After three years away from drag racing, world championship crew chief Tommy DeLago came back to the NHRA ranks.

In January, DeLago joined Davis Motorsports/Justin Ashley Racing to work alongside fellow world championship crew chief Mike Green.

And DeLago is thrilled how things have gone so far. Ashley is fourth in the season points standings through seven races. He won the season-opening Winternationals (Feb. 20 in Pomona, Calif.) and was runner-up in Houston (April 24).

“It has been sort of amazing,” DeLago said about his time so far with his new team. You know, obviously, Mike and I have a history. He pointed me in a direction of what he wanted me to work on to be able to help the team, help the guys, and help performance. And we've been able to achieve some of that fairly fast. Obviously, we still have some growing pains.

“Now we have been able to make things 60 foot better, ET a little bit better. And, but now when you build them and build something that starts to be a little bit of a monster, you have to learn how to – like lion taming. You almost have to learn how to tame it when the conditions get warmer. And that's what we're getting into now for the meat of the season. So, we still have a little way to go to tame it when the tracks get pretty slippery, but I'm sure that we'll get it.”

DeLago also praised owner Davis.

“It's working for Dustin Davis,” he said. “Just, it's purely amazing how he lets people – he doesn't micromanage, and he lets everybody – he hires everybody to do their job, lets you do your job without walking on your shoulders all the time.

“All the crew guys that are on this team, nobody has an ego. Everybody's working towards one common goal. It's just, like I said, every facet of this team has been a joy to work with. It's been, obviously, my time off has helped me kind of get my myself centered again. This team is just like, it's almost meant to be.”

Prior to 2022, the last time DeLago was on the NHRA scene was when he was tuning Cruz Pedregron’s nitro Funny Car for the final eight races of the 2018 season.

Before that DeLago worked on Shawn Langdon’s Funny Car with Kalitta Motorsports the first part of 2018.

The highlight of DeLago’s career – so far – came when he was the crew chief for Matt Hagan at Don Schumacher Racing when he won the 2011 NHRA nitro Funny Car world title. DeLago also tuned nitro Funny Car driver Alexis DeJoria to the 2014 U.S. Nationals win.

“I think it was the camaraderie that was actually the most surprising and enjoyable thing,” DeLago said about the coolest thing for him when he returned to the dragstrip. “The amount of crew chiefs and crew guys and owners and just marketing PR people. Just everybody as a whole welcomed me back and basically told me how it was good to see me back out doing what I should be doing.

“That camaraderie really instantly made me realize I made a good decision to come back with this team. It just cemented it even deeper that ‘What was I thinking that I was going to retire?’ Now that I've had a three-year break after 26 years, I'm ready to go another 20-something years.”

As strong as his team has looked through the first seven races, DeLago isn’t making any bold predictions for the remainder of the season.

“It's hard for anybody to win a championship, the competition is so tough,” DeLago said. “You have got several cars running at the top right now and you got some cars that are working their way to the top that will be to the top by the end of the year, I bet.

I am a big believer in being focused, working hard towards a common goal with everybody together. And we have one advantage that I think there's only a couple teams out there that have the same advantage as us, is we have Justin Ashley, who I think is a top two, top three driver, if not the best driver or the driver that has the most potential.”

DeLago knows with Ashley in the driver’s seat it raises expectations.

“That's another part of pressure is just knowing that the pressure is really all on the team,” DeLago said. “You know, mostly on the team and crew chiefs to perform because we pretty much have a driver who's there at the top of the reaction times and who keeps it in the grove 95% of the time.”

“You know, so that's what makes it – that's what makes you want to even pull it off even more. That's what makes you work harder, is there's a certain group of us that I guess are just used to being underdogs most of our lives. No matter what facet of our lives it is. Even in normal life, being an underdog either makes you quit or it makes you strive to be better.”

DeLago and Green worked together on Darrell Gwynn’s New York Yankees-sponsored Top Fuel dragster driven by Andrew Cowin and other cars as well through the years.

“Mike and I have worked together on cars before, and we worked alongside each other on different cars at Schumacher's,” DeLago said. “Obviously there's a little gelling period. I think him and I are getting better at communicating with each other every week because obviously there's a little bit of a learning curve. I'm a No. 2 guy and Mike's the No. 1 guy. I was the No. 1 guy for, I don't know what it was – quite a while. So, that's a little different dynamic and there's some nuances when your No. 1 crew chief's got all the pressure on his shoulders, it's really critical to learn when to state your opinions and when not to. It's just a little bit different dynamic and it's a learning curve, which I think is going brilliantly. Every week we're getting better at communicating with each other to make the car better, to make the team better.” DeLago acknowledged Green’s demeanor makes it easier for people to get along with him.

“Obviously I think anybody can work with Mike Green because he's pretty easy going,” DeLago said. “He's smart. He takes a pretty methodical approach but is open minded enough to have somebody like me that probably 80% of the time he and I agree on exactly what we're doing, but there's 20% of the time where I'm outside the box and like, ‘Hey, we've already tried that a couple times. I don't know that we've seen the results that we want to see. Why don't we take a run and try it this way to attack it from a different angle to achieve this, per se.’

“He's very open minded to do that. He doesn't do it every run. We'll talk about it. And then, you know, he's the main guy he decides on what run we should go ahead and try that. And he always does. It may not be that race. It may not be that run, but once I tell him something and I'm pretty adamant that I think this what's going on, he will pretty much put it down in his brain. And at some point, in time, he'll be like, all right, let's try that. I'm like, all right, cool. So, to me, that's just respect. When you work with somebody who respects you, it just makes it more enjoyable and makes you want to keep working for that person. Keep coming up with ideas, keep trying to troubleshoot, try to do everything we can do to keep the cars close to the top as we can.”