Photos by Ron Lewis, Mike Burghardt, NHRA
FINAL NOTEBOOK – LEE EARNS FIRST NHRA FUNNY CAR TROPHY; CAPPS WRECK IS TESTIMONY TO STRONG SAFETY EQUIPMENT; ANDERSON SOMEHOW WINS GOOFY PRO STOCK FINAL
1 – PAUL LEE FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH – Paul Lee has a lot of achievements in life. He owns successful automotive aftermarket companies. He is an expert poker player. He has earned a law degree – one of three college degrees, to be exact. He won several alcohol Funny Car races. He even survived a widowmaker heart attack several years ago. So, no one could say he has been unfortunate.
But he never won an NHRA Funny Car Wally trophy – until Sunday at the Arizona Nationals at Firebird Motorsports Park in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler.
He joined Greg Anderson (Pro Stock) and Shawn Langdon (Top Fuel) on the winners podium.
Lee’s first triumph, at the expense of reigning class champion Austin Prock, was a tremendously sentimental one, for it came 18 years to the day after Eric Medlen’s passing. Eric Medlen’s father, John Medlen, is Lee’s co-crew chief along with tuner/builder/racer Jonnie Lindberg.
“I had a feeling about today,” Lee said as he received his trophy. “We prayed about it today. John Medlen says the team prayer every Sunday, and he asked Eric to watch over us. There was just a calm in our pit. We’re blessed. Today was surreal. This trophy is going straight to John Medlen. He’s the strongest man I know. He’s a blessed man, and he has blessed us with his presence on our team.”
Moments after watching Lee clinch the victory, John Medlen said of his son, “I think he pushed that car right into the winners circle.”
Lee also credited Lindberg, a Top Alcohol Funny Car champion turned Funny Car racer turned crew chief. Lee likened him to drag-racing legend Don Garlits for his analytical thinking, driving skill, and leadership.
Curiously, Lee’s only final rounds in Funny Car competition have come in the past eight months, including at Seattle last July and at Las Vegas in November 2024. In all three, Lee has had to face Prock. On Sunday, he denied Prock the chance to record the 300th victory for John Force Racing (JFR).
Prock had a lot of emotion attached to this final round, as well. Prock grew up around the beloved Eric Medlen and looked up to him when Medlen competed at JFR with John Medlen tuning the car. Moreover, the JFR group still is dealing with the grief of losing longtime, but retired, crew chief Bernie Fedderly last week. Along with John Force’s performance guru Austin Coil, Fedderly and John Medlen formed the trio who helped orchestrate the Funny Car legend’s glory years.
In one of the Funny Car semifinals, Prock raced against teammate Jack Beckman. And even after Prock eliminated him, Beckman said, “We’re racing in memory of Bernie Fedderly. There’s a lot on the line (in the final round) against Lee. That 300th is up there. If NHRA would let me push on (Prock’s) car (to help him down the dragstrip), I would.”
One more curious connection to this story involves Chad Green. Two weekends ago, in the season’s only other event to date, Green defeated Lee in the first round. The two found themselves paired once again in the opening round at Phoenix. Green won that Gainesville battle and went on to earn his first Funny Car victory. This time, Lee won their match and went on to win the first of his career, as well.
2 – CAPPS HAS FLASHBACK TO FORCE CRASH – Ominous optics aside, Ron Capps’ spectacular engine explosion and crash into the opposite-lane wall during Sunday’s first round of Funny Car eliminations of the NHRA’s Arizona Nationals had an eerie element to it.
The motor in the NAPA Toyota Supra detonated, shattering the body and spewing shrapnel in all directions. The three-time series champion careened across the track and slapped the wall in the opposite lane. It came on the 18th anniversary of John Force Racing Funny Car driver Eric Medlen’s death at Gainesville, Florida, which led to safety improvements that Capps said helped save him Sunday, nearly two decades later and thousands of miles away at Chandler, Arizona.
The wreck also came nine months to the day after John Force’s vicious wall-banger at the Virginia Nationals, near Richmond, that still has the 16-time champion and 157-time winner sidelined with the lingering effects of a traumatic brain injury.
Capps had just clocked a 230.61-mph speed by the 660-foot mark on the 1,000-foot course when the chassis, as Capps put it, became “a convertible.” The ferocity of the blast split the body in two behind the supercharger. The car, listing to the right, spun around and sideswiped the wall.
He was uninjured, despite the equivalent of a blowtorch blasting by his face, and opponent Blake Alexander was not involved. But it triggered a flashback for Capps to last June 23 at Richmond, where Force’s catastrophe unfolded in front of him.
“I’m just, I’m living Force’s accident, right?” Capps recounted. “I know it’s coming. I had no control. Moving pretty fast, and I know it’s going to be bad. And sometimes when it’s coming, it’s going to be bad – and other times you feel like you’re in control.
“But I just kept picturing John’s accident that was right in front of us in Richmond. So I just hung on, and just tried to brace myself. And when it hit, I honestly didn’t expect to be awake afterwards, it was going that fast – and then I was still awake.”
That, Capps said, was because of the safety upgrades that resulted from extensive and collaborative research by a collection of companies following Medlen’s testing crash that claimed his life several days later in 2007, along with a pair of devastating wrecks for Force (one at Dallas six months after Medlen’s incident, the other last June).
Capps expressed gratitude for “padding, all the stuff that Eric Medlen’s and Force’s accidents and all those things over the years have thankfully been fixed and upgraded so that I could be OK right now. I feel fine,” Capps said. “No issues at all. You want to thank chassis builders and Toyota and the bodies and all the work that we do.”
Nevertheless, Capps said he wasn’t eager to watch the video of his incident: “Man, I am sure I’m not going to want to watch it. It was just ‘hang on’ and ‘this is going to be bad.’”
He said one of his first thoughts was “to get out as quick as I can and wave the camera” to signal to parents John and Betty Capps, who were following the action from home at San Luis Obispo, California, and wife Shelley and children Taylor and Caden, who were on hand at the racetrack, that he was unhurt.
The misfortune ruined a weekend in which Capps broke his 28-race winless streak with Saturday’s victory in the $10,000-to-win Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty bonus race. He will head into next week’s Winternationals at Pomona, California, with a 29-race national-event winless streak, seeking his first victory since the September 2023 U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis.
Capps said, “I don’t know if I just didn’t catch it at the time, just didn’t expect to smoke (the tires), and then didn’t see Blake. But then it’s just blurry. It bangs so quick, so violent, and then it was a convertible again. But I had fire in my face when it did it. It just started going left.”
The cause of the explosion wasn’t immediately known.
One thing was, though.
“I’m bummed we lost, and I’m really bummed (about the expense to repair it),” he said.
