Wes Distefano is having a career-best season, but his work for 2021 is far from complete.

Entering the Aug. 12-14 PDRA Northern Nationals in Mohnton, Pa., Distefano holds a 354-point lead over Daryl Stewart in the Pro Outlaw 632 standings. Distefano has appeared in the finals of all six PDRA events this season, and he’s a three-time winner in those showings in his bid to repeat as champ.

“After the win at Budd’s Creek, we came to Virginia Motorsports Park with a whole different program,” said the 40-year-old Distefano, who lives near Pontiac, Mich. “New intake, new transmission ratios, new gear ratios, different tires on the back.

“We just don’t rest. That’s kind of my personality; just never satisfied. It doesn’t matter if we’re No. 1, we try to treat each round as if we were out there racing ourselves — kind of like it’s an individual sport: If you’re playing golf, you’re going to try to shoot your best game, and that’s how we treat everything. We’re focused on our program, and I’m focused on my driving; nothing else.”

Distefano was the runner-up to Jimmy Pelcarsky at GALOT Motorsports Park to start the season; won at Bowling Green, Ky., and set the class record at 4.105 seconds; took runner-up to Stewart at Norwalk; beat Dillon Voss at Budd’s Creek, Md.; was runner-up to Stewart in the first of two July races at VMP; and ousted Voss in VMP’s ProStars event two weeks later.

He achieved that success with the help of crew chief Troy Russell, and crewmen Sergio Fusco, Greg Chaudoin, and Shawne Russell, who is Troy’s wife. Troy has been a part of Distefano’s program since Day One.

The team won the 2020 championship after coming up just short in a duel with Johnny Pluchino a year earlier in their PDRA rookie season.

“There were two or three cars that were all running real close to each other last year,” Distefano said. “We were going to finals and not getting wins. Finally, in the fifth race, at GALOT — we had runner-upped four times in a row — went up against Dillon. Dillon had run a (4.)15 or 16 and we were at 19-20, but I got a good reaction time on him and was able to get there first for our first and only win of the year. 

“I think we locked up the points going into the World Finals at Virginia. We had had some trouble before with the car not shifting out of second gear … found out it was shifting but there was no second gear. We didn’t have time to change it, so our last two runs, we were basically doing neutral drops at half track where I’d hurry up and slap it into third gear.  It was good for me as a driver to know I played a big part in clinching that championship.”

It’s been a rapid ascent for Distefano and the Shameless Racing team, but it’s a rise that has definitely had its peaks and valleys as he and Troy Russell constantly pushed the envelope.

Distefano grew up in the metro Detroit area, and a neighbor of his grandmother ran an Indy-type car out of a nearby shop.

“I would walk in there as a kid and bug those guys and ask them questions,” he said. “I was always into cars, all the way back to me and my brother playing with our Hot Wheels cars.  We used to go to a lot of circle-track races, both dirt and asphalt, and a little bit of drag racing when we were kids.

“As a teenager, I lived in a few different places. I happened to live down the street from Norwalk (Summit Motorsports Park) and went there a couple of times when I was a young teenager. I went a few more times with my cousins up to Milan (Mich.) Dragway, so I always had an interest in it.”

After high school, Distefano enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, then opted for a community college, and he finished with a degree in Business Management at Michigan’s Oakland University. Once he had a “pretty decent-paying job and my life was settled,” he set out to build his dream car, a 1967 Camaro. He first, though, obtained a ’98 Camaro convertible with an LS2 engine that made about 500 horsepower. More upgrades followed on that ride until his father showed him a photo of a ’67 Camaro he’d found for sale.

“It had a 509 with a single (nitrous) kit on it and some 295 drag radials,” Distefano said. He eventually tweaked the car, and its nitrous input, until the car went from 9.60s in the quarter-mile to a 9.13.

