Brandon Welch took care of the hard part first. The former Funny Car racer has acquired sponsors for his first season in a dragster, beginning with new-to-drag-racing Better Diesel. All he needed to do at this weekend’s test session at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was earn his Top Fuel license.

He laughed. “Yeah, no pressure,” he said. “I’m having fever dreams about getting my license, because we just set up a fully sponsored race the week after my last chance to get my license – but no pressure.

He regarded this PRO-sponsored preseason event that’s wound down last Saturday as his last chance – at least before the season kickoff next weekend at Pomona, Calif. But he was optimistic he could complete the procedure in the freshly branded Better Diesel Dragster that he and cousin Tyson Porlas own together.

“God forbid if it doesn't work, we'll find another time to run the car and we'll get it done,” Welch said on the first day.

He didn’t have to worry – he had it all wrapped up before lunch Saturday.

By virtue of a 4.4-second elapsed time at 285 mph Thursday and a 4.238-second run Saturday morning, Welch achieved a nearly lifelong goal.

“I feel amazing! Unreal to be licensed in Top Fuel and Funny Car at the same time. This is beyond my childhood dreams,” Welch said Saturday after his accomplishment.

Both full passes, he said, “required me to pedal through tire shake. Good practice for Sundays. This car will run a lot better when the track isn’t so unforgiving and we can just run A to B.” 

Welch came to this testing session with a head start on his licensing procedure. Veteran Top Fuel racer Pat Dakin gave Welch’s dragster a strong shakedown on this same dragstrip last November, qualifying it 15th in the field for the Dodge NHRA Nationals with a 3.848-second elapsed time. Dakin lost in the first round. But he made an impressive showing, considering that making the field wasn’t the team’s goal at all that weekend. It was merely to prep the car for Welch’s first-ever test passes in the dragster – an any dragster.

Nostalgia nitro Funny Car racer John Lawson is dealing with a horrible loss as a result of a fire at his race garage Feb. 3 in Joliet, Ill. #DragRacingNews #nhra #Winternats - https://t.co/R393VDalNb pic.twitter.com/miO8bNscPq

— Competition Plus (@competitionplus) February 7, 2020

So the car was ready that Monday following the race. Welch’s task was to make one ambiguously labeled “moderate” pass, followed by two full passes.

“We got the moderate run done, but we had trouble with the track that Monday following Vegas,” he said. “It shook really bad in one run, and it carried the front wheels and moved me to the wall another run, so I had to lift on that. We didn't blow it up, but we hurt the engine enough that we couldn't use it again. We had a problem with the bearings and camshaft, and it was hurt.

“We went through two motors at that race, and I couldn't get all the parts to put my other motors together in time for Vegas. So that was a lesson hard learned, and I made sure we had four motors in the trailer for this weekend,” Welch said. “And we always go to every race with four motors and eight racks of pistons and eight clutch packs and all that, because we just we just can't have parts be our issue. There's too much invested in this and too much we have going for our sponsors to allow lack of preparation with parts to keep us from running the car.”

It’s all logical – and all really expensive.

“That was the trick. As we left Vegas [last fall], I built a big long list of parts I had to buy,” Welch said, “and even the little stuff for these race cars is expensive. So it all adds up to a big number. My credit card was getting worn out for this. It’s part of nitro racing, though. It's kind of silly to be a nitro team owner and complain about costs, because it is what it is. It costs what it costs.

“What's interesting is, I've noticed, this sport is a different world because nobody really talks about price,” he said. “You need something, you order it and then you get the bill and whatever the price is, the price is. So sometimes people respond kind of funny when I ask, ‘What does that cost?’ And I don't know how many I want to order yet, because I need to know how much they cost. Something that you think would be a couple hundred dollars might be 12-hundred dollars. You just don't know until you ask, and a lot of the websites don't have a price on there and the catalogs don't have the price on there. And everyone might get a different price, depending on who you are, so that happens, too. It's always a little bit of detective work to figure out how much something is going to cost before you actually pay for it. We all want to stretch the money we raise as far as possible and do as much racing as possible for the money raised. Even if we were sitting on $2 million dollars, we'd still be watching how much we're spending, because you want to stretch that $2 million dollars out.”

Welch debuted the first of several sponsors this week at Las Vegas and said he plans to announce more as his part-time season unfolds.

“We’re introducing Better Diesel to NHRA drag racing – brand-new sponsor to the sport,” he said. “They make a fuel additive for big rigs and diesel pick-up trucks and make the engines produce less soot and thus give the engines longer life and more power – and the filters last a lot longer. Better Diesel makes a great product for truckers and for people who own heavy-duty diesel pickups. There's a lot of those in NHRA fandom. So they're joining us. They're really excited about our story and the family tie that we have with my cousin and me.”

Welch and Porlas are grandsons of the late Funny Car pioneer Chuck Beal. They worked for about half of their lives on their granddad’s race cars before Welch took over the seat here at Las Vegas in 2015. After Beal’s passing in July 2017, they decided for a variety of reasons to switch to the Top Fuel class. That’s why Welch has been seeking his crossover license.

“We have six races planned. We’ll be introducing a couple more primary sponsors along the way. But we're kicking it off with Better Diesel. We've got the first half of the year covered, and we're in negotiations on the second half of the year. And the six could grow beyond, so it just all depends on how these deals come through,” Welch said.

When he said “the first half of the year,” he is referring to the races he has selected, not the first half of the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series schedule.

His plan is to start competing at Pomona, Las Vegas, and Sonoma. That, he said, would constitute his “first half of the year.” Then, he said, “potentially we can keep going to Seattle and then Las Vegas and Pomona again. Then we have interest in people running Dallas and a couple of the other races. Maybe Indy. It all just depends on funding.”

Welch said his strategy is to stagger his sponsorship announcements so no one gets lost or overshadowed by another.

“I wanted to make sure to announce Better Diesel because our races are so far apart. We’ll announce when we're going to be at a race and who the sponsor is. So I think that's a fair way to do it. Everybody gets a little bit of publicity because we're not running 18 races or even 12 races,” he said. “My thought is it's a little bit newsworthy that we're going to be there and then who's supporting us and all that. So it allows us also to modify our plans as the year goes on depending on how all of our conversations go.”