If an NHRA racer were to sweep the Western Swing that begins this weekend at Denver and snakes through Sonoma, Calif., and ends at Seattle, he or she would travel no more than six miles in the car at all three events combined.

But many of those cars will cover more than 5,300 miles on their team haulers.

If an NHRA racer were to sweep the Western Swing that begins this weekend at Denver and snakes through Sonoma, Calif., and ends at Seattle, he or she would travel no more than six miles in the car at all three events combined.

But many of those cars will cover more than 5,300 miles on their team haulers.

Some drivers, such as Top Fuel’s Spencer Massey, like driving the entire route in a motorhome. Others take the harshness from the summer grind of three races in three weeks in three wildly different conditions by treating it as a family vacation. Some linger in Sonoma’s Wine Country a few extra days or explore Seattle’s outdoor recreational elements.

For all the sightseeing and fun the travel can offer, this Wild West tour takes its toll on personnel and parts – for better or worse, just about a month before the Countdown to the Championship fields are set at Indianapolis.

Funny Car driver Ron Capps had just two words of advice: “Pace yourself.”

He said if the NHRA wanted to make crew chiefs crazy, mechanics worn out, hauler drivers craving sleep, and race cars along with team owners’ wallets tested to their limits, it did an excellent job in carving the Western Swing into each Mello Yello Drag Racing Series schedule.

“NHRA really made it a challenge,” Capps said, “putting Denver at the beginning of that West Coast Swing, because it's not an easy place for parts. And I'm sure if you looked at the UPS bill on most teams getting parts sent out so you can get them back before Sonoma, it's pretty high. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff going out UPS from Colorado after that race. So it's difficult. Then you go [as] right down to sea level as you can get in Sonoma. So you talk about conversely as far apart as you can get as far as tune-ups. So it's really hard on the crew chiefs.

“As a driver you've just got to pace yourself and try to be in the best shape you can because Denver will test every bit of what you've got,” the NAPA Dodge driver said. “And then of course, Seattle is just some of the best air. With all the trees around, people forget oxygen, and it's close to sea level and it can have records set there.”

Massey agreed: "You have to prepare yourself. There's a physical side to this and you have to think of all the guys that are working on the car. It's a totally different set-up than what we run at the other 23 events. The air is thinner, so endurance is important. We change a lot on these race cars just to go to Denver, and that's demanding on the crew chiefs and the crew members.

"The Western Swing is one of the toughest stretches of our schedule," the driver of the Battery Extender Powered by Schumacher Dragster driver said. "We have two four-in-a-row stretches during the year, but the Western Swing is still pretty tough. In Denver, it's just really hard to get these cars down the track. These engines like a lot of oxygen and the track is a mile above sea level and there's not as much oxygen up there."

He won the Top Fuel trophy at Denver in 2013 and is fifth in the standings. But he hasn't advanced past the second round since winning in May at Topeka.

"It's kind of odd to look at it on paper, because, no, we haven't been going rounds like we want to,” Massey said, “but our car has actually been running better and more consistently. We just haven't got the results we want on race day.”

Pro Stock’s V Gaines also has struggled, but his one advantage is that he doesn’t have to exhaust himself getting to Bandimere Speedway. He’s a prominent businessman in the Denver area, and his Kendall Oil Dodge Avenger is giving him the business these days. In the past four races, he has lost four straight first-round matchups and failed to qualify for the most recent race, at Norwalk, Ohio. He has been runner-up to Allen Johnson at each of the past two seasons at his hometown race.

And while Gaines has tested at the Morrison, Colo., venue, that, too, poses a bit of a problem – just like the mechanical glitch he couldn’t solve when the schedule took him east of the Mississippi.

“We’ve known for the past month what the problem is,” Gaines said, “but we’ve just been unable to find the right solution. We’ve been kind of chasing it until we were able to round up the right parts. We’ve been doing quite a bit of testing, and I think we’ve got it working. So after testing we know it works up here in Denver. The question is if it will work the next week in Sonoma.

“You need to test and you need parts,” he said. “We make all the parts ourselves, so it’s tough if you get behind the eight-ball during that kind of stretch. We were trying to Band-Aid and mask the problems, and we were unable to get something effective. Now hopefully we can emerge again.”