“But the tires, down the whole track, were going ‘eek, eek, eek, eek,’ because I was just right on the edge of that set-up and that tire,” he said. “By that point, I was pretty well hooked into drag racing. I was looking for a heads-up class to get into because that stuff always appealed to me more than bracket racing.”

That led him to Milan Dragway, which had started a 632 class with a 3,000-pound minimum weight. In 2015, he took the car to Advanced Chassis in Antwerp, Ohio, where Russell worked and where he first laid eyes, and hands, on the car. A new front half and some measures to lighten the Camaro were to be the extent of the upgrades, but …

“They ended up adding a bunch more stuff, and I ended up doing some wiring and other stuff,” Russell said. “I asked, ‘Hey, can I go to the track with you, we’ll get this thing lined out.’ ‘Oh, OK, that’d be great.’ So I go to the track for the day, we made some passes, and Dave (David Swallow, Distefano’s stepfather and racing benefactor) said, ‘What do I owe you?’ ‘Nothing. I enjoy going to the track.’

“I don’t get to go to the track alot, working in a chassis shop. Most of the cars we work on, we get 90% done and send them down the road. It went from that to, ‘Hey, what do you think about doing this full-time?’ ‘Doing what?’ ”

And with that, and the addition of Russell’s friend Daniel Porcasi, Shameless Racing was born.

They spent a couple of years running 632 events wherever they could, and on its best days and with great weather, the car would dip into the 4.70s.

“We were qualifying about the middle of the pack and we’d go one or two rounds, at best, but we were having a good time,” Distefano said. “But we knew we wanted to do more, so we started looking for a car built for 632, and that was about when PDRA started running it.”

Distefano said he watched a multitude of videos online to see how fast drivers such as Voss, Pluchino and Ken Cartuccio were going as a way to gauge his future car’s requirements.

“I’d say, ‘Alright, we need this much horsepower based on this weight, knowing that we wanted to be able to come back and still run at our home track at Milan,” Distefano said. Those parameters prompted him to call one of the sport’s top engine builders, Pat Musi, in North Carolina.

“I said, ‘Hey, Pat, I’m looking to run 632. I want you to build me the baddest 632 on the planet. You think you can do that?’ Of course, he accepted,” Distefano said. “He started speccing this out, and we talked about making this thing like a mini 903 -- that was the concept.”

Musi told Distefano where he could find the perfect car to suit his needs in Henry Dogay’s “Cajun Nightmare,” and Distefano bought it. He had some friends pick up the car — which he had only seen in pictures, not in person — in North Carolina and bring it to Michigan.

“When the car got dropped off at my dad’s house, that’s when I really noticed how nice the paint was on it, how nice of a car,” Distefano said. “It was just a roller at the time, but I could literally roll the car with one finger.”

Months passed before all the components to complete the build were available, and when it was finished, the car and team headed to Orlando, Fla., for some offseason testing.  Bad luck for another driver made veteran driver Dean Marinis available to Distefano for some tuning advice, and he’s helped the Shameless team when needed ever since.

The first full pass on the car produced an eighth-mile blast in the mid-4.20s, and Distefano said, “We knew right then we had a player because at the time, mid-20s was where it was at.”

In 2019, Distefano made his PDRA debut and ended up the event runner-up to Pluchino. It was there they incurred the first major mechanical issue when they melted titanium exhaust valves in a 4.19 first-round victory. That issue would become “a theme for 2019,” Distefano said. “We spent so much time fixing things that they weren’t calling us Shameless Racing, they started calling us Sleepless Racing.”

By season’s end, though, Distefano and his crew were running well enough to collect their first 632 victory, at Darlington, S.C., at the PDRA Fall Nationals.

In the season finale at VMP, Distefano ran 4.19 in the semifinals to easily take out No. 1 qualifier Jeremy Huffman, but his day ended there. Distefano’s car was five pounds underweight at the scales, and Huffman wound up winning the event. Even so, Distefano finished as the series runner-up behind Pluchino.

