Remember in grade school when you were assigned the traditional “what I did last summer” essay?

If IHRA Pro Stock racer Frank Gugliotta were presented with the same task, he’d fill the pages with details of working on the NHRA 500-inch scene as a crew chief for friend Justin Humphreys; a position which became available when previous tuner Bob Glidden retired.

Make no bones about it Gugliotta is having as much fun turning the wrenches  on an NHRA Pro Stock as he is driving on the IHRA circuit. And, what he is learning as a crew chief is being applied to his IHRA effort.

Never mind the fact Gugliotta’s IHRA engine displaces 300-inches more than Humphreys’ car, with each outing he gathers that much more information he can use in both types of racing.

“You’d be surprised,” Gugliotta said of the learning potential. “You’d think they would be two different animals, and they are, but they’re similar in a lot of ways. More ways than you’d probably think. The transmission is different; clutch combination is different but pretty much the basics are the same. But those things are exciting; a little 500-incher running 10,000 rpms. They’re pretty hateful.”

Traditionally the NHRA cars pull harder in the first half of the track while the IHRA entries generally make their largest gains on the top end.

“The NHRA cars are really fast in 60 foot, but that’s all done with gear,” Gugliotta explained. “You’ve got to be real careful with these cars because you can’t put gear to something that’s got 1300 lbs. of torque. Those things aren’t as fast at the back end. Whereas you put one of these in high gear and they’re eating up a lot of track real quick.”

Gugliotta currently leads the IHRA points and while he’s aware in the early years of the IHRA, the mountain motor drivers were looked down upon, the atmosphere has changed greatly.

“I was actually shocked hanging out there with a lot of those guys,” Gugliotta said. “They’d come over and ask me about what happened last week. They’d actually keep track of it. A lot of those guys you would be surprised. They’re very interested in Mountain Motor Pro Stock.”