The official results from Sunday’s NHRA Nationals show Maddi Gordon defeated Spencer Massey in the opening round on the way to her first Top Fuel victory.
What they don’t show is that Massey is the reason she ever got the chance.
In a sport built on thousandths of a second, where races, sponsorships and careers can hinge on taking every advantage available, Massey passed on the easiest victory of the day. Instead of accepting a free trip into the second round, he chose to wait while Gordon’s Ron Capps Motorsports team fought to bring a silent race car back to life.
He didn’t win the round but left a lasting impression on a rookie that will likely one day become a seasoned veteran like Massey, who grew up in Top Fuel, and has the life experience to prove it.
Long after Gordon’s first Wally Trophy becomes another statistic in the NHRA record book, one detail should remain attached to that victory. Before Gordon beat Tony Stewart, Shawn Langdon and Antron Brown, she first had to survive Spencer Massey.
It’s not because he gave her a race to the finish line. Instead, it’s because he waited for her, a gesture of goodwill that Gordon will never forget.
“He is a true drag racer and as soon as I got out of that race car, I jumped over and I thanked every single Spencer Massey teammate that I could find because if it wasn’t for him, none of this would have happened,” Gordon said. “That is a true drag racer and that’s what I love about this sport are people like him. And you’re absolutely right, none of this would be possible without him.”
Moments before the pair were scheduled to race, Gordon’s dragster suffered a ruptured high-pressure air line during the starting procedure.
Without air pressure, a Top Fuel engine doesn’t start, and as officials prepared to keep eliminations moving, Gordon’s afternoon appeared over before she ever reached the starting line.
Car chief Chuck Grospitch wasn’t ready to accept that ending. With Gordon strapped into the cockpit and the clock working against him, Grospitch pieced together a makeshift repair that produced just enough air pressure to fire the engine. It wasn’t a permanent fix; just enough to make it through a burnout, staging and 1000 feet of dragstrip.
He held all the cards and for Massey, he chose to sit back and let it all unfold.
He would have been well within his rights for taking the automatic round win. As expensive as Top Fuel racing is, a first round win could have made for a better bottom line.
Massey only cared about one aspect in this instance. If he were to win, he wanted to earn it.
“Obviously, things would have been a little different if they wouldn’t have been able to fix it because they wouldn’t have been able to run,” Massey said. “Who knows what would have happened at that point.”
“They sat there and asked me if they wanted me to, ‘What do you want to do? They’re telling us to fire up.’ I said, ‘Well, if they’re not making her, let’s see if they can do it, looks like they’re about to fix it.’ We just kept waiting.”
Eventually, NHRA officials instructed Massey’s team to start the car and move toward the burnout. And, even then, he found another way to buy Gordon’s crew a few more precious seconds.
“Until finally I said, ‘Hey, they’re making us fire up,'” Massey said. “‘They’re making us, so we got to do it.’ So that’s what we did.”
His burnout stretched longer than normal. His backing procedure slowed. Every extra second gave Grospitch and the Ron Capps Motorsports crew another opportunity to finish the repair.
“Burnouts are fun,” Massey said. “And I do the longest burnout on Top Fuel cars nowadays. Everybody just does the little short ones now and stops around 60 foot, where burnouts are just as fun as they run.”
He admitted there was more behind it than simply enjoying a burnout.
“With knowing that she was having a problem, I knew the car fired up,” Massey said. “I said, ‘Okay.’ So I’m letting them take their time, so I backed up slow and made sure we were in the right spot for the groove and all that stuff.”
“It didn’t hurt us. We didn’t need it to be that much more time than what we normally would, so we were fine and we wanted to put on a show for the fans and put on a show and a good race between the two of us.”
For Massey, there really wasn’t another choice for the driver who had at one time been in Gordon’s position as the young driver on a highly-sponsored Top Fuel team with mountains of expectations on his shoulders.
“We’ve never raced before and I don’t want to win a race like that for sure,” Massey said. “We wanted to make it a good race, we weren’t just going to have something handed to us.”
That’s easy to say after the fact. It’s much harder to say when a free round win with extra money is sitting in front of you. Yet, Massey never hesitated to do the right thing in the spirit of drag racing.
Those opportunities went up in smoke at half-track with Massey’s dragster, as she pulled away for the decisive win.
Gordon outran Massey, then rolled through Tony Stewart in the second round, defeated points leader Shawn Langdon in the semifinals and capped the day with a 3.786-second, 333-mph pass against Antron Brown to earn her first Top Fuel victory in only her 10th professional start.
Before she celebrated the round win with her own crew, Gordon made another stop. She walked over to Massey who was exiting the car after the loss.
“She said, ‘Thank you for waiting,'” Massey recalled. “Like I said, like I’m saying now, ‘It’s no big deal, it’s just how it goes.'”
Massey played off his gesture by reiterating, “You don’t want to have a race given to you and it’s sportsmanship.”
Massey understands exactly where Gordon is in her career because he once occupied that same place.
After driving for Don Schumacher Racing and Don Prudhomme, he now races on his own terms. He owns the equipment, chooses the races and no longer answers to the pressure that once accompanied a championship campaign.
“We’re not running for a championship or anything like that,” Massey said. “It’s just something that happens when parts fail or things happen to malfunction, but I wanted to have a race.”
“My crew chief said the same thing I did. He said, ‘Hell, I mean, obviously if I wanted to start it, we would have started it.’ But we wanted to make a race out of it.”
He also knew exactly who sat in the other lane.
“Well, we need more racers like her,” Massey said. “Obviously we need young blood in the sport and youth and energy and man, she sure has all of that it seems like.
“I’ve known her father and known of the family for a very, very long time. Great family and very good racers. So, when I heard that she was coming up to drive with Ron, I’m like, ‘Well, that’s going to happen. She’s going to be good because she was a good alcohol Funny Car driver.'”
Gordon earned the first Top Fuel victory of her career. Grospitch made sure she had a race car and Massey made sure she had a race.
“We wanted to make a drag race out of it,” Massey said. “We weren’t going to have somebody just give it to us.”
