys like [nitrous racers] Billy Harper and Dennis Radford out here racing then you know the nitrous guys feel like they have a chance.”

Halsey’s yet to take advantage of the rules amendment allowing nitrous cars to increase their displacement as large as 820-inches. He estimates the larger motor will be in the car within three weeks and should debut in Rockingham. The motor he’s running in San Antonio displaces 800-inches.

He quickly credits this as the source of his three-second performances.

“We just fine tuned the engine and the car,” Halsey said. “We did quite a bit of testing to make sure everything was just right. That’s the key element.”

 

As long as there are two diametrically opposite combinations in Pro Modified such as the superchargers and nitrous car, there will always be a debate related to which one has a performance advantage.

There will always be the lingering questions asking if nitrous front-runner Jim Halsey will run the complete tour with the IHRA.

“Our plan is to run here and run Rockingham and we will evaluate our situation from there,” Halsey, a three-time finalist in IHRA competition revealed.

The season is early for Halsey and reasonably too early to determined whether or not the nitrous combination has a competitive chance against the blown entries.

“Based on what we did over the winter I think we picked up some power, it remains to be seen whether we gained on the blower cars any and if they made gains too,” Halsey said. “We'll just see how competitive we are and make the call from there.”

Rockingham will tell the complete story for Halsey’s remainder of the season schedule.

“The end of last year we picked up a bunch in the back half,” Halsey said. “We did some stuff in the winter but we haven't run any quarter mile races yet so it's hard to tell.”