While many racers and their teams enjoyed some fun family times in the Southeast between the Charlotte and Atlanta races, Brittany Force’s Monster Energy Dragster team was hard at work back at the Brownsburg, Ind., shop, making chassis updates.

“They headed back to Indianapolis [from Charlotte] Monday morning to front-half the car and then [had to] get it over [to Atlanta] for the weekend. It’s a lot of work. I always appreciate my team and everything they do,” Force said. 

Force qualified No. 16 at the recently completed Lucas Oil NHRA Southern Nationals and lost in the first round. 

The Monster Energy Dragster already has undergone changes during the early part of the 2017 Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season. She raced to the final round in the second race, at Phoenix, but they had to incorporate a safety change after that event. The NHRA mandated Top Fuel cars have an extra crossmember to the bay area just beyond the foot box.

That new mandate, NHRA Vice President of Technical Operations Glen Gray said, came from data that Kalitta Motorsports has gathered from research conducted since Larry Dixon’s Top Fuel accident at Gainesville and presented to the SFI Chassis Committee.

And its timing is partly in response to the decision by three top-running dragster teams to approach the NHRA Tech Department with concerns. They were troubled that the top rails on the 300-inch-wheelbase cars were bowing at top speeds. Gray said the Kalitta-driven research indeed “showed some loads that higher than they needed to be.”

Those changes didn’t work out as the Force team planned, so JFR opted for more effective updates. And Norm Boutot, the JFR fab shop manager, planned these newest changes with consideration for 2018 spec changes he expects the SFI and NHRA to hand down.    

Boutot told John Kernan, of NHRA and FOX Sports, that they made the chassis too stiff when they front-halved Brittany Force’s car after the Phoenix race in February.

“We went overboard, as far as thickness of the frame-rail tubing,” Boutot said. “And in light of what’s coming up for next year, as far as rules, go, we now have an idea of where the ‘safe zone’ is, with the changes the NHRA and SFI have come up with. And with that, we have decided to build our car so it will be a safe spec for next year, as well as legal. And we’re going to go ahead and do that instead of waiting until next year,” Boutot said. “We were a little worried when we stepped up our tubing that we might see what we’ve seen . . . and that is we’ve lost some of our flexibility.”

Boutot is one of the voting members on the SFI Chassis Committee, as are Aaron Brooks (who heads the Morgan Lucas Racing chassis-building program, Joe Fitzpatrick from Don Schumacher Racing, Murf McKinney, and others.  

Gray said that group is “working on a new specification for 2018 that goes a little bit beyond just adding that bar [the crossmember]. We’re 99.9 percent sure of what the spec is going to be for next year, but it isn’t completely finalized yet. So Norm is building a car, assuming that’s what it’s going to be. And that’s very good assumption to make.

“As soon as the [2018] spec is completely finalized,” Gray said, “we’re going to let all the teams know” so they get a head start on any changes they need to make. The 2018 specs, he predicted, won’t cause major budget woes: “There are some cars out here already that meet the new spec and won’t have to do anything [because] they front-half the cars frequently.” Gray lauded the process, saying, “You have the best minds, the people who re actually building the cars, and you have real data.”