Top Alcohol Dragster pilot Garrett Bateman experienced dizzying highs and terrifying lows at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the weeks before the NHRA Finals in Pomona, Ca. His triumphant victory behind the wheel of Rick and Linda Henkelman’s HipLink A/Fueler at the NHRA Toyota Nationals was following by an enormous explosion at the regional event one week later.

In a display of what nitromethane can do when compressed, a failure in the valve train led to a cylinder being filled with nitro where it would hydraulic and leave a gaping hole in the cylinder head and engine block. Damage from the concussion and the fire left Bateman and Tyson Parker, son of Top Alcohol Funny Car driver Russ, scrambling to make repairs in time for the first round of qualifying. The 5.24 that Bateman recorded was one of the most gratifying runs of the versatile driver’s career considering the monumental effort that went into it.

“We had to replumb it, rewire it, replace the frame rail,” said Bateman. “Tyson Parker did the upper frame rail – he worked for his uncle Randy Parker, the chassis builder – at Shane Westerfield’s shop on Monday night. Then we had to build the motor. The injector was ripped off of it, so we had to rebuild the injector because that’s a specific one that we like to run. 

“At 600 or 700 feet down the race track, I saw the mags go skipping by. It burned the coils off and melted the boxes off, so we basically had to rebuild the car from behind the driver. And we were thrashing until 10 minutes before we had to get up there. I mean, the chutes cables weren’t ready yet. It’s just Tyson and I. Brandon [Henkelman] is our crew chief, and he couldn’t get here today. I’m just really proud of Rick and Tyson. Rick didn’t want to quit. Tyson volunteered to stay with me instead of going home and working. We just busted butt every day and fixed it. And it had three holes out on that run. 

“What a story. The panels are burnt on the side. It’s got new panels Tyson had to build. The bucket was blown off of it, we repaired it. So it kind of looks like a junkyard dog, but it runs like a striped-ass ape. That’s crazy to me, but I’m happy.”

Henkelman added, “All the grace goes to these two guys [Bateman and Parker]. Every single aspect of the car was affected. And the trick is finding every single one of those things and fixing them. It’ll hide from you in plain sight, but we found every single one of them. And that run I just did, we dropped one hole at 3.8, one at 4.1, and one at 5.2. This is a whole different motor, and it’s just an adjustment to fix that.  

“All it did [on the explosion] was it broke a tip off a push rod. That’s all it takes. That exhaust valve no longer opens and shuts, so it just keeps filling with nitro and pretty soon you’ve got a hydraulic. It does two things: it explodes the nitro out of pressure and tries to expand liquid; you can’t do that. Whatever is in its way is going to leave, and it did. I’ve been doing this A/Fuel thing for 20 years. I’ve never had anything like that happen to me.”