Cruz Pedregon loves the younger generation. He likes their exuberance, optimism and energy. That’s why the Cruiser, who turned 63 on Sept. 19, likes to surround himself with mostly young members of his team.
But he has to admit, sometimes their attitude can be confounding.
Take, for example, Pedregon’s 15-year-old daughter, Ryaah. She’s giving him the silent treatment, not talking to him. They didn’t have a fight, nor did Cruz ground her.
Rather, Ryaah has gone full-on tough love mode on her papa when it comes to this year’s NHRA Countdown to the Championship, the annual six-race playoff that kicks off with this weekend’s Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals presented by MOPAR at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Michigan.
Ryaah means well, but she wants to kick Cruz in the butt so that he can turn around and kick his opponents in theirs en route to a potential win this weekend.
Ryaah’s silent treatment for dear old Dad is paying dividends: the elder Pedregon earned the provisional No. 1 qualifying position during Friday’s first two rounds of qualifying, taking his Snap-On Tools Dodge Charger to the No. 1 spot with one of his best runs of the year: 3.886 seconds at 327.51 mph.
“I want to say hi to my daughter out there, Ryaah, who’s not talking to me right now, but maybe she says, ‘Dad, you need to win some races then I’ll talk to you,’ so hopefully we can do that here soon,” Cruz said with a big smile during his post-qualifying press conference.
Pedregon then added, “Spoken like a true Pedregon, right? I taught her well. She said, ‘Don’t you be talking to me, getting beat first round all the time.’”
There’s no question it’s been a difficult year at times for Pedregon, including barely qualifying for the Countdown and suffering a number of the same kind of first-round elimination losses Ryaah is talking about.
But now he has a chance to catch fire at the right time and potentially make a run at the Funny Car championship. If that happens, it would be Pedregon’s third career Funny Car championship and first since 2008 after winning his first in 1992.
If his provisional No. 1 holds up through Saturday’s final two rounds of qualifying, it’ll be Pedregon’s first No. 1 of the season and a promising step toward his first win since last season.
“This was huge,” Pedregon said of Friday’s effort. “For us, we’re just trying to get our head above water here. We’ve been taking on water pretty much all year.”
The veteran Funny Car pilot came into this weekend’s opening race of the NHRA Countdown 12th in the standings, 129 points behind points leader Matt Hagan. Admittedly, it’s a big spread, but not a lead that is insurmountable for Pedregon to overtake.
Especially if it means he can get Ryaah to cut him some slack and start talking again.
The winner of 44 NHRA national events laughs when he calls himself the “old dude” of the team. But it’s the truth: his team is so much younger than he is, to the point where he could be a father to most and maybe even a grandfather to a few.
And that youth movement within Cruz Pedregon Racing is showing its mettle, the kind of mettle many other teams either overlooked or didn’t see at all when the season began.
“Collectively, I think a lot of it is the younger guys we have,” Pedregon said. “I got to get up for those guys. But yeah, I think really our team needed that (Friday’s No. 1). I think it’s been rough behind the scenes. We’ve got a lot of guys that their birthday started with a two (as in 2000 and younger), and so it makes me really feel old, because I won my first championship in 1992. It starts with a one (as in his birthday year, 1963).
“So younger group, but we’ve been training these guys. … So I really feel like we got a good group of guys, just a mixed bag. Obviously at the start of the year, these guys weren’t even on anybody’s radar to hire them, so it’s a credit to the team and the foundation that I’ve built over the years, myself and Stacy Jenkins, and my wife Melissa.”
Speaking of young and old, Pedregon loves to work with the youngsters who work for him — you know, the ones whose birth years begin with a “2” — and reflects on watching some of the sport’s greats when he was coming up through the NHRA ranks as an aspiring Funny Car pilot.
“It’s a combination of everybody,” Pedregon said, noting himself and his fellow old-timers who are surrounded by the young-uns. “I write notes and letters and talk to them. I really feel the foundation of a team is organization and cleanliness.
“The one issue I have, and it’s not fun to live with this, but I have great OCD, I’m very conscious of cleanliness. And so I wear these guys out.
Why these guys have stuck around this long, it’s a credit to them because they know that, hey, I tell them, I go, ‘Look, if there was another way to do it, I would teach you guys how to do it,’ but I’ve always been around clean, organized operations from Larry Minor to Joe Gibbs.
“This is the only way I know how to be successful. Some of my heroes, coming up, Kenny Bernstein, Don Prudhomme, if you looked at their trailers and their operations, they were immaculate. And so I try to emulate that type of operation.
“It’s rough because, like I said, it seems like I’m never happy, but I tell them, ‘Guys, we’ll be successful if we do it this way.’ So it’s just been a lot of meetings, let’s just put it that way.”
There’s an old saying that if you surround yourself with young people, their youthful energy and optimism rub off on you, and Pedregon definitely subscribes to that theory, especially after earning the No. 1 spot, at least for one day, if not all the way into Sunday’s final eliminations.
“We’re just pleased, we’re acting like a bunch of kids and we just won the race,” he said. “Believe me, I had my goofy moments in the lounge and I seem composed now, but man, it means so much to beat the competition because like I said, I’ve been around how many decades now? 90s, 2000s, the teens, the 20s. And man, these guys are out for blood, man. Crew chiefs included.”
Pedregon knows the celebration can’t last long. He and his young team have to come into Saturday’s second day of qualifying ready not only to hold on to No. 1, but also to lay a strong foundation heading into Sunday, when the overall effort means the most.
“We’ve got to lay in it now, but I really feel like we have the one thing that’s hard to have,” Pedregon said. “That’s speed and quickness, and the car has it no matter what. And that’s a dangerous combination. So yeah, I like our chances. We’ll see.
“I mean, hey, there’s a lot of good drivers out there. I can’t think of a better era that I’m in now, a better crop of drivers, man. There’s some guys, some younger guys coming in there that are good, and then the cars are good. So we’re going to have our hands full, but it’s nice to be able to enjoy this for tonight and then we’ll see what tomorrow brings. But yeah, it’s important for us to get those runs and get those licks in while we can.”
While the Countdown kickoff location is different this year, Pedregon hopes the outcome can still be the same as last year, when he began the Countdown with a win at Reading, Pa. That track is not on this year’s NHRA schedule after the rival IHRA purchased the facility late last year, and it was replaced by this weekend’s race in Michigan.
But Pedregon thinks lightning can strike twice, even though where it strikes would be different this year.
“Hey man, let’s just make these last six races the best, and we’ll let the chips fall where they may,” Pedregon said. “That’s kind of our approach right now.
“I’m a huge Raider fan, and hey, they’re turning that around. I think it’s time that we turn it around too. And I really feel like we are. But yeah, I think really our operation is finally starting to come together now. And that doesn’t mean anything, we haven’t won any rounds yet, but we’re just going to enjoy the heck out of this night and just see what tomorrow brings, and Sunday, obviously.”
