The new year brings new developments to Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park as less than two months remain before the 35th annual NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series event on the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix.

One big development is a new title-rights sponsor for the Feb. 22-24, 2019, NHRA Arizona Nationals that soon will be announced. This marks a great way to start a season that shows the growth and popularity for the second Mello Yello event of 2019 and confidence marketing partners have in the future of the Motorsports Park.

Top Fuel fan favorite Scott Palmer will remain with Tommy Thompson Motorsports in 2019, campaigning the Magic Dry Organic Absorbent Top Fuel dragster in the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series.
 
"I'm honored and humbled that Tommy wants to keep us around for another year," Palmer said. "Our relationship goes far beyond racing. We're good friends and partners and I know I have the best supporter in all of motorsports. We are going to do everything we can to bring attention and hopefully a bunch of trophies to the entire Midwest Organics family."
 
Midwest Organics Executive Vice President Don Corsette said extending Palmer's contract was an easy decision for the company. "Scott is such a likable guy and a true racer in every sense," Corsette said. "His interaction with the fans and the reaction he gets from people in the pits makes him the perfect ambassador for Magic Dry and CatSpot. He's definitely moved the needle for us and helped expose race fans to what we're doing with our all-natural, 100-percent organic products."

They were once fierce competitors on the drag strip, but Joey Martin of Joey Martin Race Cars (JMRC), is now determined to help fellow chassis builder and Pro Mod driver Dan Parker continue to fulfill his need for speed.

Next March will mark six years since a devastating racing accident left Parker 100-percent blind, but as he likes to say, "I'm not a blind man who wants to go racing; I'm a racer who happened to go blind." To that end, the Columbus, GA-based driver is currently building a 2008 Corvette in which he plans to become the world's fastest blind man, aiming for the 200-mph mark.

The new Starting Line Club at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park will open in time for the Feb. 22-24 NHRA Arizona Nationals and tickets are on sale now.

The Starting Line Club is the entire ground floor of the track’s original three-story Brown Tower and is the only luxury VIP suite to offer seating less than 30 feet from where 11,000-horsepower nitro machines will launch at the 35th annual NHRA national event at the Gila River Indian Community facility near Phoenix.

The number of guests will be limited to around 60 each day.

This wasn’t the direct career path Norm Boutot Jr. set out on.

Boutot lived in South Florida as a youngster, and then moved back to Fort Lauderdale when he was 19.

“I loved the ocean and I always wanted to study sharks and be a marine biologist,” Boutot said.

The marine biologist path didn’t materialize, but the motorsports door did open for Boutot.

The NMCA Muscle Car Nationals will host five Chevrolet Performance Challenge Series events in 2019. The five-race series that is focused on modern LS/LT performance will be run during the NMCA All-Star Nationals at Atlanta Dragway (Commerce, GA) April 4-7, Homecoming at Memphis International Raceway (Millington, TN) May 2-5, NMRA/NMCA Nitto Tire Super Bowl of Street Legal Drag Racing at Route 66 Raceway (Joliet, IL) July 25-28, NMCA All-American Nationals at Summit Motorsports Park (Norwalk, OH) August 22-25, and the NMCA World Street Finals at Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis September 19-22. 

Bob Vandergriff Jr. revealed to CompetitionPlus.com that Top Fuel driver Blake Alexander has opted to leave his team.

“I was on the way to pick up my daughter from the airport (on Friday, Dec. 21) as she was coming in to visit for Christmas and I got a phone call from Blake and all he said was, ‘Hey I’m going to go in a different direction in 2019 and I just wanted you to know.’ I said. OK, and I hung up. At that point, I wasn’t planning on discussing anything. If that were his intentions and his mindset, my philosophy has always been if you don’t want to be with us then you need to go, so off he goes.”

As reported by CompetitionPlus.com last week, world championship crew chief Mike Green was going to join Bob Tasca III’s nitro Funny Car team.

Now that Green is officially onboard with Tasca Racing, he talked about his new job which is as the co-crew chief with Eric Lane on Tasca’s nitro Motorcraft/Quick Lane Racing Ford Mustang Funny Car.

“This is great,” Green said about joining Tasca. “I’m really excited about it. I was at the races last year, but I took a year off from being a crew chief (in 2018). I was working at DSR (Don Schumacher Racing) and DSM (Don Schumacher Motorsports) last year and now I’m excited to get back tuning a race car. Tasca Racing, with Eric and the guys, they did a great job getting things going last year. They made some great runs and made some progress and I think they have everything in place to be a contender and I excited to go over there and help them.”

This all new quarter-mile heads-up class will feature Turbocharged, Supercharged, and/or Nitrous Injected dragbikes on gasoline or methanol, along with nitro injected dragbikes. Minimum weight for the class will be 700 lbs. for all combinations. Complete rules for PX will be posted before the end of the year along with all other XDA classes on www.XDAracing.com.