For Bill Reichert, it was just a matter of completing some unfinished monkey business.

Down and out after a disappointing run at the spring Gatornationals,
the veteran Top Alcohol Dragster driver returned home to Owosso, Mich.,
to assess his situation. “We had run several 20s (5.20-second runs) but
we red-lit in the second around. And that just devastates you,” said
the 55-year-old Reichert. “You pride yourself on being a good driver …
and the job really isn’t that hard.”

Drag racing is a sport where how you start is just as important as how
you finish. In fact, it often can be the difference between winning and
losing.

Because of it, competitors will do almost anything in chase of that
hole-shot advantage. 13-time champion John Force takes a quick dose of
oxygen, while others spend hours on the practice Christmas Tree.

Mike Ashley, a former AMS Pro Mod champ who is now in his second year driving a Funny Car, has found a different method.

Jason Fiorito and Pacific Raceways
officials are taking small, gradual steps toward relocating its quarter-mile
drag strip.

The hope is to get the OK from King County to amend the motorsport facility’s
conditional use permit that would allow a new strip to be built and sunk into
the ground on the west end of the 320-acre property. The NHRA-sanctioned track,
located in South Puget Sound, about 30 miles outside Seattle, is home to 300 events each year.

Steve Torrence has no delusions of grandeur.

He understands that success in NHRA POWERade Series drag racing doesn't happen overnight,
but he also knows he's aligned himself with a very talented racing team.

The reigning Lucas Oil Series Top Alcohol Dragster champion, who made his Top Fuel debut at last
weekend's Torco Racing Fuels Nationals near Richmond, Va., is driving a second car
for Dexter Tuttle Motorsports.
The team, with driver Auto Club of Southern California Road to the Future
finalist J.R. Todd, has become one of the more consistent units on the POWERade circuit, winning three national events en
route to challenging for a top-ten finish in points.

May 26 had started out as a pretty good day for IHRA
sportsman racer Eddie Pauley. Journeying from his home in Shelby,
NC, he had gotten on the road a day early to
make the Mr. Gasket Pro-Am Tour Race in Douglas,
GA, an IHRA Division 9 points
meet. “When you plan to do something and it gets to be time to do it, something
always goes wrong,” he said. “I’m always running late, I’m always in a frenzy
to get somewhere, but this time I went by myself. I left in plenty of time to
get there, it was a beautiful day, and I was thinking, ’man, things are
actually going good!’ And then--ka-blooey.” 

.

Life for Rahn Tobler right now is great.  My professional life
couldn’t be better.  My personal life - my relationship with my wife is
strong as it ever has been. We’ve been together for going on 26 years
and that’s been great. My home life is great. Obviously the opportunity
here with Kalitta Motorsports has been a terrific deal for us.  There’s
no place that I’d rather be. I don’t aspire to do anything else but
work here at Kalitta Motorsports.  I feel so fortunate every day to be
able to do what I do

It was about a year ago that Pro Mod racer Raymond Commisso was lying in a hospital bed recuperating from his second consecutive crash, a shoulder separated and two vertebra in his neck bruised. His confidence was shaken, his resources were rattled, and Commisso’s brand-new ’63 Vette was so badly damaged he’d have to start over virtually from scratch. But with a little help from a lot of friends, one year later this Canadian restaurateur has pulled off the nearly impossible--in two consecutive weekends his ‘67 Camaro rocked the Pro Mod world in both NHRA and IHRA.

After running three seasons in the Torco’s CompetitionPlus.com Pro Modified class without so much as qualifying for an IHRA national event, Commisso won the Skull Shine World Nationals, August 28 at Norwalk Raceway Park, when he beat Mike Janis with a solid 6.126, 232.35-effort. Then at the Mac Tools U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis the following weekend, Commisso wowed NHRA crowds by qualifying No.1 with a 6.016, 236.80 right off the trailer, backing it up with a 6.02, then going all the way to the final before losing to Joshua Hernandez, 6.10 to 6.04.

Talk about comebacks.

Patrick Bowen depends on his dad Ricky to help him when he
races.  That’s not unusual. Many sons
depend on pop to get them dialed in, set just so in the water box, even on the
starting line. Ricky Bowen goes several steps further, though: he literally
lifts son Patrick into and out of his dragster each and every time he goes down
the track. Once in the cockpit, though, Patrick is on his own, and he can quite
capably go rounds --- he so impressed “Million Dollar Man” and racing promoter
George Howard by going five rounds at a 2002 B&M race at Huntsville Dragway
that he got free entry into the Twin 20s at the Million Dollar Drag Race in
Memphis later that year.

Patrick, 28, is confined to a wheelchair. He has been since
he was a child. He is fully paralyzed from the waist down. He was born with
spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal cord is not connected. He went
through several recent operations to fuse his spine, but twice the operations
failed. The rods the doctors placed in his back held on the last one.

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.