UPDATE - LAUGHLIN EARNS NHRA TOP FUEL LICENSE

If drag racer Alex Laughlin were a major league baseball player, he'd be known as a utility player. In other words, he's a jack of all trades and has pretty much mastered all of them.

"That's really what I should've done because I'd make a lot more money, for sure," Laughlin admitted.

For the record, Laughlin has licensed and raced an NHRA Pro Stocker, a Pro Modified, an A/Fuel Dragster, and has even won behind the wheel of a Radial vs. The World car, essentially a Pro Modified car on drag radial tires.

Coming soon to his resume, a Top Fuel dragster which he plans to run at the NHRA Dodge Mile High Nationals.

"I was supposed to run Pro Mod in Denver, but after not running very well in Ohio, we've kind of been seeing ourselves fall behind a little bit in Pro Mod," Laughlin explained. "Going to Denver wasn't going to do much for us as far as learning things or trying to do better. And so Richard [Freeman] wanted to take Denver off to be able to start finding some more horsepower, updating the engines. I had some pretty big sponsor obligations to be there. It's a huge market for Havoline; they just opened a bunch of new stores there, the Havoline Xpress lubes. They had a bunch of people coming out to the race, so not showing up certainly wasn't an option.

"Obviously, Pro Stock isn't running there either, so I couldn't just run Pro Stock instead. And I started thinking what my options possibly could be after not being able to find another Pro Mod car that I could hop into for the weekend. So I'm looking at the other pro categories and I've got a Dragster, a Funny Car, or a Pro Stock Bike. And I didn't see my size being very competitive on a motorcycle. Though I would like to ride one sometime just to be able to say I've done it. And then Funny Car I haven't really ever had a huge interest in, but it's been a full season running an A-Fuel Dragster with Anthony Dicero, and thought that's the closest thing to any experience that I have whatsoever and probably the most realistic."

Enter the working man's Top Fuel favorite Scott Palmer, a true blue-collar drag racer who still understands the value of the throttle whack in the pits.

"One call led to another and I ended up with Scott Palmer," Laughlin said. "He said that he's got two cars already loaded in the rig. He said he wished he would have had a little more notice, but that's kind of the way the world works these days, everything is last minute. He just did exactly whatever it took to pull this off."

The plan calls for Laughlin to begin the licensing process on Sunday in Wichita, Kansas, and on Monday, if all the pieces of the project fall into place, he'll register for the NHRA Mile High Nationals on Monday morning.

Because he's experienced success behind the wheel of an A/Fuel dragster, Laughlin believes his track record with the dragster will take out some of the intimidation factors generally associated with Top Fuel.

"It's literally the same process from starting a car to doing the burnout, backing up, staging, and hitting the gas. It's all step by step, exactly the same. So that helps, that I already understand the process and have that muscle memory. The only thing that's going to be the wake up call, whenever that thing doesn't stop pulling until the finish line."

Muscle memory is one thing. Keeping the assignments on par with the car he's driving used to be tough, but now he's as versatile as they come.

"In the beginning, it was difficult, but I guess I've just done it so much now so many times, different cars, different types of cars, from everything within drag racing all the way up to everything else I've raised from shifter cars, legend cars, tractor puller, all kinds of stuff," Laughlin explained. "So I think that I've been lucky to be able to have done all of these other things that really help my brain slow everything down and process exactly what's happening, one step at a time. Even though it's happening in tenths of a second, you can process it even faster than that."

Having that many irons in the fire has been challenging for Laughlin, and to this point, he hasn't been burned by the experience.

"Done a little bit of all of it, I guess," Laughlin said. "I've been lucky to be successful in all of them so far."