This season, Leah Pritchett is having a wonderful year in her Don Schumacher Racing Papa John’s Pizza/Mopar Top Fuel dragster.

Pritchett left the Mile-High Nationals third in the season point standings, thanks to qualifying No. 1 with a track-record time of 3.733 seconds, and claiming a runner-up finish to her teammate Antron Brown.

Part of what has made Pritchett so good this season – she has three wins this season at Pomona, Calif., Phoenix and Houston – is her focus.

For example, on July 21 during a lengthy rain delay at Bandimere Speedway she never strayed from the task at hand.
“When you get into the staging lanes, you put on your helmet, each driver has their own way of blocking everything out, getting in tune with their race car and thinking about what they’re going to do on the run,” Pritchett said. 

“Particularly, in this instance, I get to be in that state of mind for a longer period of time which is my favorite state of mind. We just front-halved our car after Chicago to get it more like how it was at the beginning of the year because we made some changes. So, I get to focus on, alright, that’s my No. 1 priority, is this first hit right here and to report back to Todd (Okuhara) on what I think and what I feel. It’s cool, I get to be in my zone for a longer period of time.”

Pritchett acknowledged her rise to stardom has caught her off guard a little bit.

“It has been, I would say a surprise because you can’t really prepare for something like that personally but mostly I’m not surprised because of the amount of work that everyone has put into that,” she said. “The performance on the track, I am not surprised (about) because I see how Todd works. I’ve been with a lot of crew chiefs in my time and I am just so in awe of him. How he runs this team, the leader that he is, how much of a plate load he has with his other requirements and job duties at DSR. He’s actually my inspiration for doing anything and everything I can to keep this going. Propelling not only our team but propelling the NHRA as much as we can. I think if we all have that state of mind of growing the sport, and I think we do, we just all need to try to do it all together.”

Fans in NHRA circles are familiar with Pritchett, but recently she became more a part of the mainstream media as she’s appearing on national commercials for Papa John’s Pizza.
 
“I’ve eaten quite a bit because I like it!” Pritchett said. “I guess that’s good and bad because I’d eat it every day. We started designing the pizza box at the beginning of this season and we knew it would come out in this particular month (July) and that’s why the TV spot comes out in this particular month (July). The Double XL Pizza, everything that’s on it is deli-style, everything is large. Which is a representation of our program, go big or go home, and Papa John’s went big with DSR. We didn’t go home, we didn’t dabble a little bit, we went big. We go big when we go on the track so we translated that into pizza, you go big or you go home.”

Having Papa John’s Pizza as a full-time sponsor has been a joy for Pritchett.

“It’s been a dream come true,” Pritchett said. “The most amazing thing is the passion for being at the track and his (John Schnatter, Papa John) love for being one with the team. The relationship that he and Don have is awesome. He loves it and that’s what it takes. It takes a founder, someone’s initiative that has passion that matches ours and that’s what you see. It’s like a passion that is personified into a tangible thing, this is what is seen by everybody.”
Up next for Pritchett and her DSR team is the Toyota NHRA Sonoma (Calif.) Nationals July 28-30.