They got a favorable deal on the rent.

And there Brandon Welch and Tyson Porlas stood, looking at the half of a warehouse building that Welch called “just dirt and grease and grime . . . with a floor that was caked in probably a centimeter of grease . . . and just black everywhere.”

But the cousins from San Diego had some grease of their own – elbow grease – in renovating their part of the metal-recycling facility into a first-class shop for their new Top Fuel team. 

“We started by cleaning. We spent two weekends cleaning those floors, then we sealed those floors, and we framed in walls. And I had an electrician donate time, and we wired in air compressors and plumbed air and rebuilt a shop out of a – I don’t want to position our company as being in a dumpster, but we started in a former dumpster and made it a beautiful, clean, modern shop. We custom-painted the walls in our team colors, blue and orange. It is my dream shop right now,” Welch said.

Welch, who will switch from the Funny Car class to Top Fuel, said, “It was exactly like everything else we do. It was going to be a lot of work. But by putting in the extra work, we’d save a little bit of money. I just walked in and said, ‘We got the square footage and the price is right. We’ll do whatever it is we’ve got to do to make it work. In San Diego, it’s $2-plus a square foot to rent. If you want a 5,000-squre-foot shop, you’re talking 10-grand a month, so we had to get really creative to find shop space. And we did it. If you came to our shop, you’d never know it was in an old metal-recycling building. The floors are clean and polished and painted. The walls are clean. It looks great. But it started out terrible.”

Their plan to take delivery of their Kalitta Motorsports-built dragster didn’t go as planned, either. They arrived with their hauler at Pomona early last Saturday, hours before the crowds were to fill the pits during the Winternationals. They didn’t have to worry about spectators – the monsoon-like rain had kept them away. Welch, Porlas, and members of their crew were soaked. But they went home, drenched but delighted, with the two-year-old car that recently was front-halved.

Frankly, the foundation of their race team grew out of grief. Welch and Porlas are grandsons of the late Chuck Beal, a thoughtful, intelligent and generous man who was an accomplished 1980s Funny Car driver and before that had campaigned blown gas dragsters and Top Alcohol Funny Cars primarily on the West Coast. Together the cousins worked on Beal’s car for literally half of their lives, then Welch took over driving “The Bealmobile” in 2015, with Porlas still on the crew.

But with Beal’s passing in July 2017, the team was a bit rudderless. Rather than rush into any decision, they tricked out the trusty Monte Carlo body with a photo-tribute to their beloved grandfather and ran one more race, the 2018 Winternationals – an event at which Beal 35 years earlier had completed back-to-back victories. They had tuning help from Scott Graham, Pat Dakin’s Top Fuel crew chief.

“Our track record in Funny Car, we couldn’t seem to find the consistency that that we wanted to find,” Welch said. “The Winternationals was the perfect microcosm of the state of Funny Car competition lately. There were 15 full-time cars entered and 20 cars entered in the race totally. It was hard to qualify, hard to do well, against all these teams with more funding and more data and more, more, more.

“I got sick of going to the races and not being competitive. And I really wanted to be competitive. And to be competitive, you have to be consistent. You need funding, and to get the funding, you’ve got to be relevant to the fans. And to be relevant to the fans, you’ve got to be competitive. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. Consistency is a big piece of it,” he said. “Going from A to B more often than not is really attractive to me. Then you’ve got a chance to go rounds.”

Welch asked Graham what he thought about a move from Funny Car to Top Fuel, which certainly had quality but not always as much quantity as the Funny Car entry lists.

“If we build a Top Fuel car, we’d be running all these same motor parts. We own all this stuff. It’d just be a different set of pipe,” welch reasoned. He said, Graham’s “cars with Pat Dakin, rarely do they abort a run. Rarely does the car not go from the starting line to the finish line and run a 3.80-ish and qualify mid-pack. To have a chance at winning rounds, you’ve got to be somewhere mid-pack.”

Moreover, Welch said, “The way Scott runs that [Dakin] car is so impressive to me. Pat gives him a budget every year, and it’s far less than I would expect you can run 10 or 12 races with. And he has Scott that works on it fulltime for him, and he’s got one other guy who works in the shop with Scott. Scott has a mandate from Pat that we want it to be a high-3.70 or low-3.80 car and we want it to stay together. He’s just as capable of running a low 3.70. The idea that Scott has that kind of command over the tune-up for that car, that he can tailor that car to run exactly how he’s told to do, is really amazing to me. It’s pretty powerful.”

