Call them grumpy old men – or just two Top Fuel drivers and pioneers of drag racing who have a great time teasing one another.

Chris Karamesines and Luigi Novelli, both from the Chicago area, had their well-honed entertainment shtick in high gear in the pits Friday before qualifying began.

Karamesines assured that he wouldn’t subject his car to all the trauma it went through here last year in qualifying. He was on track to post a 3.9-second run, but his Lucas Oil Dragster suffered extensive damage. The input shaft broke and trashed the clutch and the engine. His crew chief, Dennis Swearingen said the car “went from 5.6 Gs to minus-1 in a thousandth of a second. There’s just too much damage. It sheered the flywheel studs and beat up everything in the bellhousing.” So he didn’t have time to fix the damage and missed the show.

But the octogenarian – who allegedly is 85 years old but won’t swear to anything much past 39 – said he didn’t expect any of that kind of trouble this weekend.

“Nah. Everything’s going to be fine. It’s going to be wonderful,” Karamesines said.

Pressed for the reason he was so sure, he said, “I have no idea, but we’ll figure it out.”

He said nothing noteworthy was going on in his organization: “Nothing yet. We’re just going to try and do our best here and see what happens. As long as we can beat Novelli, we don’t care.”

Does he really have a rivalry going with Novelli?

“Nah,” Karamesines said. “Just his age. He’s just too old to be driving a race car.”

Novelli, transparent about the fact he’ll be 74 years old in December, reacted with mock annoyance when he found out Karamesines accused him of being too old to be driving a race car.

“I got news for him – he’s ancient. He should have quit 20 years ago,” Novelli said.

The owner-driver of the National Machine Repair Dragster, said they poke fun at each other “all the time” and that their silly sniping has been going on for “30 years, maybe 40.”

Novelli emphasized, “Don’t forget – he started probably [19]58, ’59. I started by ’61. We go back, you know, a long, long time. But, you know, he’s a little bit older and he’s a little bit, supposedly wiser. I doubt it.”

Asked if he thinks he’s wiser than Karamesines, Novelli (who described the state of his team as “same old stuff, same old cars, same old Luigi the old guy, same old working, same old everything”) indicted both of them.

He said, “If we were wise, we wouldn’t be doing this and spending all our money.”