Capps even joked, “Anybody want to throw some money as a partner? Want to come in? That’s the second new car. And I feel so bad for Guido and the guys (tuner Dean Antonelli and the crew). It’s a lot of money. Thank God we got NAPA Auto Care and Toyota to help us, but we’re a single-car team, and we’re just doing our best out here. So we’ll be OK. We’ve got a week (until the season’s third race, at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip), and I’ve got the best guys in the world. So the NAPA Boys will get it fixed. We can fix the car.”
3 – ANDERSON WINS UGLY PRO STOCK FINAL – Drag racing has no start-finish line. It has a starting line, and it has a finish line. For the Pro Stock class, those two lines are a quarter-mile apart. But Sunday evening in the Pro Stock final, the starting line pretty much was the finish line. That sounds strange, but it’s completely fitting.
It was as though neither Pro Stock driver wanted to win the final round, but both wanted nothing more than to triumph in this rematch of the season-opening Gatornationals. And even when Anderson was declared the winner, he said he had no idea what he had done or why he won or what Glenn, who beat him at Gainesville two weeks ago, had done. Anderson is 64 years old and constantly wisecracks about being a graybeard. Glenn, too, fondly gets in his digs to his mentor. But Anderson was not going crazy Sunday. The final round was the weirdest even the experts have seen in the sport’s history.
Both Anderson and Glenn committed foul starts, and both cars lost power immediately.
Anderson saw his win light come on, and he said later that he didn’t know how he could red light – and have his car quit on him, to boot – and still win. He said he knew he had red-lit at the Christmas Tree – jumped the gun – but didn’t have any idea what Glenn, his KB Titan Racing teammate, was doing. So he figured he needed to try to get his HendrickCars.com Chevy Camaro to hook up again and was supremely frustrated he couldn’t do that. “I had no chance of winning that race,” he said, but little did he know he already had won it. Glenn, too, was frustrated for his own reasons.
“We both blew it,” Anderson declared. “We wanted to put on a good show, and that wasn’t much of a show. They say there’s no such thing as an ugly win. Well, that was an ugly win. But a win is a win is a win. We’ll forget about the details of it. The Great Lord shined on me today.”
Only two of the scheduled 20 races are in the books so far, but Anderson’s dubious victory put him seven points ahead of Glenn in the early standings.
4 – STAVRINOS DOUBLES IN PRO MOD – Mike Stavrinos hauled his race car across the country, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But it was worth the trouble, for he ended the weekend as winner of not only the Arizona Nationals but the first two events of the Congruity Pro Mod Series season. On Saturday, he claimed the victory in the rain-postponed Gatornationals. He defeated veteran Rickie Smith both times.
5 – LOTS OF DISAPPOINTED, SELF-CRITICAL DRIVERS – In Top Fuel, Shawn Reed called his weekend “disappointing” and said, “It’s like a déjà vu of last year so far. I think this team is a lot better than what we’ve shown these past two weekends. Me as a driver, I feel like I’ve taken a step back again. I don’t know why or how to get my brain back into it. We’ve got to make it down the track to get the data. I need to get better and get my head straight. I’m looking at the Tree, and I can see people in the stands moving. And it’s crazy, subconsciously, what that does. At least we don’t have to wait long to do it again.”
Like Reed, Ida Zettertröm dropped out Sunday in the first round of Top Fuel, and she said, “It’s hard to lose again. I feel like I’ve gotten good at losing, and I don’t like it. But at the same time, I feel like we made really good progress. We had great turnarounds. We made good runs with the car and good data. So, I feel very good moving into Pomona because this was the kind of progress we wanted to see in Gainesville but couldn’t find because of the tricky conditions. Now I feel like we got the right start to the season to keep going. We are rolling into Pomona with some newfound confidence. We had some brand-new stuff in the car this week that I’d never used before, and I feel like it’s getting better and better. I just need some more runs to dial it in.”
Gatornationals Top Fuel winner Antron Brown disparaged his own reaction times but balanced his critique of the weekend by recognizing that his team gathered a lot of useful data about hot tracks that will come in handy in the summer months.
Funny Car’s Daniel Wilkerson said he was “very disappointed in myself. My team deserves better, SCAG deserves better, our dealers we have every weekend deserve better. I’ll be over it after we hit the gas Friday at the Winternationals. But this one hurts, because the guys gave me a bad-ass car.”
Matt Hagan took responsibility for his quarterfinal exit, saying, “It was a tough weekend to go out second round when we’re used to going some more rounds than that. We qualified 10th, so we want to work on our qualifying position as a group. The loss fell on the driver today. We got beat on a little baby holeshot. I’m sure (Austin) Prock had a hole out and we did, too. We got to the stripe before he did as far as the E.T. says. He had a .070 light to my .078 light, so I didn’t get it done. And it falls on me. I have to dig deeper.”
Funny Car driver Buddy Hull offered some encouragement: “No one had their best day at this race. Everyone struggled a bit, including us. It’s good to keep that in mind, because otherwise it’s very easy to be hard on yourself when you’re dialed into competing at such a high level.”
6 – WATCH OUT COME LAS VEGAS – Top Fuel’s Josh Hart says he has seen flashes of success that should provide direction to make his team a championship-contending one. But he’s being patient, understanding he isn’t quite there yet. “We tested three different combinations at this event, and we found one that we like for the long season ahead,” the R+L Carriers team owner-driver said. He said he’s “prepared for the endurance NHRA challenge of 2025, and we feel that we will be a real contender by Vegas.” That four-wide event is April 11-13.
7 – LANGDON REMEMBERS CREW MEMBER, THANKS CROWD – After winning the Top Fuel final, Shawn Langdon gave another shout-out to clutch specialist Jeff Leister.
“He had a health scare coming back from Gainesville,” Langdon said, “so hopefully he’s watching and has a smile on his face. This Wally’s for you, Jeff. We miss you and can’t wait for you to come back.”
Langdon also thanked the Phoenix crowd, which delivered a third straight announced Saturday sellout and turned out in droves Sunday. “We appreciate everybody coming today. The sold-out crowd speaks volumes about all the great fans here in Arizona,” he said. “We thank you guys very much.”
8 – YOUNG GUNS LOOK TO TURN PRO – For those who fret that the nitro-class pipeline isn’t getting filled, it’s going to be alright. Dylan Winefsky, 20, and McKailen Haddock, 18, will be returning Monday to Firebird Motorsports Park to pursue their licensing procedures for the Funny Car class.
Haddock is the son of former Top Fuel and current Funny Car driver Terry Haddock, and he has served on his dad’s crew since he was in junior high school.
Julie Nataas, 28, has been testing in Del Worsham’s Funny Car that Bobby Bode has raced in the PRO Superstar Shootout and the first two NHRA national events. Her plans for the rest of this season are unknown at this point.
