There’s a simple way employees of Tasca Automotive Group can see where they stand with the company, according to its vice-president, Bob Tasca III.

“I can tell you the No. 1 service advisor in my company, No. 1 salesperson, No. 1 technician, No. 1 service manager, No. 1 general manager,” he said. “I can tell you the last-place ones. The truth be told, if you are at the bottom of the pile in our company, you have a lot of pressure on you to either improve or leave.”

And similarly, he said, that’s the same manner in which “racing flushes people out.”

That may explain why Tasca wasn’t satisfied finishing third and fourth the past two years, respectively, in NHRA’s Funny Car standings. He won three times in each of those seasons, but his competitive fire to be on top necessitated changes in his racing team.

Mike Neff and John Shaffer, the guys running the race team and making the tuning calls the past three seasons, are out. The reins, Tasca announced last week, have been handed to a pair of veterans, Aaron Brooks and Todd Okuhara.

It was a somewhat late announcement, given that there’s less than a month before the 2023 season opener in Gainesville, Florida, but a move Tasca believed was in order given the way 2022 played out.

 

 

Tasca was red hot during the summer, at one point holding a 19-3 record in eliminations from Norwalk, where he was runner-up, through Brainerd, which he won. But once summer turned to fall and the Countdown to the Championship began, Funny Car racing turned into a two-man duel between Robert Hight and Ron Capps, with the latter prevailing in the season finale at Pomona. Tasca finished behind those two and Matt Hagan, and was a distant 178 points off Capps’ championship pace.

“We had a great year last year through the summer. It's good for TV, it's good for your sponsors, but it doesn't win you a championship,” Tasca said. “The bottom line is that the cars that really competed for the championship, when the tracks got really good, they ran at the top of the page. We struggled early in the season and we struggled again at the end of the year. We didn't have a car that was going to run with Robert and Capps and Hagan when the tracks got really cool.”

That oh-so-evident shortcoming had to be addressed, so Tasca brought together Brooks and Okuhara, long-time employees of Don Schumacher Racing who haven’t tuned nitro cars together. Brooks’ background also includes time with team owner Don Prudhomme, and he tuned Doug Foley’s Top Fuel dragster in 2022. Okuhara worked at DSR from 2005-2022 on Jack Beckman’s Funny Car entries and the Top Fuel entries for Leah Pruett and Tony Schumacher.

“I love their dynamic, you know what I mean?,” Tasca said. “They're not one crew chief, and you've got co-crew chiefs that if one crew chief says jump, the other one says, ‘How high?’

“I've been in those situations, and my car has always run the best when you have two real independent thinkers that challenge one another. Ultimately, the scoreboard has no friends. Whoever made the call, felt more passionate about it, you're going to find out real quick if it was the right decision or not. So I think you're going to see great dialogue between Todd and Aaron. I'm really excited about seeing what they can do with this race car.”

Brooks and Okuhara come into a situation that isn’t a reclamation project or missing the pieces that are needed to put a No. 1 on the side of Tasca’s Mustang.

“It's not a broken program,” Tasca said. “They both came in and said, ‘Listen, what Mike and John did was fantastic. We're going to take their set-up and move forward from there.’ 

‘We're not going to start from scratch, that's for sure. We had a great car, we just need to get it to run better when the conditions are really good. I think you'll see them test a lot this upcoming couple of months, as we go through testing plus the race season. Those first five races, which I think are really critical because the conditions are typically really, really good. Then in the summer we’ll probably fall back to more of what we did for the last two years.

“Truthfully, in '21 and '22, we had a pretty dominant car through the summer and then get ready for the championship run. So it's certainly not the best car that runs through the summer (that) has the best chance to win the championship because the conditions are so much different. I'm excited about seeing what Todd and Aaron can do together.”

Tasca’s season didn’t really get traction until late June. That’s when he made his first final-round appearance, falling to Hight in the championship round. Hight took top honors again at the ensuing race at Denver, but the following week, it was Tasca in victory lane with a win over John Force at Sonoma.

Hight beat J.R. Todd in the Seattle finale to close out the annual Western Swing, but when the series next convened at Topeka, it was Tasca again getting the better of Force. At Brainerd, the next event, Tasca outraced Capps to the finish line for the Wally.

Tasca lost in the semifinals of the U.S. Nationals to end the regular season, then faced these results during the Countdown:

– Second-round loss at Reading;
– Second-round loss at Charlotte;
– Second-round loss at St. Louis;
– Semifinal loss at Dallas;
– Semifinal loss at Las Vegas;
– Semifinal loss at Pomona.

 

 

To put it another way, Tasca won only nine of a possible 24 rounds during the Countdown, or 37.5% of his duels.

It was a disappointing way to see championship hopes fizzle away, week by week. Tasca compared the on-track demands to those of the family’s automotive group in terms of a bar that’s set extremely high.

“I think in business and racing you just keep going,” he said. “At the end of the day, shit happens. Some of the shit is planned, some of the shit is well-executed, other shit just happens. You just got to pick up and move forward. That's what I did at the end of last year; wasn't a planned event. It just happened, and shit happens. For me, I took it as an opportunity to say, ‘OK, how do I get better? What am I looking for? How do I want to change the whole makeup of the race car?’ I think I've done that in a very big way with Aaron and Todd.”