Shawn Langdon, who lost to Massey in the Denver Top Fuel final last year, nevertheless said he has fond memories of the Western Swing and of the first stop.

“I always enjoy the Western Swing.  It’s nice to head out West and go to Denver,” the Brownsburg, Ind.-based Al-Anabi Team racer said. “I love going to Bandimere Speedway.  I have a lot of good history and a lot of good memories there winning the NHRA Junior Dragster national championship there 17 years ago. Then to head out to Somona is always great. I always have a lot of family and friends at Sonoma, and there’s just a lot of history about the Western Swing.  We’re excited to go out there.  Our race car is getting back to running well, and hopefully we can end up with a sweep.

“The Al-Anabi car is a top-five car at all times. We have a car that is close to being able to compete for the Mello Yello championship. We’re just fine tuning a couple of areas.  I know that as soon as we get these little things fine-tuned, the car will be back to running how it was last year in the Countdown,” the reigning class champion said.

Top Fuel’s Antron Brown, one of only seven pro racers to complete the sweep (in 2009),  said, “The coolest part about that, honestly, is that when you look at the Western Swing, you go, ‘All right, to win one race is hard enough, but then to win two of them is really hard.’ We came real close at doubling up, I think it was in 2012. We won two of those races out there and then we lost in the semifinals of the last race. Everybody was like, ‘You can do it again, and you try not to talk about it because to win one round of NHRA racing right now is crazy-hard. To get past the first round is crazy-hard. There's no more gimmies. There's 12 great race teams out there, and to compete out there in it is just it makes it that hard and difficult to try to get it done.

“And to say that you're one of the people that you can stand back and look at it and you know you're part of history that's going to last forever -- because you just won three back-to-back races on the toughest stretch on our tour . . . it is just an incredible feat, how difficult it is just to win a race on the Western Swing, especially going to all the different climates and conditions that you're going to see, from being a mile high in Denver to all the different track conditions that you go through,” Brown said.

He’ll give it a go again in his Matco Tools/U.S. Army/Toyota Dragster – and he said his crew is the key.

“To win all three of those races is just a testament to how great your team is. You have to have a serious team, not just mentally but physically. You have to have all the strength that you need to get it done mentally, emotionally, and physically. In those years we had a great team, and I think this year we have even a stronger team than we ever had.”

Brown is the most recent to join the Western Swing Sweep club.  Top Fuel’s Joe Amato did it first in 1991, and Funny Car’s John Force followed suit in 1994. Greg Anderson is the lone Pro Stock racer to accomplish the feat, and he did it in 2004. The others were Top Fuel drivers Cory McClenathan (1997), Larry Dixon (2003), and Tony Schumacher (2008).

To become the first to sweep twice would be “huge,” Brown said. But he was adamant that he can’t let his mind race way ahead with such notions.

“We go into the Western Swing and we can think about that, but when we go into the first race in Denver, you erase all that from your mind, because you don't let your emotions get the best of you,” he said. There’s so much that you have to have go your way to get that done. If you're focused on that, you're not focused on the thing that you need to get done.”

Anderson also used the word “huge” to describe the magnitude of being able to sweep twice. And like Brown, the Summit Racing Equipment Chevy Camaro driver said he has a more pressing agenda.

He’s 11th in the standings because he missed the first portion of the season while recuperating from heart surgery. Catching up is his top priority, he indicated.

“Actually, the biggest thing right now for me and a huge thing for me personally and this team would be for me to win a race,” he said. “I'm going to have to win Denver to even have a chance at that. Right now for me to win a race, it would be huge. It's been two years since I won a race, and I know exactly in my heart it's going to take race wins to make this Countdown. That's going to be huge to me. I can't even look far enough down the road to think about sweeping the Western Swing right now, but I would sure love to start out at Denver with that first win in two years and get myself into that top 10. It would make things a whole lot better.”

He said, “We think we've gained on our project a lot. We think we're ready to race with the top cars, and I'm looking forward to it. Allen Johnson has kind of had everybody's number out there the last several years, but I think we've got something for him this year.”

Game on.

Qualifying begins Friday and continues Saturday, with eliminations set for Sunday.

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