The thoughts that run through a drag racer’s mind when they are washing their rig after a weekend of drag racing are limitless, and for Top Fuel “super part-timer” T.J. Zizzo, his reflection process was challenging. That’s because his cell phone was blowing up.
“They haven’t stopped since Friday,” Zizzo admitted. “Probably four minutes, maybe less, than after we made our first pass. My phone hasn’t stopped. I mean, right now, as I’m doing my interview.”
It’s a good thing Zizzo’s mobile service isn’t like the old days when customers were charged by the minutes and text messaging rates applied. If that were the case, Zizzo wouldn’t have the budget to pull off an improbable feat like he and his Rust-Oleum team did last Friday at the NHRA Route 66 Nationals outside of Chicago.
In his first run of the season, Zizzo made the quickest run of the session, a 3.763, 329.58, which was almost .08 quicker than No. 2 Justin Ashley. While some might have downplayed the feat, Zizzo returned in the second session and took the top spot with a 3.735, 331.77.
Indeed, it wouldn’t hold through Saturday, many so-called experts speculated.
Then, in a much warmer Q-3 session, Zizzo made the quickest run of Top Fuel, even with a slowed 3.888. And even though his car smoked the tires at the hit during Q-4, Zizzo stood his ground and claimed the No. 1 qualifier.
Eventually, the clock struck midnight in Zizzo’s Cinderella Story in the second round of eliminations to another Cinderella in Dan Mercier, but it hardly mattered. Zizzo was already playing with house money at that point.
“I was out there washing our semi yesterday and stuff, kind of moving on with life, right? You move on, you continue your process,” Zizzo said. “And our crew Chief Mike Kern texted me late last night, and he goes, ‘Hey, I’m just putting my feet on the ground, realizing just what we did and what we accomplished as a team that hasn’t been out there, that a team is green, that we had new stuff on the car.”
“All those things. And he’s just going on and on, and he’s just like, ‘I just can’t believe it, and it’s spectacular,” and I think that’s when it hit me, like, ‘Yeah, that was special.”
Special? Yes. Unbelievable, No.
“I never realized is there have only been 117 number one qualifiers in Top Fuel in the history of the class,” Zizzo explained. “That stat to me is mind-blowing, thinking how many competitors there have been. Maybe it was harder to do what we did than it is to win. I’m not sure yet. I don’t know how many winners there’s been in Top Fuel, but pretty amazing.”
When you have as small of a serving size as Zizzo’s Rust-Oleum team has in a season, every achievement appears to be a milestone. That’s because it is. Zizzo’s limited schedule holds stops at the Norwalk Nationals, June 27-30 (Norwalk, Ohio), the historic U.S. Nationals, the iconic Norwalk Night Under Fire, August 3 (Norwalk, Ohio), August 28-September 2 (Indianapolis, Indiana) and the Midwest Nationals, September 27-29 (St. Louis, Missouri).
“In our body shop world, we perform tasks every day and make them look routine,” Zizzo said. “So we get up, we go to the shop, we go to work, right? We expect to do good things because we do it every day. This is our profession.
“Racing is not my profession. Racing is not any of our guys’ profession. Not one person. Usually a team like us, they have one guy in the shop full time and he does a little bit of everything. We have nobody here full-time. We have zero. Don Schumacher was always amazed. He’s like, ‘How do you even do that on a limited basis with no employees? It’s crazy.”
“I think it means way more to go out there and accomplish what we did doing it on a limited basis.”
Zizzo said the best way to describe his team is the drag racing version of a volunteer fire department. They aren’t full-time professional firefighters but will run into a burning building without a second thought to get the job done.
“We have a fire department right next door to us,” Zizzo said. “Now, it’s not volunteer, but I have known people who have worked at volunteer fire departments, like a smaller town where you drive to the fire from your house or whatever. That’s exactly what we are. That’s exactly what we are. Where we’re trained to do what we do, but we don’t do it full-time. So we’re not going to be quite as good as someone that’s laying in bed waiting for the bell to ring.”
So when the bell rings at Zizzo Racing, his team understands the importance of springing into action without hesitation.
“We have limited runs,” Zizzo said. “We make 25 runs a year. Some of these [full-time teams] make 25 runs before they go to the first race. It’s probably an exaggeration. So every run we make is important. That’s why we don’t skimp on blower belts or burst panels in the supercharger, tires, or whatever. We have the best of what we have on the car all the time because we can’t afford to say, “Oh, we should have put that $400 blower belt on for that pass.
“But the negative with that, is it costs us more per pass because we’re doing it that way, right? We’re making sure the best stuff is available all the time, and that kind of sucks because it’s super expensive to do it our way too, but it’s okay.”
Zizzo relishes the “super part-timer” designation but is quick to add that the formula to making it work is not Secret Squirrel-level clearance. He’ll share the trick with anyone who will listen.
“We made the formula as a team back in 2013,” Zizzo said. “That’s when we really realized. One of our long-time team members, Tony Smith, said, ‘Hey T.J., when we signed a contract with Rust-Oleum coming up, do you think you can get more money to do less races?” Because with Peak, it was you got to go to all these races for X amount of dollars, and we’re like, ‘Yeah, okay. Yeah, great. You know, let’s do that. We get to go to more races.”
“It didn’t help us. It hurt us. So, the formula is pretty simple. Just leave your ego at the door. Know you can make sound decisions at the shop, and you do not need to be at the track to make those decisions because everyone that starts out in the sport says, ‘Oh my God, the more races we go to, the more marketing partners we could find.”
“No. What it does is it wears out the team, it wears out your parts, and you go there, and you maybe do well once, and then you can’t get your act together because you don’t have the parts to do it.”
Zizzo says you must ensure there are enough parts and pieces to make eight runs in a weekend before you hit the track.
“Once again, that’s expensive,” Zizzo said. “So part-time guys want to have just part-time pieces. Well, you can’t do that either. And then you need a team that is willing to sacrifice their time and make sure that they show up at the shop every Tuesday and every Sunday with very few exceptions unless you got something going on, then you’re going to make up the time somewhere else. So you got to dedicate at least 12 hours of your time every week to the program. And there’s a lot of us doing that. So there is no secret formula other than just trying just all those things I just mentioned.”