The Shameless team entered the fray with more than just its car. Swallow got involved as a sponsor by putting up a $14,500 purse for the 632 class at Dragway 42, and at the time, its $7,500 winner’s purse was the biggest in class history. Shameless also sponsored the 632 action at the final two races of the 2019 season, and has been the title sponsor of the Pro Outlaw 632 class in 2020-21.

In 2020, Distefano took that next step up and won the title over Voss by 315 points. The team kicked off ’21 in Florida with a $15,000 victory in the World Doorslammer Nationals, and it has been on a roll ever since.

“We’ve always done a lot of R&D. We’re constantly testing and reworking our program,” Distefano said. “Pat was doing some for us over the winter before (the 2020) season, and some of it wasn’t applied until this year.”

The gradual approach to advancements works for crew chief Troy Russell, too, as long as they’re constantly looking for something better.

“I’ve got a bike that I bracket race, and it’ll run 5.20s,” he said, “but I’m always looking for more: Let’s find a way to make this a little faster and a little faster.

“I built my wife a dragster that’s got a motorcycle engine in it. It’s 17 inches longer than a junior dragster, with a naturally aspirated 1500cc Kawasaki engine, and it runs 5.40s. I spent one winter taking 60 pounds off of it ounces at a time. … I’m always wanting to see how far we can push something.”

That’s the mindset that produced the 4.105-second record at Beech Bend Park’s dragstrip late in the spring. 

"We learn something every race. If you don’t learn something, there’s no point in going,” Russell said. “When we set the record at Bowling Green, the difference in a 4.15 pass and the 4.10 pass was 15 pounds. We changed engines, trans ratios, tires, wheels, some other stuff, and went (4.)15 in the first round of qualifying.”

In the second time-trial pass, “the thing hiked the wheels off the hit and tried to go to the moon,” Distefano said. “I told Troy, ‘I don’t like this change. We can try this again, but if this doesn’t work this time, we’ve got to put it back.’ We moved the weight up about 10 inches in the car and the thing went 4.10 with a five. I had to do a double-look.”

Distefano is quick to credit his crew for the team’s success, especially the husband-wife duo of Troy and Shawne Russell. Troy says his spouse’s contributions are a key piece of Shameless’ success. 

“She measures the wheelie bars, takes tire temps, and works on the driver-side bank in the pits,” Troy said. “When we’re at home, she’s out in the shop with me helpinging me tear stuff down, looking at stuff, getting the car set up. I’m always bouncing ideas off her.

“She’s a retired science teacher, so she’s got that same mentality I do: Let’s figure this out. I’ll come home from a race and spend hours looking for ways to improve this or that. She’s the same way. She’ll go over every run from that race, looking at ETs, looking at oh-twos (oyxgen sensor readings), looking at when the car’s shut off, when the throttle shuts off, the fuel pressure. She’ll spend 8-10 hours looking at data.”

So what’s the next challenge for Distefano if he can double-up as Pro Outlaw 632 champion? He’s not certain.

“Pro Nitrous seems like a logical move based on what we do now and what we run. … It’s going to come down to budget. We’re thinking about it, we’ve looked at a coupla of things, and we’ve got some other business investments we’re looking at, so we’ve got to be mindful of that. 

“Heather and I have been married since 2009. We have a young family, and when I started this I had no kids. Now I have a son (Wesley Jr.) who’s a year and a half and a daughter (Jillian) who’s three. That all happened since I started this travel-racing stuff. To make the move into a Pro Modified or Pro Stock car, that’s not a year-to-year thing, that’s a big investment and a big commitment. Those are things we’re evaluating right now. We’re trying to see if business-wise it makes sense, and family-wise if we can make it work.

“And I couldn’t do this without my mother and stepfather, Brenda and David Swallow. David was a car nut who grew up racing and cruising on iconic Woodward Avenue (in Detroit). ‘I couldn’t race at this level or have had this success without his passion for cars and racing. He has done a ton for the 632 class and PDRA.”