NHRA took a personal turn for me this weekend.
I spent a good portion of my time at Atlanta Dragway in Tim Wilkerson’s pit working on an upcoming feature story. I’ve never met a nicer group of guys. Each team member took time out of preparing Wilkerson’s Levi, Ray & Shoup Funny Car to tell me about their positions on the crew while tuning the Impala to No. 1 qualifier form. No question was too stupid or too obvious. Above all else, watching the team gave me a deeper understanding of how an NHRA team operates.
But it was on Saturday afternoon when I stood near the finish line watching the final round of Funny Car qualifications that I began to see things differently. Even from that far away, I could see Jon Gimmy holding up the body on Wilkerson’s car as final adjustments were made. Gimmy had told me earlier that holding up the Impala body is special to him. As Gimmy put it, there’s an intensity in Wilkerson’s eyes just before he makes a run down the lane like at no other time, and he is the only one to see that look. So as I watched the team from a quarter mile away, I wondered if Gimmy was seeing that look at that moment.
As it turns out, those men were no longer among the nameless crew members I’ve seen on ESPN’s NHRA broadcasts. They were men I’d met and spent time with and joked around with earlier in the weekend.
And on Sunday morning as I watched the crew pulling the car toward the staging lanes for the first round of eliminations, I felt like some heroine in a novel watching a group of warriors going off to do battle. When they returned to the hauler after the first run, they would either be the victors or the defeated.
Though each team was doing battle against the competition in the other lane, on Sunday I was looking at things through the eyes of the Wilkerson crew.
• For everyone who thinks NASCAR is the greatest form of motorsports, I beg you to attend at least one NHRA event. You will not regret it.
Drag racing has been described by at least one colleague as racing for people with short attention spans; a pass of five or six seconds is perfect for a person who has trouble staying focused for long periods of time.
That assessment is crude and wrong. No other form of motorsports provides the rush you get from watching 7,000-horsepower, nitro-burning dragsters covering a quarter-mile distance in less than five seconds at more than 300 miles per hour.
The sound of a fuel car taking off from the starting line is also something every race fan should hear in person at least once in his or her lifetime. It’s simply indescribable. As one spectator remarked to his friends as Larry Dixon’s crew warmed up his dragster Saturday morning, “There ain’t no other sound like that in the world.”
If that still doesn’t convince you, try this. Unlike in NASCAR where the top-funded teams — the Hendricks, Gibbs, Roushs, etc. — are likely to reach victory lane each and every week, in NHRA there’s no telling whether the higher-ranked qualifier will win a round or be defeated by a lower-ranked competitor. Money doesn’t always equal success, and in NHRA, sometimes David can defeat Goliath on the track.
All of this may seem like a press release or an audition for a job with the sanctioning body, but take it from me, a long time NASCAR devotee. NHRA is where it’s at.