HARTMAN NAILS THE QUICKEST AND FASTEST AA/FA RUN

by Bobby Bennett, Photo by Dave Kommel    Sat, 2021-03-27 21:58

 

 

It's been a while since Richard Hartman has been behind the wheel of a nitro-burning vehicle at the Texas Motorplex. But Friday afternoon, Hartman, the former Funny Car racer who now tunes for Tim Wilkerson, thundered his way to the quickest and fast run in Fuel Altered history during first-day qualifying at the Funny Car Chaos event.

Hartman recorded the mark as he ran a 4.920 elapsed time at 296.28 miles per hour in a roadster with a chassis which Wilkerson once drove to an NHRA Series championship runner-up. He returned on Saturday and finished his milestone pursuit with a 304.53 mile per hour blast. 

"I get to play this weekend," Hartman said with a smile. "Tim called me up a couple of weeks ago and said, 'How'd you like to run the Fuel Altered at this deal?"

"I said, 'Sure, let's bring it down. Do you want to drive it?"

"He said, 'No, I want you to drive it."

"In case I screw up, he'll hop in and drive it."

That was the case before the run, and likely Wilkerson has zero chance of getting to drive the car. Not because Wilkerson cannot pull rank, but because Hartman has a handle on his first real fast ride since 2007.

"It's pretty incredible," Hartman said. "It's the quickest I have ever been, period. It was fast. I shut off a tick early - two tenths into the run, a piece of foam came off the valve cover, and I just shut off the car."

One would assume the pucker factor would have been high for Hartman.

"It was a really uneventful run," Hartman admitted. "The thing left and about 200 feet moved to the centerline, and I was able to bring it back. It bobbled the front end at the eighth-mile, but it all smoothed out. I'm surprised it all came back to me in a hurry."

Hartman's run obliterated the previous mark held by Tom Motry's Fuel Altered at 5.28 seconds and 286 miles per hour.

While it might seem like Wilkerson's Fuel Altered is nothing more than a scantily clad Funny Car, the reality is - it is.

"It's no different than back in the day when they switched back and forth from a Funny Car to a Fuel Altered," Hartman said. "We've dedicated this car to just be a Fuel Altered, but it was one of Tim's Funny Cars. Actually, he finished second in the world with it one year. So he provided the car and I built it at my shop. I built the body on it, made it into the Fuel Altered and all that. He loved it so much, he ended up taking it, and now it stays at his place."

Making the switch is not as simple as taking off a body and turning a few switches.

"It's an older combination of his from his program, likely early 2000s," Hartman said. "It's nothing like running the parts that we run today; it's quite a bit different. You have got to think a little bit differently about it. We didn't make it really user-friendly. We didn't make it to go rounds, so when we first come back to the pit, you don't just take the body off. You have to take the wings off, you have to take the body panels off slowly, and then it's business as usual.

"It's just like working on a Funny Car. If we had to, we could always put it into service as a funny car, but it's a bad-ass Fuel Altered, so we're going to keep it that way."

And just to think, this car had never fully gone to the quarter-mile under power.

"Our goal was to run the first Fuel Altered four-second run at over 300 miles an hour," Hartman explained. "We have knocked out half of that on Friday and then sealed the deal on Saturday. It's a bit overwhelming of an experience."

 

 

 
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