Paul Lee enjoyed his best season as a nitro Funny Car driver in 2024, and so incredible as it was, he’s not intimidated by the prospect of improving his performance in 2025.
Lee believes he had a team capable of running at the front of the pack in 2024, and he’s planning on more of the same in 2025 with freshman nitro tuner Jonnie Linberg and his mentor John Medlen. They’ll kick it off in a few weeks in Bradenton, Fla., during the PRO SuperStar Shootout.
“We’re going to start right where we left off,” Lee said. “It took us a half a year last year to really hit our stride with Johnny Linberg as the crew chief and John Medlen as the Consultant, and it was our first year together, so it took us about a half a season to come together.
“By Seattle, when we went to the final, he was hitting his stride, and then the back half of the year, the second part, was just building on what we did the first part of the year. So now we have a good baseline not to have to build a program, but start where we left off.”
Lee believes that with a better first half of the season, one where he was supposedly “down” with seven top-half-of-the-field qualifying efforts after missing the NHRA New England Nationals due to other obligations, he would have clearly qualified for the Countdown. He doubled the round wins that he had to this point in 2023.
In the second half, it was not hard to see the momentum shift. Lee raced to two final rounds, winning the Pep Boys All-Star Callout during the U.S. Nationals. Though Lee fell short of the Countdown by 12 points, his final round at the Ford Performance NHRA Nationals in Las Vegas showcased a time no longer hungry, but one ready to bite their way to the top.
Lee understands that getting solidly into the Countdown takes a full season of success. His goal for 2025 is to provide more of the same as he ended the season.
“There’s pride knowing we accomplished what we did with a car funded 90 percent by our businesses,” Lee explained. “We’re battling up against guys with budgets twice to three times more than what we are, so it does feel really good to be able to run with those guys with way bigger budgets than we do.”
Forget the top-half qualifying and round wins; Lee smiles when he sees the measure of a team’s success with the drag racing fans.
“I have more people wanting a hero card now,” Lee proclaimed. “Before, they didn’t want any hero cards. I had to pay people to take them. Now I’m getting people to actually ask for them.”
Last year’s success took Lee back to his days in Top Alcohol Funny Car when his team reached the final rounds regularly and came away with wins and top-ten finishes.
“We were a big fish in a smaller pond,” Lee explained. “Now we’re a small fish in a big pond. It’s just the tremendous amount of resources that it takes, both financial and personnel, to run one of these cars, which is beyond what I ever thought it was going to be 20 years ago.
“And you got to have the funding to get the right people, and even then you need the right combination of chemistry with the right people. So yeah, I definitely miss going rounds. That’s why I’m out here. I’m not out here to go down the track. I’m not out here to be a participant. I’m out here to try to win, and I still have that desire to want to beat the other guy in the other lane, which is just as bad as I did 25, 30 years ago.”
And while Lee is considered a small fish in a sea of Great White sharks, he’s reminded that a piranha is not significant in stature but delivers a nasty bite.
“I guess that’s what we are now because the guys that are in the top five teams out there have pretty big budgets, and we don’t have that,” Lee said. ‘So that gives us more satisfaction. Matter of fact, most of the parts and pieces that we have, we bought from the guys that are ahead of us, so we don’t have brand new shiny cars and bodies and blocks and heads and all that stuff. We have all their used stuff. That’s what we’re running with. We don’t skimp on the rotating assemblies and clutch parts, but other than that, all our stuff is used stuff that we bought from the guys that we’re trying to beat.”
“Last year was a great learning season for our first-year team, and when it comes for a first-year team, I would say it was really greatly successful.”
As Lee puts it, if that doesn’t equate to hunger, he’s not sure what does. He’s planning to make a serious dent in the Funny Car ecosystem.
