Mention the IHRA Hall of Fame and Clay Millican can't help but break out in his trademark smile.

He is, you see, the latest racer to be selected for membership in the hall. The news was announced last week. 

And while his career accomplishments certainly justify his inclusion among IHRA's most elite, news of the selection feels a bit strange to the driver who won six consecutive Top Fuel titles and a sanctioning body-record 51 national events.

“It's one of those things where it's awesome that people recognize what we did, and at the same time you have that little thought in the back of your head like, ‘Hey, I'm still doing this,’ ” Millican said during the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals last weekend. “Me and Mike are still out here battling away at it, but to be recognized it's just crazy to me. It's what we did. It was a super-special time.

“I saw (then-team owner) Peter Lehman … comment that it could have been the most dominating stretch of motorsports ever, and that's pretty cool to even think that.”

In the team’s first full season, 2000, with Mike Kloeber calling the shots as the crew chief, Millican came within seven points of winning the IHRA championship. The following season, the Werner Enterprises-sponsored operation began a blitz the likes of which professional drag racing has never seen.

In 2001, Millican won a record six IHRA national events in a row. The next year, he shattered the mark with 11 victories, and followed that with 10 more in 2003. In ’04, he won seven times and qualified No. 1 on 11 occasions. In 2005, his nine wins included a 4.48-second quarter-mile blast at Rockingham (N.C.) Dragway that remains the IHRA record. He capped the astonishing run of titles in 2006 with four wins in six final-round appearances. 

“That group of people was amazing,” Millican said. “Every person that was involved with that whole thing from day one, we ate, slept and breathed racecar. That is all we did, period. Lots of hours, lots of work, lots of work until people got sick. There was more than once somebody had to go to the emergency room from dehydration or just from …”

“… chopping the end of their finger off,” Kloeber interjected.

“… or even Peter trying to make sure we ate well,” Millican said. “He scalded himself trying to fix pasta or something.”

“I got food poisoning,” Kloeber said.

“That wasn’t from Peter’s cooking, though,” Millican added.

During much of their IHRA reign, Millican and Kloeber’s crew remained intact. The operation was based in Millican’s hometown of Drummond, Tenn., and the long-time crew members included Justin Crosslin, Jamond Haug, Keelin Hooten, Buggy Johnson and Chris Martin. Crosslin and Martin now work for the Capco Racing teams of Steve Torrence (winner of the past three NHRA Top Fuel titles) and his father, Billy.

“An amazing group of people — amazing group,” Millican said. “It’s a lifetime's worth of stories in that seven years that we did that.”

Tops on the victory list was the team’s dominance at Rockingham Dragway, where Millican was triumphant 11 times in a row from 2000-2005. Cory McClenathan downed Andrew Cowin in the 2006 Spring Nationals, then Millican captured the World Finals to make his streak at Rockingham 12 out of 13.

“If they had a drag race at Rockingham, you wouldn’t have to ask us twice, that’s for sure, ” Millican said. “Man, oh, man, I love Rockingham. Just the whole thing. Steve Earwood (track owner), the whole shooting match.”

Millican has been competing exclusively in NHRA for more than the past decade, advancing to the final round 16 times and collecting three victories. While that’s nothing like the kind of success to which he and Kloeber were accustomed in IHRA, it’s evidence that a comparatively underfunded Stringer Performance team — compared to Kalitta, Schumacher and Torrence, that is — still possesses some of its forerunner’s touch. During the 2018 season, for example, the Stringer dragster set the NHRA elapsed-time record at 3.628 seconds and Millican captured two of his three NHRA career Wallys.

“It’s really great to see Clay get recognized and put in the Hall of Fame,” Kloeber said. “He certainly deserves to be in there. We still today get people at every NHRA race that we go to that remember the Werner car, the Werner days, and how dominant we were so on so forth and how well our car ran in the NHRA events when we brought it over. There's no weekend that goes by that we don't get a recollection from somebody.” 

Hang on … Millican wants in on that comment.

“The thing is for me, I'm the one everybody talks to about all this, but that was a group,” Millican said. “The core group was, what, six or seven of us, Mike? Jamond would come in every race weekend, and the rest were essentially all full-time. We say it all the time — family — but we were 100%, live together non-stop. That’s all there is to it.”

He added, “When we showed up and didn’t win, we were all disappointed. I had raced enough in the sportsman series to know you weren’t supposed to win like that, but somehow it kept happening. It was an incredible run, not often that comes around. I’m awful proud of my IHRA record.”