For right now, Maddi Gordon will continue to pursue a Top Alcohol Funny Car championship, hoping to add one to the family mantel to complement father Doug Gordon’s three. But by the start of next season, she’ll be stepping into a Top Fuel dragster for Ron Capps Motorsports.
Melanie Johnson, daughter of 13-time Top Fuel championship tuner Alan Johnson, is starting her driving career in the Top Alcohol Dragster (TAD) class with the McPhillips Racing entry. Her immediate goal is to earn a championship in that class, following in the footsteps of her father and her late uncle, Blaine Johnson. Together the brothers recorded four consecutive TAD titles (1991-94).
9 – BRITTANY FORCE GETS SEMIFINAL SURPRISE – Having posted a commendable start to her weekend, Brittany Force’s Monster Energy dragster let her down at the starting line as she lined up against eventual winner Shawn Langdon in the semifinal round. The crew shut off the car and she didn’t get the chance to go for her first victory of the season. Crew chief John Collins said, “It looked like something failed in the valve cover in the burnout, leaking a little bit of oil. We didn’t want to take a chance to run the car. Safety first.”
10 – DID YOU NOTICE? – Veteran NTT IndyCar Series racer Graham Rahal was one of Jack Beckman’s associate sponsors this weekend. Beckman’s PEAK Chevrolet Camaro Funny Car sported the decals from Graham Rahal Performance, one of the businesses in his portfolio. It makes sense that Rahal would be associated with John Force Racing, given that the NHRA legend is his father-in-law. Rahal attended drag racing’s Gatornationals two weeks ago, but was competing this weekend in the IndyCar Thermal Grand Prix “next door” in Southern California. He finished 11th. Beckman advanced to the semifinals Sunday at Firebird Motorsports Park.
1 – KALITTA SEALS 60TH TOP STARTING SPOT – Following Top Fuel teammate Shawn Langdon’s Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty victory, Doug Kalitta gave Uncle Connie’s Kalitta Motorsports outfit an extra-special double-up Saturday at the NHRA’s Arizona Nationals.
Doug Kalitta, driving the SealMaster dragster, recorded his 60th top-qualifying position for Sunday’s eliminations in front of an announced sell-out crowd at Firebird Motorsports Park at Chandler, Arizona.
During the Friday evening qualifying session, Kalitta was the lone Top Fuel racer in the 3.60-second elapsed-time range. Kalitta’s 3.688-second run at 330.39 mph gave him the provisional No. 1 qualifier. Saturday’s weather was warm, which enabled Kalitta to hold onto his advantage.
“We were pretty happy with that run last night,” Kalitta said. “Alan and Mac (crew chief Johnson and assistant crew chief Savage) and my whole SealMaster Toyota team got a good run in last night. My car has been going down the track every time, so (we’re) getting it done. It’s Alan Johnson’s birthday today (Saturday). It ended up being a pretty good day.”
Of his weekend, he said, “So far, so good. We’ll see how Sunday goes. Like all these races, everybody’s running close, so you have to get up on the wheel and make it happen on Sunday.”
Kalitta will take on hometown favorite and No. 14 qualifier Travis Shumake in the opening round of Sunday’s eliminations. Shumake’s best run was a 5.20.
2 – TASCA STAYS ATOP ORDER IN FUNNY CAR – Bob Tasca, driver of the Ford Performance Motorcraft/Quick Lane Mustang, rode his 3.863-second, 333.82-mph clocking from Friday night to his 19th No. 1 qualifying position Saturday. It’s his first of the young season, and it gives him a first-round pairing Sunday against No. 16 Jon Capps.
3 – HARTFORD SECURED No. 1 STARTING SPOT – The Pro Stock top-qualifier award stayed in the Phoenix area. Matt Hartford, a Scottsdale resident, grabbed his fifth No. 1 starting position with his Friday night run of 6.509 seconds at 208.20mph in the Total Seal Chevrolet Camaro.
4 – STAVRINOS FIRST-TIME PRO MOD WINNER – Mike Stavrinos, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, defeated veteran Rickie Smith to earn his first Wally in the never-thought-they’d-get-it-in Gatornationals. Three rounds of eliminations played out Saturday to complete the rain-postponed Gainesville results.
“It really doesn’t feel real right now,” Stavrinos said, cradling his Wally statue. “I’ve wanted one of these (trophies) since I was a little kid. I can’t tell you how much this means. I’m a little emotional right now. It’s awesome, and the guys worked so hard on this. We thrashed on these cars all winter, just getting them ready. We didn’t have great results testing, but everyone just pulled together. Everyone involved in this whole deal is phenomenal. To be No. 1 qualifier and win the Gatornationals, hats off to all my guys. They deserve this.”
Smith missed the cut for the 16-car grid for the Arizona Nationals. He said it was odd that he could fail to qualify, yet make the final round of the Gatornationals eliminations, but he said he was honored to do that on an otherwise disappointing day.
5 – #2FAST2TASTY WINNERS – Ron Capps said he knew the 2024 season “would be a rebuilding year, but I didn’t understand we weren’t going to win a race all year. We came close, but that third place at the end of the year was bigger than people believed. They didn’t understand the journey behind it.”
So when Capps regained his winning form with a Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty Challenge victory Saturday over final-round foe Matt Hagan, he ended his drought. And he said, “It may not be a Wally, but at (sponsor NAPA’s) headquarters, it’s a win. And for Toyota, we beat that Mopar car. So there’s a lot of little wins that you just don’t think about that are big for that one little round.” Moreover, the $10,000 winner’s share of the bonus-fund purse is a boost to the Ron Capps Motorsports organization.
The Countdown points he accumulated and the satisfaction he said he felt after dispatching an opponent as worthy as Hagan consumed him, and once again, like last year, he almost forgot the feat came with a cash prize. “That’s funny, because that’s why we race. That is the exact passion I’ve had for this sport. The passion – you have to have the passion and the love for the sport of drag racing. And I grew up in it and I have it and you forget about the money,” he said. “The win light is the coolest and biggest thing in the world at that moment. And you’re drag racing one of the best there is in Matt Hagan. And it’s just cool. Yeah, I forgot about the money.
“And let’s not forget, our NAPA Auto Care team won the inaugural one. We went to Indianapolis and won that,” Capps said. “We’re so happy Mission Foods put this deal up for the fans. For us racers, it’s really exciting.”
Capps, the No. 4 starter, will be looking for more success Sunday morning, beginning with his Round 1 match-up against Blake Alexander.
Shawn Langdon was the Top Fuel winner, and the 2024 Arizona Nationals champ kept his Firebird Motorsports Park streak alive. The Kalitta Motorsports driver beat Tony Stewart in the final round of Top Fuel’s Mission #2Fast2Tasty Challenge. He has been to the past two final rounds at this venue. Langdon, runner-up in Gainesville at the Gatornationals two weeks ago, appears to be surging.
