MILLICAN'S SUCCESS REMAINS IMPRESSIVE FEAT

by Thomas Pope    Tue, 2019-08-27 16:37

Steve Torrence’s absolute dominance in the 2018 NHRA Countdown to the Championship -- a six-for-six victory streak -- will always ranks as one of drag racing’s mind-boggling feats.

It’s no surprise that the Texan has kept up a torrid pace in 2019 and leads the standings by a significant margin heading into the U.S. Nationals, the final race of the regular season. 

But what is jaw-dropping in the Top Fuel ranks is Clay Millican’s performance. With Indy on deck and the half-dozen Countdown events after that, the Straightline Strategy Group-owned team is fourth in the standings and a scant seven points out of sole possession of second. The SSG operation is poised to make a run at unseating Torrence, at least in Millican’s opinion.

So why’s that a big deal? After all, in 2018, Millican set the NHRA elapsed-time record of 3.628 seconds, won two events and finished a career-best third in the points. He and his dragster are not a combo to overlook.

But consider the massive upheaval within the operation at the end of that season. The strides that Millican, crew chief Mike Kloeber, Jim Oberhofer, et al, have made thus far, including five final-round appearances, is perhaps the surprise story of the season in Top Fuel.

Millican and a teammate who handled hospitality were all that remained of the team after the 2018 campaign concluded at Pomona. Millican knew that Kloeber would be coming aboard -- a reunion that Millican had pitched for years to various team owners -- but that was the extent of the roster.

Factor in, too, that with a population of less than 3,000, the team home base of McLeansboro, Ill., located about 110 miles east of St. Louis, isn’t the center of the nitro-racing universe. It’s a town so remote that the area only got 9-1-1 emergency service within the past six months, Millican said. 

That locale ratcheted up the difficulty in assembling a team in time for the 2019 tour.

“It was a very, very crazy, hectic offseason,” said Millican, who won the IHRA Top Fuel titles with Kloeber from 2001-06. “We were essentially starting from scratch, 100 percent all-new people. We had no choice but to dig in. It was like completely starting over except that the trucks and trailers were there.

“It was just very, very chaotic trying to get all the people. … We’re not located in Brownsburg, Indiana, like everybody else that does this. Our race shop, which we call ‘The Nitro Barn,’ is literally in (team owner) Doug Stringer’s backyard.”

 

 

 

 

So Millican and his wife, Donna, left their home in Drummonds, Tenn., and literally set up shop in McLeansboro to get things ready for 2019. 

“We cleaned trailers, unloaded everything and reloaded. We knew we weren’t going to have him all the time, but we were able to get (former Funny Car racer) Jack Wyatt, also an IHRA guy, to come help us out. That was very, very helpful. Jack’s a veteran that can take a mess and straighten it all out, and that’s what we did.

“We just had to keep working until we could find people that wanted to come out and race Top Fuel and move to McLeansboro, Illinois. It was crazy, it really, really was.”

Since Millican didn’t know the extent of the parts inventory inside the team’s hauler, he and his wife “pretty much just dumped it all out on the floor” and took stock of the situation. All the pieces such as the car, engines and a supply of spare parts were essentially in place, but the team didn’t have any crew to prepare the car for preseason testing or the season opener.

Longtime Kalitta Motorsports stalwart Jim Oberhofer agreed to assist the team in preparing for the 24-race, coast-to-coast challenge.

“Those guys had to essentially take everything that was put together and take it apart so that they could put it together the way that they needed. Every crew chief does everything different,” Millican said.

“Testing was challenging, to say the least. It didn’t go well, just trying to get people where they needed to be, moving this guy to this position and that guy to that position. Then we kind of got lucky right at testing when we were able to get two guys that had left John Force’s and that made a big difference. They’re both young guys, but they’re really, really talented. We got through testing thanks to those guys coming over.

“Mike was still trying to catch up with the electronics that are available on the car now versus the last time he tuned one of these things (2014). The only thing that was dead, solid comfortable for me was Mike rolling me up into the beams. I knew then, ‘Hey, this is gonna be OK.’ All we had to do was get our gameplan going and get people in the right spots.”

Clearly, there was no transition in Millican and Kloeber getting acquainted on a personal level. Their Werner Enterprises-sponsor dragster annihilated the Top Fuel competition in IHRA. In addition to the six consecutive titles, they set the IHRA quarter-mile record at 4.48 seconds, broke the speed record, and won 51 national events. At one point, Millican won 10 races in a row, and he won all 11 final rounds in which he appeared in 2002.

The nitro marriage was broken at the end of the 2006 season when then-team owner Evan Knoll fired Kloeber. Millican had hoped to reconnect with Kloeber ever since and finally got the chance about this time a year ago when the entire 2018 crew announced it would be leaving at the end of the season.

 

 

 

“Me and Mike had never got sideways at all,” Millican said. “We continued to talk regularly and he’s definitely a dear friend; one of my best buddies. It just took the right set of circumstances to get him to come back.”

In preseason testing near Phoenix and in the season opener at Pomona, Millican said that given all the offseason restructuring, he was proud for simple accomplishments such as “that we got the car to start and go down the racetrack. I shouldn’t even say that about going down the racetrack. We were still happy when the thing started and worked correctly and we did qualify” at Pomona.

Millican got beat in the opening round at Pomona and again in the season’s second event, which was at Phoenix. 

But less than a month later, the pieces of the puzzle finally fit, and Millican went to the Gatornationals final against Richie Crampton, whose edge out of the gate gave him a holeshot win at the finish line, 3.76 seconds to Millican’s 3.75.

Millican has since been to finals at Las Vegas, Charlotte, Denver and Sonoma, all without a win. But racking up all the round victories to get to the final pair five times has allowed what is, in essence, a first-year team to be among the contenders at each event.

They’ve accomplished this with a much smaller budget than the other title challengers.

“The biggest thing we have to do is just take care of our equipment,” Millican said. “We’re not a highly funded team, we’re a very small team, so we probably spend a lot more time rubbing and loving on our parts than some of the other teams because we’ve only got X amount of stuff

And we’ve got to make sure it works. Mike’s got to make sure the tune-up’s good, and the driver will absolutely shut it off if it don’t feel right.”

 

 

 

To be able to run the full schedule, the team buys used engine blocks and cylinder heads from the Kalitta, Torrence and Mike Salinas teams. Millican’s team, he noted, does stock its own fresh array of pistons, connecting rods and crankshafts.

Pinching pennies is a way of life for Millican’s team. After reaching the finals at Denver and Sonoma on back-to-back Sundays, he lost in the second round at Seattle when his parachute deployed as soon as he launched.

“In between rounds, we broke a parachute mount, and you have so little time between rounds,” Millican said. “I’m the one that changed the mount, and I’m the one that packed the parachute. We are actually changing the entire mounting system on the car for the rest of the year because  there’s a better way to do it than how we’re doing it.

“Again, it goes back to budget. The parts that we need to do that cost you a thousand bucks, and we’ve never had them before and didn’t think we needed them -- but obviously we do.”

The success to this point has led Millican to believe his team can give Torrence, Salinas, and the Force, Schumacher and Kalitta teams are run for the title by season’s end.

“I think we’ve got a real, legitimate shot at it,” he said. “There’s no reason why we can’t go out there and reel off multiple wins in a row and give ourselves a shot at winning that championship.

“It’s pretty obvious the competition’s going to be pretty stout. Steve Torrence is out there on his own, but when the points reset after Indy, it all changes and comes back. … I like our chances. I’ll take these runner-ups right now, but let’s just turn them into wins during the Countdown.”

 

 

 
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