It’s hard to believe that Justin Ashley began his preparation for Sunday’s NHRA Top Fuel championship battle a little over 14 years ago when he didn’t have a clue he’d be racing in a nitro-burning dragster.
Ashley grew up around drag racing with his father, Mike, a two-time NHRA Pro Modified champion and later a U.S. Nationals Funny Car champion. As a high school student on New York’s Long Island, Ashley was immersed in stick and ball sports. He was a sure-gloved shortstop on the baseball team, a high school quarterback for a couple of years, and later a wide receiver.
Pressure situations brought out the best in him then, and as he sees it, do the same today as a 29-year-old professional drag racer. In the first round of the In-N-Out NHRA Finals, Ashley will be thrust into the pressure cooker as he meets Antron Brown.
“I think you can’t buy experience, whether it’s in racing, business, or stick and ball sports I played,” Ashley said. “Just being in those high-pressure situations before is the best way to learn how to perform under those particular situations because whether it’s racing or stick and ball sports, I was in high-pressure situations, I succeeded. I’ve also failed.
“I think what I’ve learned is that the best way to find success is to detach yourself from the outcome and just focus on the process. To go out there, to be the very best that you can be in this instance, each and every lap down the racetrack. Then, detach from the outcome because you can’t always control what the guy in the other lane is going to do. So it taught me how to be just singularly focused on doing my job and letting the rest take care of itself.”
That’s why, in the high-pressure situations Ashley encountered in his meteoric rise up the ranks in drag racing, he appeared born for these instances. He won in his first NHRA Top Alcohol Dragster race and, three years later, reached the semi-finals in his Top Fuel debut.
In just four years of Top Fuel racing, Ashley has won 15 of 25 national event finals. He’s also won 148 rounds of competition heading into Sunday’s 2024 finale.
While there were times he appeared a giant on the drag strip, on the baseball or football field, he certainly had his limits.
“I was 5′ 6″, all of 160 pounds in high school and college,” Ashley explained. “I learned a lot of lessons from that. I played a lot in high school, fortunately. Then, by the time I got to college, I was mostly on the scout team, and I used to get beat every day like a normal scout team slot receiver would. But I used to love it.
“I think what I learned is every day the pressure that somebody might feel in a game, the same way I would feel if I got in, I felt in practice because I wasn’t getting as many reps or as many opportunities as the other guy. S,o I internalized that pressure. I love the pressure. I learned to really enjoy being in those situations because you had to. If you wanted to perform at a high level, you had to perform under pressure, and I went through some of that growing up.”
Ashley rolls to the starting line for his first round match against Brown, one of the two other drivers within striking distance of his point lead, and he definitely has something to prove.
” Always feel like I have something to prove,” Ashley said. “But the interesting thing is that I don’t feel like I have something to prove to anybody else. I feel like I always had something to prove to myself that I could always be good enough, that I could be great enough, that I can succeed, and that’s life.
“Look, no matter what the result is, I want to make clear that life goes on. But we are here to win a championship. We know what the expectations are. Internally, nobody’s going to put more pressure on ourselves than us to go out there and succeed and win a championship.”