“There are some tracks that just seem to work well with what you have, and there’s some tracks that just doesn’t seem to work well, and Phoenix, obviously, fortunately, is one of those that seem to work well,” Langdon said.
“The team has done a great job with the car, and we’re making great runs and kind of continuing that success. I didn’t do a good job in the final. I clicked it a little bit early, which shows how much stronger the car really is, and it definitely gives us a lot of confidence going into Sunday.”
Langdon, the No. 3 qualifier, has a first-round appointment with Scott Palmer on Sunday morning.
In the Pro Stock class, Elite Motorsports’ Jeg Coughlin Jr. certainly was pleased to win the Pro Stock version of the #2Fast 2Tasty final, particularly as team boss Richard Freeman admitted that the group had “been behind the eight-ball a bit.” But Coughlin seemed more relieved and grateful to hang onto his uncharacteristically low No. 14 starting position for eliminations. He’ll have to line up against the increasingly dangerous Cory Reed in Round 1 on Sunday. Coughlin first got by longtime rival Greg Anderson, then beat Dallas Glenn in a 2-for-2 showdown with the KB Titan team.
“I think that was a big shot in the arm for our entire team,” Coughlin said. “Pro Stock is so close. A holeshot is almost a loose term, because you can win or lose races by thousandths of a second. We’ve made a lot of changes to our cars across the board coming into this race, and we feel like our performance is there, but we’re just not able to light the (score) boards up. So we’re working hard and fortunately, we made some strides today.”
6 – SOUS CHEF CAPPS PREPS SOUND CAR FOR WINEFSKY FAMILY – This weekend, Jon Capps is thinking of himself as the sous chef in the Winefsky Family’s Nitro Moose Funny Car pit.
That might sound hifalutin’ in the down-to-earth world of drag racing. But a sous chef, according to culinary industry experts, is responsible for making sure nothing in the kitchen goes wrong, upholding safety standards, and providing the executive chef with all he needs to produce a tasty product for the customers.
In an automotive sense, that’s what Jon Capps is doing: helping the Phoenix-area longtime drag-racing family ensure that young driver Dylan Winefsky is safe, and that the team has all it needs in the car’s performance to run well and ultimately be ready to put on an entertaining show for the fans.
“A lot of things go on in these cars that unless you really understand them and have had laps in the cars, you would think they’re not doing the correct thing,” Capps said. “The G-forces are really weird. Most people don’t experience a lot of G-force, so they have a tendency to make your brain think different things. Your brain tells you as soon as you hit the throttle and all those G-forces throwing you back in the seat, your brain tells you to get off the throttle, but you’re not smart enough to do that, so you stay in the throttle.”
He said Dylan has “some laps under his belt in the Fuel Altered. He did really well over there. He came from Jr. Dragsters, so he’s got plenty of seat time going down the dragstrip. But these things are a little different. How you use the clutch after the burnout backing up, everything affects how the car runs. And so the crew chief wants to make sure that everything is consistent. You put the same amount of temperature in the clutch backing up as you do when you go into the burnout box, as you back it up to stage the car. The process is the same. And he’s got a lot of things where he’s thinking of trying to get down the track. But there’s a bunch of things you have to do before you get down the track.”
Capps said, “I’m the sous chef. So we’re going to go out there and make sure the car’s happy and it doesn’t do anything goofy, so he doesn’t have to worry about that. So as far as he’s concerned, the car’s going to go down there and go straight down the track so he doesn’t have to worry about small things.”
So far, Capps – recent winner at the March Meet at Bakersfield – has not done any driving coaching with his young driver-in-waiting. “We haven’t really gotten into that yet. We started talking about it a little bit (Thursday). I’ve watched him in the altered. I know he does a pretty good job – really good job.” Capps said the altered is a crazier car to master – “more so than this one.
“The second half of the tracks where those things get goofy is where these have a body on ’em, so they have downforce. That’s a big difference between ’em. So, yeah, I think it’ll be fine. I just want to make sure that the car’s going to go out there and not give them any problems. So they go out there and it takes a lot of money to make these things run. So if you have to make three or four extra runs, that’s a lot of money,” Capps said.
The plan was to go to 330 feet on the first attempt Friday, come back and let tuner Johnny West take a look at the computer and see what the car is doing. The second run was tentatively scheduled to be a half-track pass, 660 feet, and see what the car was doing – “if it’s hurting itself or whatever. You’re going to pick up on a lot of those things in those incremental numbers in the computer. By the time we’re going to go to the 1,000-foot mark, we’ll know if the car is going to be safe to be there or not.”
They didn’t get a chance to stick to the plan entirely, but Capps landed the car in the No. 16 starting slot in the final qualifying session Saturday. Capps will face No. 1 qualifier Bob Tasca III in the opening round of eliminations Sunday.
Capps said at the start of the weekend that he didn’t “envision even going to the finish line. That’s not my job. It’s not here for my ego. My job is to make sure that Monday morning when (Dylan) gets in the car, he can go A to B . And honestly, he could probably go to 800 foot and get his license if the car is running well, just because it’s based on percentage of the national record. I think it’s within 10 percent of the national record.
“What other drivers that sign off for him need to see is they want to know that he can drive the car, keep the car in the lane. That he knows where the car’s at and if there’s a problem,” Capps said. “That’s usually for me, if I’m watching him sign somebody’s license, if the car does anything goofy and he catches it, that’s better for me. As somebody running against him, I’m going to know that he knows where it’s at and he’s got his own best interest looking after it and keeps the car off the wall and keeps the thing from blowing up. Even the guys that are in the other lane have a stake in it – everybody out there (does). You could be next to him.”
For example, he said. “John Force hit Kenny Bernstein, two of the greatest drivers ever. Those two guys are the best ever that there was. And it still happened. And those guys, something happened and they ran into each other. You want to make sure that those guys in the other lane knows what’s going on.”
Capps, a stunt driver by trade, has driven a Nostalgia Funny Car most recently. And he said, “The process is the same as far as staging the car. This one, every crew chief’s a little bit different how they have the fuel pump set up. Some of ’em have two different levers, a high side and the low side. Some of ’em have just one fuel lever, where it’s always on or always off. Everything’s a little bit different. But the process as far as the glide clutch in or out, they’re usually pretty close to the same. The G-forces are a lot different. Once you hit the throttle after about 80 feet, it’s a whole new world in a big-show car, because that’s where the clutch actually starts to apply. And that’s where it starts to grunt, starts making some horsepower, throws you back in the seat.”
Capps applauded the “great group of guys working on the car. Johnny West is an amazing crew chief. Dylan is a neat kid. He’s very humble.”
He met the family when Dylan was getting a Super Comp license. Capps was working for Frank Hawley’s Drag Racing School when it made a visit to Las Vegas, where Capps lives. “Robert was running the altered then. And we chatted a little bit,” Capps said. “And then it turns out, I think later that year, my brother year after or two years after, Robert raced my brother in the altered.”
