Four years ago, Ryan Peery became a motorcycle drag racer and finished second in AMRA’s Funny Bike points.
Three years ago, Peery won AMRA’s Funny Bike championship.
Two years ago, a testing crash put his racing on the back burner as he rebuilt the bike for Top Fuel Harley competition.
One year ago, Peery made his Top Fuel Harley debut by qualifying No. 1 at AHDRA’s Rockingham (N.C.) Dragway race and reached the final round.
Now, on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021, Perry leads the standings in AHDRA and AMRA, and he’s won back-to-back NHRA events to pull within two points of reigning champ Randal Andras with one race remaining. (NHRA will not officially recognize a Top Fuel Harley titleist this season.)
“I always focus on the work ahead, but when I do get a little bit of time off, it’s like, ‘Man, I can’t believe what I’ve been doing,’ ” Perry said on the heels of his NHRA win in Pennsylvania. “I’ve run three AMRA, three AHDRA, been to three NHRAs; qualified third or better at just about all of them; and been to the finals in all but two or three of them. It’s been an incredible season.”
That type of performance stems from his decision to take a buyout from his job designing railroad infrastructure and focus on racing for one full year. The Milford, Ohio, native is also making his mark as a consultant to other teams/racers — when, that is, he’s not swamped with work preparing his 2020 Weekend bike for its next outings.
“What Randal did last year, winning six out of eight NHRA races, that can’t be duplicated — but I’m having a pretty good season,” he said. “I’m happy already and grateful for everyone that’s helped me and where I am right now. Even if I’m not a champion in any of them, I’ve had a great season.”
Peery didn’t attend the NHRA season opener at Gainesville, Fla., but he began his rampage soon after.
He won the AHDRA kickoff at Commerce, Ga., when his mentor, Jay Turner, suffered engine damage in a semifinals win and couldn’t return for the trophy run. Peery captured the next event, at Rockingham, over Jimmy McMillon, then took down Tracey Kile at Columbus, Ohio. He’s 27 points ahead of Kile going into this weekend’s eighth-mile race at Orangeburg, S.C. (Sept. 17-18). The AHDRA’s season capper is Oct. 1-3 at Norwalk, Ohio.
Peery got his first NHRA national-event victory in his first NHRA final-round appearance. That came on Labor Day weekend in the U.S. Nationals, and in spectacular, highly unusual fashion.
Peery, who qualified No 3 in the racers’ lone pro-class qualifying shot, KO’d Andras in the opening round of action. In the semis, against Bob Malloy, Perry ran the quickest time of the event, 6.498 seconds at 209.49 mph, to advance. In the finals against Tyler Wilson … well, let him explain what happened.
“Knock on wood, I got lucky there,” Peery said. “My parachute popped right at the starting line, and I ran the whole final run with the chute out. Chute popped right when I hit the throttle, and I ran 6.69, 196, with the chute out and still won.
“My bike just likes that load on it, and it kept pulling. I got around Tyler before probably the eighth-mile or sooner, and just never saw him after that. Nothing felt abnormal. I didn’t even know the chute came off til I turned off the end of the track and Amanda Busick was right there with a microphone in my face, and she goes, ‘How does it feel to go to your first final and win here at the U.S. Nationals — and you did it with your chute out?” I said, ‘I didn’t even know it was out.’
“Sometimes you’ve got luck on your side, and it was on my side that day. The fact that the bike was only 2/10ths slower with the chute out than it ran in the semifinals tells you we put a good tune-up in it.”
He didn’t need Indy’s type of good fortune the following Sunday at Maple Grove Raceway in Mohnton, Pa. Peery again was the No. 3 qualifier, then edged Keystone State favorite Rich Breeland, 6.549 to 6.62. Malloy red-lighted in the semifinals, and Peery made the most of that gift in the final pairing. His best-of-the-day 6.497 was more than enough to conquer Bill Jackson’s 7.01.
There’s no time to revel in success, though, as the upcoming AHDRA show at Orangeburg will be the third of seven consecutive weekends of action for Peery.
That will be followed by AMRA at Bowling Green, AHDRA at Norwalk, the NHRA’s Top Fuel Harley finale at the Texas Motorplex, and AMRA’s return to Rockingham. A three-week break precedes the AHDRA season capper at Gainesville, Fla., on Nov. 6-7.
“It’s kinda weird,” he said. “The first half of the year took four months to get through, and we’ll finish the last half in two months.”
He spent much of the summer lull prepping for Bristol, Indy and Maple Grove, then headed to Turner’s headquarters in Julian, N.C., to make preparations for Orangeburg and beyond.
“There’s always plenty of maintenance between races: grinding clutches, servicing the bike, honing cylinders, re-buttoning piston, re-ringing them,” he said.
“I basically have three sets of top-end: cylinders, pistons, rods and heads. And I have to spend time grinding clutch discs, which is a nuisance, but that’s where all the magic happens. You’ve got to have clutch packs ready to go.”
Peery opts to run 17 discs in his clutch pack — nine fiber, eight steel — from three manufacturers. He can grind a fiber-based plate “a couple of times” before it’s used up. With steel plates, Peery starts with the thickest he can obtain and grinds them until they’re too thin to perform anymore. A six-run race weekend, multiplied by 17 plates, means Peery has to have 102 clutch plates ready for competition before the show begins.
“You’ve got to have the perfect clutch-pack thickness to go in your clutch pack in the housing. Your clutch hat is all set up with the weights and fingers and air gaps. It’s got to be perfect. I’m within plus or minus 1/1,000th of an inch,” Peery said. “All those plates make the clutch pack, and that pack has to be the perfect thickness. You’ve got to hit that number perfectly, and we’ve got a jig we put it in to measure all that.
“The motor’s gonna do what it wants to do, and in order to get that power to the back wheel, it’s got to go through that clutch system. That’s what tuning is, is getting that motor running right, and getting that power through the clutch to the wheel.”
That’s something that Peery has excelled at this season with crewman Buddy Johnson, Top Fuel and Funny Bike rider Chris Smith, and input from Turner’s Rex Harris. Peery said that Turner has been, and remains, an important component in his 2021 ascent.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Jay Turner or having the success I’m having,” Peery said. “I do tune my own bike, I do work and wrench on my own bike. When I built this bike, Jay is the reason I got this bike built and that it’s running the way it is. We stripped this down to the chassis; front-halved the whole thing.
“I couldn’t have done that without Jay and his knowledge. Rex gave me the baseline tune-up, and I’ve run with it from there. And they still help me when I need it. I’d like to think I’ve helped them in return. I’m not doing it on my own, but I do a lot myself, and I have them to lean on if I need help.”
He may have to do that again to pull off a possible triple-title sweep, including one-upping Andras at the Texas Motorplex for the unofficial NHRA crown.
Or maybe he’ll just keep doing what he’s been doing to this point without missing a beat.
