Spencer Massey has 18 career NHRA Top Fuel national event wins. Massey has proven he can beat the best in the business, but he has been living a different racing life for the last several years.
Massey competes in high-dollar bracket races and drives a limited Top Fuel NHRA schedule for Pat Dakin’s team.
Massey will compete in the Top Fuel class at the Gatornationals at Gainesville, Fla., March 10-12.
“For the last few years, since really back when he (Pat) had cancer, and so forth, I’ve been driving all the races that he normally would do,” Massey said. “Of course, Pat’s good now; he got cured two years ago, but he still wanted me to continue to drive. So that’s what I’ve been doing. That’s what we’re doing this year. We’re just going to continue with all his normal schedule like we did last year.”
Massey said there will be a couple of different scenarios this year, though, just because he and his girlfriend, Danielle Waits, are expecting their first child.
“We’re having a baby girl, and the (due date) is May 11, so we’re going to have to skip with me driving Charlotte, and we’re thinking about Chicago; it’s up in the air still, depending on whenever we have the baby,” Massey said.
Before competing at the Gators, Massey battled in the 3rd Annual BTE King of the Coast Top Bulb 150 presented by David McMurtry Engines March 3-5 at Gulfport (Miss.) Dragway.
Massey won the gambler’s race on March 3 and pocketed $2,500 and then captured the title at the March 5 race, winning ten rounds and earning $14,500. He won both races in his dragster.
“I was Gulfport, Miss., bracket racing, and then I will ease on over to Gainesville. I’m actually going down to Ocala (Fla.) for an NHRA deal and do all the meet and great stuff for the fanfest on Wednesday (March 8),” Massey said. “It was definitely a very good week in Gulfport. On Sunday (March 5), you have to have some lucky rounds, which is always a plus, and there are times when you have to make up the difference to win it, and Sunday was my day. My dragster was amazing.”
At Gulfport, Massey drove his dragster and 1971 Nova. “There were 150 entries,” Massey said. “It’s maxed at 150 entries. It wasn’t an index; it’s whatever your car runs. It’s all eighth-mile and if your car will run, like my Nova runs 6.30s, so whatever I want to dial in, I just dial in on the shoe polish on the window, and with my dragster, it’ll run 4.60 to 4.70, so whatever I want to dial it in with the dragster, that’s what I dial in.
“With bracket racing and Sportsman racing, anybody with an eight-second car all the way down to a four-second car, we compete against each other and win the same amount of money. Like last year, I raced in The Million dollar bracket race out in Vegas, Peter Biondo’s race, in my Nova. It runs 6.40s up on the mountain out there, and that’s only an eight-mile, but I made it to the final round and I broke out by two-thousandths of a second worse than the guy that beat me in his dragster, but still I made $65,000 in a street car.”
Races like Gulfport and Vegas are what attract Massey to bracket racing.
“Any Sportsman racer who just has a little bracket car that has fun still has the potential to win big money and have fun,” he said. Competing in Top Fuel on a limited basis with Dakin also is satisfying for Massey.
“There’s no pressure with competing the full season,” Massey said. “There’s no pressure with having to please sponsors, so to say because the only sponsor that there is — is Mr. Pat Dakin from Commercial Metal Fabrications and myself. That’s the cool thing about it, and all the crew guys have been on Pat’s team since the beginning. They’re all we consider family, and what Pat considers family, and so that’s why we like just to come out, and I like to keep my skills sharpened up as much as I can on the reaction times and driving these things.
“Taking off a couple of years back in 2016 and 2017, without driving full-time, it definitely caught up with me because I started driving again really back in 2018, 2019, 2020, I felt myself behind the eight ball. The more I do it, the more I catch back up with the race car because these things are animals, going 320 mph.”
Massey, who won the 2009 Auto Club Road to the Future award while driving in Top Fuel for NHRA legend Don Prudhomme, went on to win a total of 18 national events while driving for “The Snake” and, later, Don Schumacher Racing before leaving the class after the Brainerd (Minn.) event in August of 2015, when he was released from the DSR team. Massey’s last Top Fuel national event victory came at the Gatornationals on March 15, 2015, in Gainesville.
Dakin, who has been racing Top Fuel since the 1970s and is a member of the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, is a longtime friend of Massey.
“We normally do eight to 10 races,” Massey said of Dakin’s team. “That’s generally what we do. Last year, I believe we did eight races, maybe nine, I forget. This year, if I skip a couple with the (baby) being born, then we might make up a couple later in the season. Or Pat might decide he might just want to drive again. You never know with that guy.”