Not long after that, Capps and Robert Winefsky were chatting, and Winefsky told him the family was going to get a big-show car together. He told Capps, “If you want to drive it and shake it down for us, that’d be great.” Capps said, “I think I was out of the country, working on a movie when they were doing it last year. And so John Hale did it for him. So (Robert) called me at the beginning of the year this year and was like, ‘Hey, I’m not sure what your calendar looks like, but if you want to do it, we’d love to have you.’”
Meanwhile, Jr. Dragster graduate Dylan Winefsky has worked on Chris Demke’s Top Alcohol Dragster, handling the bottom end and right-side cylinder heads for five years – the job he’ll continue to do next week at Pomona, California, at the Winternationals.
And he has found out first-hand how crazy a Fuel Altered can be.
And if he officially can record a 4.50-second elapsed time at 240 miles an hour during testing Monday, it’ll be his turn to get behind the wheel again – in the professional ranks. “In theory, it seems easy, but it’s been kind of a challenge so far,” he said.
“We had our Fuel Altered. We ran that. My dad drove that since I was about four. And then when I was 16, I started making runs in it. So I drove that car for two years,” Dylan Winefsky said. “We had a rear wheel break, which sent me into the wall. So I crashed that car. And then we were talking with Johnny (West), and he said the best way to go about it is just build a big-show car. You can build a nostalgia car, but the cost difference to run isn’t all that different. So it just made more economic sense. And big-show cars get better exposure than the nostalgia cars. So, economically, it all just made more sense just to go ahead and build the big-show cars.”
He said the Funny Car – whose Dodge body, incidentally, is the one Ron Capps (Jon’s older brother) drove with in his Don Schumacher Racing days – “should be a lot easier to drive compared to our old car. But so far right now, the old car’s been easier to drive as far as keeping up with it. I’ve had a little bit of an issue keeping ahead with this (Funny Car). But it’s still just a learning curve. All it takes is seat time.”
6B – THE PAUL LEE STATEMENT CONTINUES – Last season, McLeod-sponsored Funny Car racer Paul Lee qualified in the top five at least seven times. This year, in two starts, Lee has two and heads into race day with a No. 5 seed, where he will race Gainesville winner Chad Green in a rematch of their first-round earlier this month.
7 – WHY NITRO MOOSE? – It’s a curious nickname for a Funny Car and for a well-mannered young man such as Arizona’s own Dylan Winefsky. It might have suited a Canadian driver, perhaps, one would expect. But Robert Winefsky, a former racer and father of the 20-year-old who’ll be attempting to wrap up his licensing procedure Monday, said “There’s a story behind that.”
It turns out the inspiration came not from Canada but rather from Appalachia.
“Back in 2019, we were crewing for Terry Haddock, me and Dylan. And on Father’s Day (weekend), we went to Bristol,” Robert said. “We rented a car and drove up to Norwalk, being that it was just a (short) trip and we had a whole week. I was like, ‘We’re not going to take any interstate. We’re just going to go to all these little towns and stuff. So we ended up going through Nitro, West Virginia. And they have a high school and the Nitro Moose Lodge. They had this bus with no wheels on it. It was just a dilapidated old bus. So Dylan took a picture next to the bus.”
Dylan recalled, “It was a fun, fun trip – fun, fun year.”
A friend, Chris Thompson, suggested that “Nitro Moose” would be a really good nickname for Dylan, who at the time was a bit stockier and had not experienced his growth spurt to 6-foot-3. Another buddy designed a logo and started sending the Winefskys customized T-shirts. So it “behooved” the family to stick with the Nitro Moose moniker.
8 – SHUMAKE WANTS TO IMPRESS ARIZONA FANS – Travis Shumake spends most of his time in New York City these days, but he’s a Phoenix fella at heart. He grew up in Chandler, a stone’s throw from Firebird Motorsports Park, home track for his popular Funny Car racer dad Tripp Shumake and the venue where he launched his own career last spring. And his Top Fuel dragster this weekend reflects his Arizona heritage, with primary sponsor Fry’s Food Stores and associates such as the Arizona Lottery and Yates Buick GMC of nearby Goodyear, with its fleet of loaner vehicles for his team and the Scrappers Racing organization. A faithful Arizona Diamondbacks baseball fan since he first went downtown for opening day, Shumake threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the team’s spring training game Wednesday.
“I see the difference at being home this time really is the competitiveness of this car,” he said. And he wants to show it off. He’ll get to do that against 2023 Top Fuel champion Doug Kalitta in Sunday’s opening round.
“My middle school teacher comes. My high-school prom date comes. I’m just excited for my friends who don’t know drag racing to see me go fast. I think I went 215 miles an hour with my top speed last year at this race across all sessions. So it’s just a different feeling now. My family saw me do well in Vegas, and I want people in Arizona to know (the car) goes fast. I can drive fast. I want Fry’s to know that we’re not a 16th qualifier who goes out in the first round. So that’s what I’m most excited about being home. I feel comfortable and relaxed, which I just haven’t felt, even in A/Fuel. I feel very strong.”
He already has Fry’s loyalty. “We are thrilled to join Travis for his 2025 campaign to return home for the Arizona Nationals, saying yes was an easy decision,” Monica Garnes, president of Fry’s Food Stores, said. “Arizona is home to passionate motorsports fans who take pride in seeing the iconic Fry’s logo represented in the fastest racing on earth.”
Garnes has an Arizona connection, as well, as a graduate of Northern Arizona University.
“Beyond the track, Travis is an incredible ambassador for our brand, whether he’s engaging with the community at events or bringing excitement to our stores, he genuinely connects with both our associates and customers. What he has accomplished in his rookie season, both on and off the track, inspires us all to live our dreams,” she said.
Shumake said, “Even before I started drag racing, they were partners of mine at non-profits that I worked at. So it’s more than a two-year relationship, and they’re so into it. They’re fully committed. And I think they’re committed verbally to continue doing this every time we’re in Phoenix.”
This visit finds Shumake with an experienced crew that includes Scrappers Racing veteran Adem Cave and several members of Krista Baldwin’s team. Baldwin – who has an Arizona connection, as well, as a graduate of Northern Arizona University – isn’t entered in this event. So, Shumake said, “We got her blessing to borrow some guys. They know each other well. They’re not volunteers. They were just doing the same thing two weeks ago together (at the Gatornationals). One is tuner Scott Graham, who happens to have raced with Shumake’s dad as crew chief for Johnny West, also an Arizona native. “It’s my race car. It’s my parts. It’s their brains,” Shumake said.
Shumake’s dragster is one that Jordan Vandergriff used to drive. Gary Pritchett was the most recent driver, and he advanced to the quarterfinals at the Finals last November. And Shumake said he knows the car is reliable.
