You know the old saying about idle hands and a certain someone’s workshop, right? Idle hands are …
… non-existent with Clay Millican.
Well, it’s true.
So rather than let a pair of the famed Werner-sponsored, championship-lineage Top Fuel dragster continue to sit around and collect dust, the six-time IHRA titleist has restored — er, preserved – the first of them.
“They’re going to go where people can see them,” said Millican, who captured 50 IHRA national events. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, hanging on your wall in your shop,’ but I don’t want to do that. I want them to be where people can see them.”
For more than a decade, the 2001 and 2002 dragsters were on display at the Werner Enterprises headquarters museum in Omaha, Neb. They were ones in which Millican won the first two of his six consecutive crowns. In 2019, Millican retrieved them as the Werner facility got a facelift, and he moved them to a building in McLeansboro, Ill. They remained there until 2025, when Millican fetched them and transported them to the shop beside his home in Drummonds, Tenn.
Millican’s mission to give the dragsters a makeover has begun with the ’02 model. That dragster was virtually untouchable that season, speeding to the No. 1 position in qualifying 11 times in 12 IHRA national events. It was just as lethal on race day, winning 11 times. The only loss came in the Mid-Atlantic Nationals at Budds Creek, Md., when tire smoke in the opening round knocked Millican out of competition. That same dragster reached the semifinals of the NHRA races at Pomona, Calif., and Phoenix to open the year.
After completely removing every part on the car until it was a bare frame, Millican took the dragster to Rick’s Powder Coating in nearby Memphis. For competition, Millican noted on his YouTube channel that the frame was painted, but he opted for powder coating for display purposes to enhance its look.
Once back home in the shop, Millican and J.C. Meadors – “best friends since before first grade,” the driver said – began reassembling the dragster on Christmas Eve. “A jigsaw puzzle,” he termed it.
There were some minor bumps along the way in getting all the pieces to fit. Bolt holes had to be redrilled or retapped to remove some of the powder coating. The engine is “just a shell,” Millican said, with its internal parts missing.
Other than that, though, the dragster is “period correct,” as Millican put it, even down to the seatbelts. It retains the proud scars of battle such as gouges, scratches and holes.
“It was just the car that I felt like gave me and [wife] Donna the confidence that we had made the right decision for me to quit my job,” Millican said. “We also started building our house at that same time. It was like, ‘Hey, maybe you can make a living driving a race car.’ I have, so it’s pretty cool to have it.”
That dragster was outfitted with a belly pan in addition to side panels on the car’s back half. Those were crafted and installed to deal with strict penalties IHRA had put in place to deal with track oildowns.
“We did a lot of things that have since become standard,” said Millican’s then-crew chief, Mike Kloeber, in a 2020 interview. “For instance, we had extra protection on the rollcage when nobody else did because of the cockpit intrusion.”
That “protection” was a titanium plate mounted behind the roll cage that shielded Millican’s back up to the top of his shoulders. It was added after the blower pulley came off during a run at Rockingham (N.C.) Dragway, rocketed forward, and bloodied Millican.
“The pulley piece went through the suit and cut him,” Kloeber said. “The blower driveshaft was still bolted to the blower pulley but it was a ‘barber pole fracture,’ so it was sharp and jagged and pointy. When it left the blower, it was going about 11,000 RPM.”
Some two years later, after the death of Darrell Russell from cockpit-intrusion injuries, NHRA mandated that the cars be equipped with a plate that extends to the top of the cage.
“It’ll make its way to a museum. I’m just not sure where yet or when, but it has been so much fun,” Millican said. “It brings back so many memories – just being able to touch it and look at it, and like, ‘Oh, I remember this.’ It just brings up memories. … Every memory just makes me feel good about the things we did with those cars, and it just lets me know how fortunate I am. I get to do what I love doing.”
Millican recorded the rebuild process as an installment on his YouTube channel, and he said the response from fans has been overwhelming.
“The response of people that said, ‘Oh, I remember that car. I was a kid when I saw it,’” he said. “Just thousands of comments just bringing up the memories that it brought up for those people, whether they were a kid and they saw that Werner car at their first Top Fuel race or older people that’s like, ‘Oh, man, I remember that you never lost.’ It’s just been really, really amazing how many people saw that paint scheme and it took them back in time. …
“So that’s been really, really fun to see the response of how many people remembered that paint scheme was kind of iconic, I guess you would say. The amount of people that said, ‘I see a Werner truck [on the highway and] still think of that car.’”
The 2001 dragster’s facelift has no specific timetable, Millican said. Besides, he’s enjoying getting reacquainted with the ’02 dragster that helped make him a household name to fans. It’s only a short walk from his house to the shop, where he can – if the mood suits him – slip back into the cockpit to refresh his memory.
“I don’t make car noises,” he said. “At least not out loud.”
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