His may not be the most coveted NHRA championship, but it means the world to Adam Sorokin.

Last month, Sorokin captured the NHRA Top Fuel Heritage Racing Series season championship. Sorokin drives a front-engine dragster for the Van Dyke Motorsports/Champion Speed Shop team based out of San Francisco. Brian Van Dyke is the team owner.

“This is a culmination of five or six years with this team (Van Dyke Motorsports) trying to get to this point,” said the 43-year-old Sorokin, who lives in Glendale, Calif. “For the team, it’s great because all of that hard work has paid off. Personally, it’s very cool for me to win this Nostalgia Top Fuel championship. These cars are really, really challenging to drive, so to be able to get a championship feels like a huge accomplishment.”

This is Sorokin’s first NHRA championship and second overall as he also won the California Independent Funny Car Association alcohol Funny Car crown in 2002.

His may not be the most coveted NHRA championship, but it means the world to Adam Sorokin.

Last month, Sorokin captured the NHRA Top Fuel Heritage Racing Series season championship. Sorokin drives a front-engine dragster for the Van Dyke Motorsports/Champion Speed Shop team based out of San Francisco. Brian Van Dyke is the team owner.

“This is a culmination of five or six years with this team (Van Dyke Motorsports) trying to get to this point,” said the 43-year-old Sorokin, who lives in Glendale, Calif. “For the team, it’s great because all of that hard work has paid off. Personally, it’s very cool for me to win this Nostalgia Top Fuel championship. These cars are really, really challenging to drive, so to be able to get a championship feels like a huge accomplishment.”

This is Sorokin’s first NHRA championship and second overall as he also won the California Independent Funny Car Association alcohol Funny Car crown in 2002.

Sorokin won the Heritage crown in dramatic fashion at the California Hot Rod Reunion event at the Auto Club Famosa Raceway in Bakersfield last month. He came to the event trailing point leader Jim Murphy by nine points and Sorokin was 17 points in front of Brad Thompson, who was third.

Sorokin was the No. 4 qualifier in the 16-car field and cruised through the first round. Sorokin then edged Thompson in the second round.

With the season championship at stake, Sorokin ran a blistering, career-best 5.634 at 252.03 mph to defeat Murphy, who shut off early in the run.

“My team has given me a great car all year,” Sorokin said. “Plus, they’re more than just teammates, they are family to me.”

Sorokin was supposed to tangle with 2009 NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series champion Brett Harris in the finals, but two days of rain postponed the event.

Sorokin and Harris will compete in the uncompleted final round at the NHRA’s Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals in Pomona, Nov. 11-14.

“Driving on that track (in Pomona) in front of that many people will be a thrill for me,” Sorokin said.

Sorokin’s name is familiar in drag racing circles as his dad Mike Sorokin was a standout NHRA driver in the 1960s, most notably behind the wheel of the “Surfers” Top Fuel front-engine dragster. The Surfers dragster dominated dragstrips throughout Southern California in the early to mid 1960s.

Mike Sorokin died on December 30, 1967 when the dragster he was piloting for another owner had the flywheel and clutch explode during first-round eliminations at Orange County International Raceway in East Irvine, Calif. Mike Sorokin was only 28 years old.

Unfortunately for Adam, he was never able to get to know his father in person as he was just a 1-year-old when he died.

“My mom (Robyn) was just turning 19 years old and she was a widow and she had a 1-year-old child,” Adam said. “As I was growing up, to my mom’s credit, she would make sure I knew who my dad was. She would take me to the drag races and show me what he did for a living. We went to Orange County and I met the other drivers who knew my dad.”

Adam says around the time he was 10, his mom gave him a collection of his dad’s racing things she had saved.

“She gave me all these 8X10 photos of him and every magazine he had been in,” Adam said. “She gave me his racing shirts, his helmet, and his jackets. She saved all this stuff and when I received that stuff, the only way I kind of knew my dad was through those photos. As a kid, you want to follow in your dad’s footsteps and I looked at those pictures and I just thought it was cool what he did. I wanted to do that when I was bigger.”

Although Adam wanted to race, it wasn’t a priority for his mom.

“She kind of didn’t want me to follow along in those footsteps, naturally because her husband was killed doing it,” Adam said.

Adam respected his mom’s wishes for him not to race, but she gave him her blessing when she was dying of stomach cancer. Robyn died in 1985.

“I was 18 years old at the time and right before she died we had a talk and she told me that she knew I wanted to race my whole life and she said I’m not going to be here to worry about it anymore,” Adam recalled. “She basically gave me the green light to follow my passion, which was racing and she told me to be careful and take care of myself. That was one of our last talks.”

Despite Adam’s love for racing, he knew he had to get his life in order before he ever thought about getting behind the wheel.

“At 18, I was kind of on my own and I had to get out of college and find a job and all that kind of stuff,” Adam said. “Throughout all those years, I still wanted to drive and race.”

Armed with ambition and determination, Adam finally began pursuing his racing career.

“I started out and went to road racing driving schools,” Adams said. “I went to the Jim Russell Racing Drivers School at Laguna Seca and I went to Go-Kart racing schools, Renault Sports Car schools and Winston West schools. I went to every school that you can get yourself into to learn how to drive. I also did a little bit of Go-Kart racing and Sports Car Club of America racing.”

It wasn’t until 1997 that Adam turned his attention to drag racing.

“I enrolled in the Frank Hawley Drag Racing School, which at the time was in Pomona,” Adam said. “Frank was my instructor and I took a class at the school and the minute I got into one of their Super Comp cars, I was just instantly in love. I felt like this is the kind of racing I want to do.”

Adam did get his NHRA license, but landing a ride of any kind wasn’t easy.

“I didn’t come from money or anything like that so my opportunity was going to come from somebody giving me an opportunity,” Adam said. “I knew I needed to get in drag racing circles and get on a crew and show I really wanted to be there. Just because you want to drive and you are somebody’s son, really doesn’t mean anything to anybody when you are going to get a ride. You have to just be in the right place at the right time.”

Adam received his first break when he was working on the crew for Dave Smith’s California Independent Funny Car Association Funny Car team.

“I was just going to be a crew guy and I worked on the car for a few days and something happened to their driver and he was no longer on the team,” Adam said. “I got a phone call from Dave (Smith) and he told me I was going to drive his car and that was around 1999. It was a 7.50 index class for the alcohol Funny Cars.”

Flash forward to the present and Adam has been driving in the Heritage Series for the past several years and this season has been full of memorable moments.

Adam won the season-opening race, the March Meet, in Bakersfield. The same race Mike, his father, won in 1966. When Mike won the event it was called the U.S. Fuel and Gas Championships.

“That was the biggest race in Top Fuel at the time when my dad won it,” Adam said. “He went through 102 cars that were entered in that event and that was my dad’s biggest win. So, for us to start the year with a brand new car in 2010 and go out and win the March Meet was huge for me. That was pretty much like winning the Super Bowl or the Indy 500 for me. That’s what that race means to us.”

According to Sorokin, he is returning as the driver for Van Dyke Motorsports in the 2011 Heritage Series, but he’s optimistic one day he will be competing against NHRA stars Tony Schumacher and Larry Dixon.

“That’s what I have been eyeing for all these years to be able to play at that level of competition,” Adam said. “From the very start that’s what I wanted to do. I would love to either compete in a Top Fuel Funny Car or dragster in the NHRA, that would be a dream come true.”

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