About all Terry Sainty could offer was an "Ooops -- sorry, mate."
 
The Australian Top Fuel driver had popped into the Hartley Family Racing hauler, where the crew was prepping its dragster for driver Ron August Jr. during the National Hot Rod Association's recent SummitRacing.com Nationals at Las Vegas.
 
"They said, 'What are you doing?' " Sainty said, at once amused and chagrined at his mistake.
 
"I said, 'Wrong trailer!' Santo's [team owner Santo Rapisarda's] trailer at Queensland, where we just raced, was red," he said, "but the trailer in America was not red in the back."
 
His gaffe, though startling to the Hartley team, certainly was understandable.

About all Terry Sainty could offer was an "Ooops -- sorry, mate."
 
The Australian Top Fuel driver had popped into the Hartley Family Racing hauler, where the crew was prepping its dragster for driver Ron August Jr. during the National Hot Rod Association's recent SummitRacing.com Nationals at Las Vegas.
 
"They said, 'What are you doing?' " Sainty said, at once amused and chagrined at his mistake.
 
"I said, 'Wrong trailer!' Santo's [team owner Santo Rapisarda's] trailer at Queensland, where we just raced, was red," he said, "but the trailer in America was not red in the back."
 
His gaffe, though startling to the Hartley team, certainly was understandable.
 
Sainty was completing an expedition that made the NHRA's Western Swing look effortless. He was competing at the second of two events on two continents in seven days.
 
And that was after driving at Perth -- on the opposite coast from the Australian National Drag Racing Association hub, the Brisbane-Sydney corridor of Queensland-New South Wales -- and coming to the United States for the NHRA season-opening Winternationals at Pomona, Calif.
 
So after the Pomona race, Sainty and the Rapisarda Racing/Titan Cranes crew went back to Willowbank Raceway, near Brisbane, for the March 25-26  ANDRA Pro Series meet. (The ANDRA season spans the calendar years, so the March race was No. 5 of the 2010-2011 season.) By April 1, the team was back in America, at Las Vegas -- the perfect setting for over-the-top achievements.
 
"One week in Australia, the next week in America. That was pretty cool, eh?" Sainty said. "It has been quite the experience."  
 
His dizzying American tour puts him this weekend at Charlotte, N.C., as he tries to qualify for his first NHRA Top Fuel field at the VisitMyrtleBeach.com 4-Wide Nationals. To cap the madness, Sainty will be trying to coax Santo Rapisarda's balking dragster into the 16-car field while surrounded by three other hopefuls during qualifying.
 
His latest trip began at 3:15 a.m. Wednesday in Australia and ended at 8:30 p.m. in Charlotte -- a journey which included several time-zone changes.
 
"I left my house at a quarter past 3 a.m. Then I went to Sydney for a 6 o'clock flight. Then flew to Brisbane, then went from Brisbane to L.A., from L.A. to Cincinnati, and from Cincinnati to Charlotte. It was a bit of a hike."
 
He went through all that to go 1,000 feet. He hopes he gets to make seven 1,000-feet passes in all -- four in qualifying, weather permitting, and three if he makes the grid and advances to the final round (the third in this unconventional format).
 
Sainty ended up 17th in the order at Pomona, missing the cut by a mere 0.035-seconds. At Las Vegas, he was 18th in qualifying and out of the field by 0.091 of a second.
 
He said he's "not too sure" what it will take to qualify. "We changed some things on the fuel system. We've been having trouble dropping cylinders. That's been one of the main problems. Obviously, when a car drops a cylinder, it loses a lot of horsepower and it just doesn’t run quick," he said, adding that he'll try this weekend to "force it down there and qualify it."
 
Sainty said he's still learning.
 
"It's been a neat experience for me as a driver. It's a big move, coming out all the way from Australia. Everything's different, the way they do everything. This facility here is quite something: massive grandstands, four-lane racetrack, the pits are huge . . . everything's just bigger and better," he said.
 
The problem at Las Vegas began with an oil leak.
 
"We just couldn't fix it in time. This time we're going to make sure we start the car plenty early, just to make sure it's all ready to go," Sainty said Thursday before warming up the dragster that used to belong to David Baca. "We don't want to miss that first [session]. It makes it easier if you can get into that top 12 on the first run.
 