So he asked Graham, “What if we just build a car that’s a clone of Pat’s car and I’ll put all the parts on it that you would run on Pat’s car, with the six-disc clutch? It’ll be your clutch control and fuel control. It’ll be almost like you’re looking at the same car, but it just happens to be ours.’ Pat wants to race on the East Coast, 10-12 races a year, and we have all this availability out West.’ He said, ‘Sure. You build it and I’ll tune it.’ So that was the basis for the decision.”

It didn’t hurt that Welch could see Blake Alexander’s example when he drove a dragster last season for Bob Vandergriff Racing. “A part-time team can show up, and if you have the right parts and the right people, you can win races,” Welch said.

Still, one element was missing: Beal himself. And that helped drive Welch’s and Porlas’ decision to enter the Top Fuel category.

“I think there’s also some sort of emotional catharsis that’s happening,” Welch said. “It got really hard to walk into the shop and see that Funny Car. I would have flashes of Chuck’s voice in my head. I’d look over at the desk he would sit at, and it was like I’d see him in my mind’s eye. It was kind of painful for all of us to come into the shop. The Funny Car was the thing we did with Chuck and the thing I grew up with, him racing his Funny Car. The idea that my cousin Tyson and I now own a race-car team, we can start a new thing. For the crew, too, it’s a way to get out from under the cloud of grief that has hung over us and start something new that’s our thing. The whole crew has totally bought into that idea. So it really feels like a new day for us.”

He sold the 2009 Victory Funny Car chassis and equipment to Canadian Alcohol Funny Car racer Doug Hearsum, who was looking for a match-race nitro Funny Car.

“It really needed to go to a guy like that, who wasn’t trying to go Mello Yello drag racing and just wanted to have a car to take to match races, put on a good show, and have a good time,” Welch said. “We shipped it about as far away from San Diego as you could get, to [Lisle,] Ontario. He bought two bodies, and we had another body we sold. Ads we’re trying to sell some Funny Car headers and whatever else you can’t bolt from a Funny Car onto a dragster. For the most part, it’s all done.  

“We have state-of-the-art, great, great pipe now. It’s basically fresh. It’s got the latest Aerodine wings, and I’m buying as much as I can from Kalitta. The great part about that is they’re really supportive of the teams that spend money with them, naturally. And Scott generally gets his parts for Dakin’s car, if he’s not buying them new, from Kalitta. From what I understand, he shares a lot of information and they’ve got a brain trust there,” he said. “There are a couple of cars that would have been less expensive. But they were older; they were used. I would have had to find a way to front-half them. This gives us a fresh start with a car we can run for at least a few years and know it’s the absolute, latest best stuff. It’s a drastic change from where we’ve been. We’re starting with a car from Kalitta, great parts from Kalitta.”

And that’s when Welch’s sponsorship-development instincts kick in.

“What Scott brings in his approach to racing, with the supporters I’ve been able to build relationships with in the past, is a really, really exciting combination,” he said. “I’ve got to find a way to sell a sponsorship and deliver a ton of value to that sponsor so they stick around for many years. All of this is about building that value proposition. It’s a combination that I can sell, so I’m excited about that.

“The approach for us is perfect for me and my situation. What we’re trying to do is approach it the same way we approached Autoanything (his former Funny Car sponsor). I want to introduce sponsors to NHRA drag racing who maybe haven’t experienced it yet or haven’t even dabbled in sponsorship yet. Right now, I’m negotiating on a couple of sponsorships,” Welch said.

“The goal is to build the car, then license in the car. The time frame is a little unknown. My goal is to have a Top Fuel license by summer, which is feasible, then sell two to four races in the second half of the year. With the lead time we’re talking about, the conversations I’m having now are related to 2020 with the idea that we can put a couple races in 2019, test some ideas, test some activation ideas, introduce the sponsorships, and then really expand into 2020,” he said, insisting he wants to “hit 2020 running.”            

He already knows he and Porlas can transform a metal-recycling smelter into a sparkling race shop. Being able to “out-Scrappers” Mike Salinas and a field of champions including Antron Brown, Steve Torrence, Brittany Force, Clay Millican, and hopefully Tony Schumacher one day again, and compete equally against rising Top Fuel stars Leah Pritchett, Austin Prock, Cameron Ferre, Richie Crampton, Terry McMillen, and Scott Palmer is the next test.

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