“Five out of our last six passes, we’ve run under a 3.73. Troy Fasching, Adem Cave, and Rob Flynn have this thing on rails, and we aren’t hurting parts, which is great for my wallet,” Shumake said. He credits the Scrappers Racing team, who run his program as a team car with Jasmine and Mike Salinas, for the late 2024 success. “I want to set the tone for the season, especially on the sponsorship front, that this car is great. This car needs logos on it, whether it’s for me or Gary.”
He said he hadn’t planned to get back in the seat until the June race at Norwalk, Ohio, but Friday he squeaked in just before the deadline to enter next week’s Winternationals at Pomona, Calif.
He said that before this event, he had made just 16 passes in a dragster in his life but that he “learned a lot last season, that’s for sure. On and off the track, I was constantly finding my footing. I’ve owned this car for over two years, but I’m still in my Top Fuel infancy. To put it into perspective, a full-time Top Fuel driver averages 120-plus laps in a single season. I’ve made 16 in my life. Even at 6-4 and 205 pounds, I’m really still just a giant Top Fuel baby.”
9 – DAD HAPPY TO STEP BACK, PRAISES SON – Chicago-based Bobby Bode, an Arizona State University graduate who lived in nearby Tempe during his college years and raced his family-operated Funny Car, is back in the Phoenix area. This time, he’s again driving a Toyota Funny Car for one of the sport’s top team owners and decorated racers, Del Worsham.
Dad Bob, who showed Bobby the ropes before turning over the seat to his son, has stepped away from driving altogether.
“When Bobby started driving, we were going to try to keep (his license). He always said, ‘We’ll get two cars.’ We always had a dream of getting a picture of both qualifying together or something, but I said, ‘Do you know how much money that would cost? Let’s just Photoshop one, and I’ll be happy,’ the elder Boe said. “I drove 20 years. It was good. I’ve got 500 passes in there, but he’s so good right now. I could work the next 10 years and I’ll never be as good as he is right now.
“He is good. We started him at eight with the Juniors and the four years he sat in our car. Del’s car is way better than our car,” Bob Bode said. “And he learned in ours, which was maybe a little harder to drive. And because he learned there, coming over here, now this is faster. It gave him the experience to try to handle all the things that come out of it in this car. He’s been handling it good.”
At the start of the year, Bob Bode said, “we were real happy between Bradenton and Gainesville, he did everything right. He practices. He’s got a practice tree at home and we’re late for something, but he’s sitting there practicing the tree. So I go, ‘We got to go.’ ‘Yeah. One more, Dad. One more.’ So he takes it serious and shows he’s doing really well.”
But at some point, Bobby might have to share Worsham’s car with former Top Alcohol Dragster ace Julie Nataas. She has checked off some of her licensing passes in this Funny Car and once she completes the process, she might compete in it later this season.
10 – LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON – McKailen Haddock, son of and crew member for Funny Car team owner Terry Haddock, will be making passes Monday at Firebird in pursuit of his Funny Car license. Veteran driver Jim Campbell has been shaking down the car for the Haddocks this weekend.
FRIDAY NOTEBOOK – KALITTA, TASCA, HARTFORD SHINE AT PHOENIX; ‘FLAP’ FLAP PLAYS OUT; TASCA TALKS INDYCAR, FOX; PRO MOD SUSPENSE REMAINS; PALMER NEEDS BUBBLE WRAP
1 – TOP FUEL’s KALITTA KICKS A– – Doug Kalitta predicted before the Arizona Nationals at Firebird Motorsports Park that “overall, our car is running great, and I think we’re in really good shape. We should be able to go to the Phoenix race and really kick some a–.”
He was right. Bearing the same Sealmaster livery with which he was top qualifier and winner of the Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty NHRA Challenge two years ago, Kalitta rewarded the hearty fans who sat through a lengthy delay during Funny Car qualifying with a superb 3.688-second elapsed time at 330.39 mph.
“They’ve really done a nice job with this facility,” Kalitta said. “The track is nice and smooth. Hats off to everybody who was involved there.”
SealMaster is a longtime Kalitta Motorsports corporate partner. In addition to the primary placement in Phoenix, SealMaster is a full-season associate partner on Kalitta’s dragster as well as J.R. Todd’s DHL GR Supra Funny Car.
“One cool thing about SealMaster is that they do a hell of a job with their NASCAR truck series team – they’re always up front contending for wins and championships, so they understand motorsports,” Kalitta said. “That makes it fun to work with them. They’re a great company, and they love motorsports so we’re really excited to represent their brand and hopefully help them with the marketing effort. They’re giving us this opportunity to help so there’s no better time than this weekend to go out and win the next race as far as I’m concerned.
“Phoenix has a lot of history,” he said, “and when I first started driving, that’s where we tested. So I always enjoy going back here. They continue to make great improvements to their facility, and their fans are great. Big crowds always show up.” He said he was sure he and his Alan Johnson-tuned care would “hit the ground running.”
2 – TASCA TOPS FUNNY CAR LEADERBOARD – The two fastest Funny Car drivers on the planet duked it out Friday for the provisional No. 1 qualifying position at this second race on the 2025 Mission Foods Drag Racing Series schedule.
Bob Tasca III prevailed with a 3.863-second elapsed time at 333.82 mph. Two-hundredths of a second behind him was Austin Prock (3.883, 327.74). Jack Beckman gave John Force Racing two of the top three with his 3.895-second performance at 327.51 mph. In order, Ron Capps, Paul Lee, Alexis DeJoria, Bobby Bode, and Daniel Wilkerson rounded out the tentative upper half of the order. Jim Campbell, driving one of Terry Haddock’s Mustangs, sits on the bump overnight with a 5.058-second E.T. Still unqualified are Buddy Hull, Jon Capps, Haddock, and Jeff Diehl in the 20-car class.
3 – HARTFORD HOT IN PRO STOCK – Hometown hero Matt Hartford used a 6.509-second elapsed time at 208.20 mph to establish himself as the Pro Stock driver to beat this weekend. He held off session one leader Greg Anderson (6.512), Cory Reed (6.516), and Dallas Glenn (6.520).
4 – DRAMA-FILLED FUNNY CAR Q2 – Racing was delayed in the evening session because Funny Car owner-driver Chad Green experienced a serious engine explosion just after the launch.
“There was no warning. I hit the gas, and it just went out. I think it only went like 100 feet or so before it blew up,” Green said. “That’s definitely not what we were trying to do there. This session, we thought we were going to go out there and put down a good qualifying run. We got a lot of damage to deal with. I don’t know, but it looks like there’s a lot of work ahead of us tonight, so we’ll tow it back and get it ready for tomorrow.”
