If Antron Brown and his Matco Tools team weren’t proficient at playing musical chairs before they are now. 

When crew chief Brian Corradi left the team to pursue a tuning gig with Courtney Force, it sent the team into a reorganization of sorts. 

“That was definitely a blow to our team because you lose such a crucial element but that was only part of the chain reaction that happened,” Brown explained. “What happened is that Brian left and we had to fill that void. So you take our Car Chief who puts our cars together for the last eight years, which was Brad Mason, who’s our Assistant Crew Chief, he moves up to the Crew Chief position.  Well he moves up, he’s no longer the Car Chief. 

“We took Kyle who was our cylinder head guy for the last five years who was a great mechanic, move him into Brad’s position which is a very hard position, which he’s the Car Chief. Now he’s got to be able to dissect and fix everything on the car from all the management system and everything else, so he had to come up to speed with that. 

“Then you take Matt Sackman who’s our clutch assistant and move him to doing cylinder heads.”

Losing Corradi was akin to a 1940s small rural town losing the community doctor. 

“Brian being gone, losing him, what you lose is anybody can sit at a computer and type in a tune up, but when you have these great tuners, and I don’t even call them tuners, what I call them, they’re doctors and what I mean by doctors is that when you have all the years in like Brian and Mark Oswald has in, or like somebody like a Mike Neff or Jimmy Prock and Rahn Tobler, those guys are able to diagnose problems and fix them from one round to the next,” Brown said. “Where other people come in, they can put the tune up numbers in and they can’t fix the problem, and it takes them five races to fix, you get what I’m saying? 

“That’s the difference with somebody that’s on that…Brian Corradi. Look what he’s done with Courtney Force’s car this year. The car was already running good but he’s able to diagnose problems and help fix it from round to round and keep it together and make it consistent, and that’s what you did. And that’s the track that we’re back on now, and that’s what made our Top Fuel car so good. We went down the track 90 percent of the time. And now if you look at our car at the last race, we went down every run except for one run last race. Every round. We didn’t smoke the tires three times in qualifying, we didn’t do this. And now we’re back on that path and we know how to do it. It was just getting our team in sync again and back to that position that we’re used to doing. 

Brown lamented the fact the Matco Tools team didn’t have a strong finish to the 2017 NHRA Countdown to the championship albeit finishing fourth best in the division with nine round wins and three semi-final finishes. 

“That’s why we didn’t win the championship,” Brown explained.  “We still won 53 rounds last year and the only one that out round raced us last year was Steve Torrence who won 55 and only Leah [Pritchett] won in the 40’s, 

“Our team had a great year last year, we just didn’t show up in the Countdown the way we wanted to for the last six races. So we had to fix all those issues that we had last year and losing Brian  just compounded on us. It compounded on us and then we had some other parts failures and issues at the beginning of this year too with our race car.”

Brown started the 2018 season with the reshuffled crew and together they scored three semi-final finishes in the first four races.  

“We were fighting all these issues that caught up with us where we were trying to problem solve and we weren’t racing,” Brown said. “And now we switched our whole car combination around because we implemented four new clutch discs in our car. Not one, not two, not three, but four. So it changed our whole combination around where we start with that right before we raced Chicago. Chicago was our first key with that and we’ve been building on it, and now we’ve got all of our parts issues fixed, we got our race car right, and now we’re starting to see the benefits of it where we’re starting to get back into the groove that we used to be in, where we’re able to go down the track every run and we’re picking at it to make it better and better. 

Brown reached the semi-finals two weekends ago at the NHRA Virginia Nationals outside of Richmond, a definite get well weekend for the week which suffered through five consecutive first round loss weekends. 

“We could have put it in the winner’s circle but the driver didn’t show up,” Brown said. . “So now hopefully this race here we can get everything in line and make it happen here in Bristol and it will be the perfect race to get it to happen because this is a race that we’ve been wanting to win so bad. But I learned from the last race that we’re just going to be like Ray Charles and let it do what it do and just relax and go out and have fun and not put no pressure on, but just race how we’ve always raced the previous years.” 

"I’m happy for the countdown this year, they ain’t going to hear me complaining about it. I’m going to love it this year. With that being said is that we’re growing and what I see and what I’ve been feeling on the inside we’ve grown a great deal since Pomona this year and we’re only getting better. And I think we’re going to be better and stronger than what we ever was."