Tasca described Brooks as “thrilled” with his new environment because he’s “never had the inventory that he has in a very long time – probably since the Morgan Lucas days –  where I’ve got parts and pieces that his eyes were wide open.

“Todd is ... A lot of people don't know this, but he's a big reason why I'm back in racing. When I was part-time (12 races from 2015-17), he was tuning my car. When I first came back with Eric Lane, he was tuning my car with Eric. So Todd's been a close friend of mine for many, many years. I have an awful lot of respect for Todd and his knowledge of the industry and tuning these cars. …

“Again, my car's not broken and we got all the data over the last couple of years with Mike and John. We're going to take that data and let them twist the knobs a little bit different, to be quite frank. The goal is to come out swinging in Gainesville without missing a beat.”

Tasca juggles his hectic racing slate and a more hectic business scenario. When the Rhode Island native began racing in 2008 in Top Alcohol Funny Car, there were two Tasca dealerships. Now, the company has dealerships in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Missouri.

“So we’re a national platform now, and I've really focused on continuing that growth both on and off the racetrack. But my main business is our auto group. It feeds the race team. I'm very fortunate to have great sponsors with PPG and BG and Ford and Motorcraft, but it takes even more than what they give me to run this car. … Without Tasca Automotive Group, there would be no Tasca Racing. The growth has allowed us to continue to race and it's been exciting for me. We've been winning on the track and we've been winning off the track. My grandfather coined that phrase, ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.’ We've gone from a single-point Ford store back in the '60s to a 30-rooftop automotive group all across the country. So it's been an exciting journey.”

Tasca doesn’t have time to reflect on his accomplishments on or off the track for one simple reason: He’s always looking forward.

“I do say ‘Wow!’ at the talent that we've amassed. I guess one of the greatest privileges for me is to work with the men and women across our platform, now almost 2,000 employees across the country. It's really special for me, and I've said to a lot of people that have asked, ‘I haven't bought a car dealership in many years, I've just invested in people.’ I think that's what has allowed us to grow, is our investment in incredible talent across the country. … 

“Invest in the best people you can. Put them in a position to win with a lot of the resources we bring to the table with our management company, how we index our stores against one another. Everything is indexed from first place to last place. I've got that from racing. … Well, in business, there's many industries and people that I can assure you go home every day and they don't know if they won or lost. I call it ‘living in the gray.’ Well, in our company, if you're a salesman, an F&I person, service advisor, business development person, manager, you go home every single day from my company and you know exactly if you're winning and losing. Because we index all the critical positions in our company, no different than drag racing.

“That's how any healthy organization flushes people out. The winners win, the middle of the pack people know what they have to do to keep winning. Those that are losing, first and foremost, it's on us to make sure that they're in a position to win with training and resources. But after that, it comes down to you, right? You've got to go and figure it out. If you do in our company, you can grow exponentially. If you can't, you won't be with us long. I tell every new acquisition that we make, ‘The only way you don't like working with Bob Tasca or the Tasca Automotive family is if you're OK with losing. If you’re OK losing, you're not going to have a lot of fun with me.”

Three-plus months will have passed since Tasca’s last run at Pomona 2022 and his first testing shot in Gainesville next week. Tasca says he’s always found a way through his years in a nitro car that works for him; i.e., ease up on it as each season starts anew.

“It's funny, everyone says, ‘Do you hope you didn't forget how to drive?’ But the first thing that goes through my mind is I hope I didn't forget how to stop – so, just going through the routine, getting the parachutes out,” he said. “The first run, I never take it to the lights, although sometimes you want to, it feels so good. I guess to some degree it's like riding a bike – it instantly comes back to you.

He added, “This race car will find your mistake. It's more about the team getting up to speed than even me, to be honest with you. Just first day, go real slow. Everything about that first day is just go slow. Make sure the car is serviced right, the checklists are done. You get back into that rhythm. Anything doesn't sound right, look right, smell right, just stop – we're not in Indy going for the win. So to me, it's just getting everyone back in the rhythm, back in the routine.

“Then it's awesome because by the third day, fourth day, fifth day, sixth day of testing – we're going to probably have about six days of testing between next week and the week of the race – it's like, boom, these guys just start to get into a routine.”

And that’s something that allows Tasca to ease back into his routine as a driver.

“I think as a driver, I feed off of them. When you see them that first day struggling to put the thing together because it's been a little while, right? It's like, ‘OK, fellas, let's just go slow.’ Then you just see them start to pick up the pace. For me, that gets me going. So no, we'll be just fine. Every guy on the team has got experience, which is unlike last year. Last year, I actually had a bunch of new crew guys that had no experience. So from the crew position, I feel more confident, truthfully, than I did going into last year. The crew chiefs, I'm excited for them, I really am. I said to Todd and Aaron, ‘I'm excited for you guys. I've put you in a position to win.’ They're incredibly talented guys. These are not rookie crew chiefs. They've got an incredible amount of experience. They get a great program they're walking into.

“I'm excited about some new ideas. I was with Mike and John for three years and, truthfully, sometimes you can get a little stiff. At the end of the day, we need some new ideas, we need some new blood, the car has to get better. No one is going to tell you that my car was good enough those last three or four races to win the championship. It wasn't. I think we're going to get some new ideas. I haven't been this excited … in a long time getting to a race and seeing what this team can do.”