"Back home," he said, "we don't have anything like that. We're lucky to have eight cars. Usually you’re in the field, where here you have to run really good to get in. You don't want to miss that first qualifier. [If so,] you're just giving it away a little bit."
 
Said Sainty, "It has been a huge effort by Santo Rapisarda to fly a team from Australia to the U.S. to race, and we would like to reward him by qualifying at this event."
 
He spent some time Thursday studying sportsman runs, especially focusing on the newly designed Christmas Tree. He's used to the traditional NHRA tree set-up. It's what ANDRA uses. He said this new version "looked like a really good set-up."
 
He said he has seen the four-wide spectacle "only on television" but said Thursday, "It looks great! They've gone to all the trouble to build it. I think I should be excited about it. I imagine it’s loud, if you get down there on the starting line. They have to be loud. It looks like a really nice racetrack, and I can't wait to run on it."
 
One of the biggest adaptations for Sainty has been the varied racetracks. In Australia, he and his fellow racers don’t zip around the country, racing at 19 different venues. Their championship season is composed of events at three tracks. So racers there are completely familiar with the tracks. Weather conditions might dictate some tune-up changes, but ANDRA racers don’t have to worry so much, or at least don’t have to shift mental gears so often, about the facilities themselves.  
 
"When I first started racing, in 1992, we had the Adelaide track and the Melbourne track. We raced quite a bit at Melbourne. Now basically we've just got the two main tracks," Sainty said. "The main tracks for us are Sydney and Brisbane. We race in Perth, in Western Australia, once a year."
 
In America, he already has had to become settled in at four wildly different racetracks, including Firebird International Raceway, near Phoenix, where he conducted his pre-NHRA-season testing.
 
"That's three different tracks, all totally different," he said. "So you're looking at the way the staging lanes are different, the way the water box is. Some tracks feel real wide; some feel very narrow. Just which way you go at the end, just silly stuff like that. And getting weighed after the run, weighing the driver -- we don't do that back home. It's just all these little things are a little bit different."
 
One major difference, Sainty said, was that "the competition here is professional. That would be one word: professional. From the rigs to the testing. At Las Vegas, we did three test runs on that Monday after the event. And some of the Funny Cars did five passes. I was like, 'Whoa -- that was pretty full-on.'
 
"They were doing lap after lap after lap. And we were having a barbecue. They were working hard all day, very hard. They had more people there on a test day than we have in a meeting!" he said. The with a laugh, he said, "We ended up feeding some of the other crews. I think they do everything better, but I think we cater better."
 
This weekend, the Rapisarda team is a bit short-handed, without Sainty's parents, Stan and Margaret, and the parents of Rapisarda's wife, Christy. That means that Sainty had to help pitch in toi set up the hospitality area and prepare that side of the spectacle.
 
So he's doing it all, and he said he hopes  he can deliver in the driving department.
 
"The Rapisarda Family, you can't get a more generous family. They're bending over backwards to try to fly the flag of the Aussie team and of Rapisarda [Racing]. They're really trying to make it happen. I'm lucky enough to be the one behind the wheel," he said. "I'm a little bit nervous -- once we get the thing tuned up, then I've got to do a good job driving it. At the moment, the car's not running very good. We're just trying our best, and we've got a really good crew. It's just that Top Fuel's not easy."
 
It never gets any easier, and Sainty's schedule promises to keep him on the run. Rapisarda has said he plans to enter 12 races. After this event at Charlotte, Sainty is expected to compete at Atlanta, Topeka, Bristol, Norwalk, Brainerd, Indianapolis, Phoenix, and again at Las Vegas and Pomona.
 
Sainty plans to return to Sydney for the "Nitro Champs" at the end of April. He'll run his family's dragster, while Rapisarda will have two cars and drivers Mike Mariani and Alan Dobson. Then, Rapisarda said, "We'll return to do the rest of the NHRA events." Australia's premier drag-racing event is ANDRA's Winternationals, in June at Willowbank.
 
Now, if Terry Sainty just can remember what color his trailer is …

Following first day qualifying at the NHRA VisitMyrtleBeach.com Four-Wide Nationals, Sainty is on the outside of the sixteen-car field with a 6.187.

 

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