At the start of the session, first Terry Haddock was timed out, giving Blake Alexander a solo pass. Then Jon Capps couldn’t get the Winefsky Family entry in reverse on the burnout. The crew pushed him back toward the starting line, but officials timed him out, not wanting Paul Lee to have to keep burning fuel while waiting. So Lee got a single pass, too.
Two pairs later, Spencer Hyde’s Jim Head Funny Car fired up but immediately developed a fuel leak and was shut off. Two more pairs later, Green’s engine detonated.
5 – KEEPING IT IN PERSPECTIVE – Bob Tasca III certainly didn’t change his message about the FOX IndyCar Series commercials being incorrect with its tagline “Fastest Racing On Earth.” But he added some perspective to his remarks from Gainesville two weeks ago.
“First off,” he said after securing the provisional No. 1 spot in the Funny Car class Friday evening, “I want to go on record to all my IndyCar friends out there. I don’t have many, because I’ve never been to an IndyCar race, actually. But I have met several drivers over the years. The truth is, I have the utmost respect for what they do, their sport, their fans. Anyone that gets in a race car and risks their life to put on a show for their sponsors and fans, hats off to them.
“My emotion was on the fact that the promotion is singling out that they’re the fastest motorsport on the planet, and that is factually wrong. It is not true, and anybody that can look at the scoreboard can clearly see that,” he said. “So I think that they overstepped some bounds, which not only pissed me off, it pissed off a lot of NHRA fans and drivers. And it was great to see the passion of race fans over the last week.”
Tasca said, “We are the fastest motorsport on the planet, although I did get some call-outs from our Bonneville Salt Flat folks. And maybe I have to preface that we are the fastest side-by-side motorsport on the planet. But, again, I love their passion, too, so it’s all in good fun.”
But he said he was told that Friday’s broadcast of the first day of Arizona Nationals action included uncorrected IndyCar commercials.
“I did think FOX wasn’t tastefully done at all with how they pitched the ad, and I was just told that it actually played on our show tonight, saying that they’re the fastest motorsport. So you want to talk about embarrassment? OK. They can keep embarrassing themselves if they’d like, but the harsh reality is we are the fastest motorsport, and I’m very proud to be able to say that.”
6 – MUDFLAP FLAP – Until the end of April, “mudflaps” on Top Fuel dragsters will be optional. For the next four races – this weekend’s Arizona Nationals, the Winternationals at Pomona, Calif., and the two four-wide events, at Las Vegas and Charlotte – the NHRA Technical Department will be evaluating their effectiveness.
The purpose of the mud flaps – a.k.a., canards – is to reduce rear-wheel loads without causing a significant impact on other areas of the race car. The issue has arisen recently following two blown-tire incidents. One involved Antron Brown at the PRO Superstar Shootout in February at Bradenton, Fla., the other Dan Mercier during early Friday qualifying for the Gatornationals two weeks ago at Gainesville, Fla.
Brown, whose tire disintegrated just as he was clocking a 330.89-mph pass, said, “We had our car tire blow out. And, literally, it destroyed a brand-new race car is what it did. The tire blowing out destroyed a brand-new race car, plain and simple.”
Mercier’s misfortune happened at the end of his 323.12-mph run.
The Tech Department will reassess the mud flap after the trial period, working with Top Fuel teams to gather as much information as possible.
If a team does not use mud flaps, the side of the Top Fuel body must be covered with a replacement body panel, with no bare chassis exposed, per an announcement the sanctioning body made this past Monday.
Brian Corradi, Brown’s crew chief, said, “We don’t need to have any tires failing, and they think that maybe you could take some downforce off the car by taking the mudflaps off, because we have nowhere else to go on the wing unless we change the wing design. So that’s the plan.”
He said Brown’s tire problem at Bradenton wasn’t caused by a mudflap problem.
“We ran something over there,” Corradi said, “but even if we didn’t, let’s say we didn’t run something over that run there, there’s a lot of pieces coming off the tires because the temperature of the tire’s up, we have more downflow. So that’s the plan. But we’re not going to take ’em off yet. We’re going to ease into it.”
Brittany Force and crew chief Dave Grubnic were the first to go down the track without the side plate in front of the headers, and her 3.768-second, 329.10-mph pass was quickest and fastest in the first Top Fuel session Friday. But neither put all their stock in the car’s new configuration.
Grubnic said, “One run doesn’t prove anything. We’ve been given the opportunity to explore [whether to use the mudflaps]. We’ve got to look at driveshafts. We’ve got to look at a lot of things. The car pretty much ran its number. It doesn’t suggest the mudflaps did anything. It’s way too early. Let’s see what happens.”
Force tested without the mudflaps a few weeks ago, and she said, “There is a lot of theories and speculation around it. We’re going to take all these four races to see what we could do, if it affects me as a driver, what it does to our car performance-wise. I’m excited to see.”
Tentative No. 1 Top Fuel qualifier Doug Kalitta said he knew his team would be running one session with the flaps and one without them. He said when he saw they were removed for the Q2 run, “I was hoping it wouldn’t smoke the tires. It was out there chattering. I was like, ’Oh, man – I hope it hangs in there.’” In general, he said, “It’s kind of cool. It’s something different,” and that he thinks the experimentation with the canards possibly might “make racing better than it already is.” With a whimsical smile, Kalitta said, “It gives the crew chiefs something to mess with.”
Shawn Reed’s crew chief, Rob Wendland, experimented with the canards, using them on the first pass and removing them for the second. Reed, who finished the day in the provisional No. 3 position, said after his second run of the day that he wasn’t aware of the change: “I stab the gas, keep it in the groove, and find money. Those are my three jobs.”
7 – PALMER NEEDS BUBBLE WRAP – The last time drag-racing fans saw Top Fuel team owner-driver Scott Palmer, he was barrel-rolling 12 times into a strawberry field in his Corvette Pro Mod three weeks ago just past the dragstrip at Florida’s Bradenton Motorsports Park. Miraculously, he walked away without even any soreness. And Friday at Firebird Motorsports Park, Palmer proved that when life gives you strawberry fields, make strawberry cocktails.
He recounted the incident: “I walked away from it, so I literally climbed out on my own and walked over to get checked out, got out of the ambulance, got on my golf cart and drove the golf cart back to my pits. And I was not even sore. I’m telling you, I’m going to contribute that to Stroud safety because after my Studebaker crash, which I’m pretty reckless, I’m not real safety-oriented. I have all the stuff, but that’s not my first concern. But when Stroud stepped up and put everything in every car I own, they’ve got a new head and neck restraint. Literally, my neck was not even sore. There’s no possible way I would’ve walked away from that if all that wasn’t [for that]. I need bubble wrap.”
Then Palmer quipped, “So maybe we should put strawberry fields at the end of all the tracks. I don’t know. Maybe we’re thinking wrong. All the cocktails around here [in his pit] this weekend are strawberry-flavored, by the way. Anything made in our pits has to be strawberry-flavored because of that. I’m serious. That happened on Thursday, and around here we call it Evel Knievel Thursday. Every Thursday is Evel Knievel Thursday. So, at night we have a shot of Wild Turkey for Evel. He always drank Wild Turkey. And I jumped like I was Evel Knievel, but I did not stick the landing. The landing did not work out for me.”
He said the crash at Bradenton with the Corvette happened because the throttle stuck. “I’m used to driving a Top Fuel car and I didn’t hit the kill switch. You don’t do that on a nitro car. And I pulled up on the tow hook a couple times and finally everything just kind of didn’t work. It was my fault,” Palmer said, “because I only run that car once or twice a year, and my routine was just not right in it. So I just lined it up to drive off into the sand trap. And the sand trap was a two-foot deep strawberry field, so it stuck in this dirt and flipped me over and barrel rolled me through the field.”
8 – PRO MOD SUSPENSE LINGERS – The suspense continues for the Congruity NHRA Pro Mod Drag Series eliminations from Gainesville. Runoffs from the rain-interrupted Amalie Motor Oil NHRA Gatornationals were folded into the first two qualifying sessions at Phoenix, which provided much sunnier weather. However, after the first round played out, a lengthy delay (that, ironically, involved former Pro Mod racer Chad Green) prompted the drivers to carry over the Gatornationals eliminations to Saturday because of darkness.
All that is after another venue change. Originally, the postponed eliminations were set to take place at the May 15-18 Gerber Collision & Glass Route 66 NHRA Nationals at Joliet, Ill. But Pro Mod racers and teams discussed the situation further with the NHRA, and last Wednesday, March 13, they agreed to change that to the Arizona Nationals.
William Brown, J.R. Gray, Derek Menholt, Mike Stavrinos, Rickie Smith, Mason Wright, Justin Bond, and Jason Scruggs advanced in Friday’s Friday round. (Eliminated were Mike Castellana, Alex Laughlin, Ken Quartuccio, Kevin Rivenbark, Billy Banaka, Stan Shelton, Sidnei Frigo, and Dmitry Samorukov.)
So the second round of Gatornationals action will precede the semifinals and final round that was to be part of the third and fourth qualifying sessions Saturday.
Eliminations in the class for the Arizona Nationals will begin at 9:30 a.m. MDT Sunday.
9 – MISSION #2FAST2TASTY PAIRINGS SET – Gainesville Pro Stock winner Dallas Glenn has a couple of simple guidelines for himself as he prepares for Saturday’s first Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty Challenge of the season: “Show up like it’s race day and not take anyone lightly.” He said his goal last year “was to be in every one of them, and I was except one. I have the same goal for this year. My mindset going into the first Mission Challenge of the season is to. The other three drivers are some of the best behind the wheel and I need to keep my focus.” He won three Challenges, and if he is to keep on that roll, he’ll have to defeat Cory Reed. The “Greg and Jeg Show,” another classic match-up between Greg Anderson and Jeg Coughlin Jr., is the other pairing.
In Funny Car, Ron Capps said he’s “going to see if we can steal the first #2Fast2Tasty trophy in Phoenix and get another Wally for the NAPA team.” But he’d better look out – opponent Alexis DeJoria said, “We exceeded our expectations tremendously at the first race of the season. Confidence is one hell of a game-changer.” In the other race, Gatornationals champ Chad Green will face Matt Hagan, a three-time winner at Firebird Motorsports Park (2015, ’17, ’19) and the track elapsed-time record-holder (3.823 seconds, Feb. 2022). But Hagan said, “Chad Green did great in Gainesville. You have to be on your toes with those guys, because they have the team and parts and pieces to throw down. They won the event, so they’ll come to Phoenix on a strong note.
“Every point counts, especially with qualifying,” Hagan said. “We saw that last year with [Austin] Prock getting 15 No. 1 qualifiers. I think we need to really focus on the Friday night runs and make them count. Going down during the day on Friday will give us a good baseline and then we can swing for the fences that night. The Mission #2Fast2Tasty points also really add up towards the Countdown. I’ve seen championships being won by two points before, so the little points are so important.”
Jasmine Salinas will be making her first appearance in the cash-and-Countdown-points bonus race for the Top Fuel class and will start with 2024 Phoenix winner Shawn Langdon. “I’m so excited to compete in my first Mission #2Fast2Tasty Challenge,” she said “We showed a lot of consistency in Gainesville, and I think it’s going to help us when we line up against Langdon for the rematch. He’s a champ with killer reaction times. There’s definitely an intimidation factor that I’ll need to overcome mentally, but that’s what I love about this sport. It’s called a challenge for a reason, and we are doing everything we can to be ready for it.”
Antron Brown and Tony Stewart will meet in the other Top Fuel battle. Stewart is taking the place of no-show Steve Torrence, who opted out of competing at the Arizona Nationals.
“Any opportunity we have at this point to gain points is valuable for us,” Stewart said. “It’s kind of tough because it’s a qualifying round at the same time, but if our car starts out as consistent on Friday as it was at Gainesville, that gives us the opportunity on Saturday to potentially gain some big points. The extra purse helps out the crew guys and everyone on the team, so it’d be an honor to win. When you can get to the semifinals in a weekend and get yourself into the next Mission #2Fast2Tasy Challenge at the following event, it’s a great thing. We didn’t quite get to that in Gainesville, but with Steve (Torrence) not at Phoenix, it allows us the opportunity to be in it. It’s just up to us at this point to try to take advantage of that opportunity and then do the best we can with it.”
TOP FUEL
Antron Brown vs. Tony Stewart
Shawn Langdon vs. Jasmine Salinas (Langdon won in Gainesville)
FUNNY CAR
Chad Green vs. Matt Hagan (Green won in Gainesville)
Ron Capps vs. Alexis DeJoria (Capps won in Gainesville)
PRO STOCK
Greg Anderson vs. Jeg Coughlin Jr. (Anderson won in Gainesville)
Dallas Glenn vs. Cory Reed (Glenn won in Gainesville)
10 – NO TORRENCES – Steve Torrence, a semifinalist at the Gatornationals two weeks ago, opted not to compete here this weekend, even if it meant a chance to race in another Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty bonus race for Countdown points and money. He forfeited that chance to Tony Stewart. The four-time series champion from Kilgore, Texas, declined at the season-starting Gatornationals to discuss his 2025 schedule. His mother and team owner Kay Torrence quipped that the family couldn’t say publicly what their plans for the season are because even they hadn’t decided what they’re doing, with the Capco Contractors business especially demanding right now. All Steve Torrence would say is that, “I’m going to do what makes me happy.” His father, Billy Torrence, who occasionally races at the sportsman level as well as in a Top Fuel dragster but did not travel to Gainesville, is not entered in any category this weekend, either.
