Pro Sportsman Association
Joey Severance, Continues a Family Tradition
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Photo by David Smith
Fresh off a victory at Mission Raceway in his most recent regional start, Joey Severance will be a huge favorite at this weekend’s regional in Woodburn, Ore. He’s the defending Top Alcohol Dragster winner, the reigning Division 6
champion, and just missed winning the 2011 national championship. Oh, and he’s a co-owner of Woodburn Dragstrip and obviously knows the facility better than anyone who’ll line up against him.
“This track is a seven-days-a-week job,” says Severance, who does everything from plunging toilets to handling souvenir sales to prepping the all-concrete surface. “It’s a lot different, being on this side of things. Instead of complaining about not getting paid enough, now I’m complaining about how much money we have to pay out.”
It was Severance who collected the Top Alcohol Dragster winner’s check in each of the past two seasons at Woodburn, but nothing could have prepared him for the phenomenal success that he and his dad, Joe Sr., one of the original heroes of Pro Comp, had everywhere else last year. They entered seven divisional events, reached the final at all seven, and won five, including Woodburn.
Hard Working TA/FC racer Chris Foster
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Photo by David Smith
DAVENPORT, IA – To fans, races are won and lost by drivers, but drivers know the real truth: drag racing is a team sport. Chris Foster may be the one who’s handed the trophy at the end of the race, and it’s his name that’s listed in the
NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car points standings, but at Foster Racing, he is but one man on a 10-man team.
“We all spend a lot of time on this car,” says Foster, who won the Division 3 championship last year and the Norwalk regional event last month. “My dad and my stepdad are both semi-retired and put in a lot of time on it. My dad spends five or six hours a day working on the car and I’m here after work till midnight every night, and that really makes a difference. A race car is just like a wife – it likes lots of attention.”
Foster first attracted national attention in 2009, when he won his first NHRA event and, ultimately, that year’s Division 3 title. He began his Funny Car career in the Midwest Funny Car Association, racing off of a 7.50 Index, and progressed to UDRA in 1996, to IHRA in 2001, and, in 2006, to NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car competition, where today he is a two-time Top 10 driver, a two-time Division 3 champion, and a seven-time winner on the Lucas Oil Series tour.
Whiteleys Double up again in Tulsa
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Tulas, OK – In a performance even more impressive than their sweep of the Las Vegas race earlier this year, the husband-and-wife team of Jim and Annie Whiteley ran the table at the Lucas Oil Series regional event at Tulsa Raceway
Park. This time, both ran low e.t. in the final, Jim a 5.34 for the Top Alcohol Dragster title and Annie a 5.67 for the win in Top Alcohol Funny Car.
Jim, who already was in a commanding position for the national championship in Top Alcohol Dragster, scored for the fifth time in seven starts this year and completed a perfect regional season with his third victory, stopping Randy Meyer in the final. Meyer, who edged him for the No. 1 qualifying spot, went up in smoke not far off the line and coasted to a 7.21 at 137 mph.
“Randy’s car has been running well wherever he goes – I don’t care what the conditions have been,” Whiteley said. “I’m trying not to think too much about the championship at this point. Our goal was to win this race, and we did it.
Mercier wins TA/D; Lourie takes TA/FC for the 2nd straight year
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Photo by Dave Smith
East Nassau, NY – At the Lucas Oil Series Eastern Regional at Lebanon Valley Dragway in scenic upstate New York, Canadian Dan Mercier won Top Alcohol Dragster on Rich McPhillips’ foul and Eric Lourie ran steady 5.70s on a tricky
surface to claim the Top Alcohol Funny Car title.
Mercier and McPhillips, the top two qualifiers, had run within hundredths of a second of each other throughout eliminations until the final, where McPhillips took off too soon for a -.248 foul while Mercier scored with his slowest run of the day, 5.51. “I saw him so far out in front of me, and I said to myself, ‘Impossible,” because I knew that I had a good reaction time,” said Mercier, of LaPrairie, Quebec. “I heard yelling over the radio, but I couldn’t tell for sure what they were saying, so I just stayed on it to the end, just to be sure.”
It was Mercier’s first final-round appearance in exactly a year, since he had virtually the same e.t. and same reaction time that won this year’s final in a close 5.52-5.51 holeshot loss to Dan Page here last year. Mercier was within three-thousandths of a second of both his reaction time and his e.t. from the 2011 final, but it proved irrelevant when McPhillips, who qualified No. 1 with the only run all weekend in the 5.30s, lurched off the line too soon.
Why decide? Thompson runs both TA/FC and Pro Mod
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Photo byDavid Smith
Clint Thompson doesn’t know what he likes better – Top Alcohol Funny Car or Pro Mod. So he runs both, fielding an 
Alcohol Funny Car in NHRA competition and driving Don Carter’s MBR-powered ’68 Camaro in Pro Extreme on the ADRL tour.
They’re about as similar as a hairbrush and a can of soup, and, as Thompson quickly discovered, a Pro Mod car requires a much gentler touch on the wheel than a Funny Car, which sometimes has to be manhandled to keep it in the groove.
“You get out of shape in a Funny Car, and when you get off the throttle, usually right you’re back under control,” Thompson says. “A Pro Mod keeps going for another three- or four-tenths of a second, and the next thing you know, the back end’s trying to come around. And you don’t get any warning.”
Mark Billington – For the Love of the Class
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Photo by Dave Smith
Dallas, TX – Mark Billington is a top executive for one of the biggest companies in America and looks the part. Clean-
cut, well-spoken, the consummate professional, he goes to work each morning in a suit and tie, but unlike other “suits” across the vast spectrum of Corporate America, who golf or go boating on weekends, he gets his hands dirty racing one of the most competitive Top Alcohol Funny Cars in the country.
“I’ve loved these cars since the first time I ever saw one, at Empire Dragway, when I was a teenager,” says Billington, the 2011 Division 2 Top Alcohol Funny Car champ. “My jaw hit the ground the first time one of them fired up. The firesuits, the power, the noise the engines made – I knew I had to have one someday.”
Billington, 48, got his first one when he was 30 – not a brand-new, top-of-the-line car built just for him, but a used one he picked up from veteran racer Bobby Baucom. By then, he was several rungs up the corporate ladder in a career that has taken him to Charlotte, Orlando, Atlanta, and, last year, to Dallas. For him, business always comes first.
Whiteley Wins 5th in a Row, Williams Back On Top
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Morrison, CO – Jim Whiteley won Top Alcohol Dragster for the fifth year in a row at the Western Regional event at Bandimere Speedway, and former Division 5 champion Kirk Williams overcame quicker cars with unerring consistency to score in Top Alcohol Funny Car.
With his fourth win in his last five outings, Whiteley has tied early season points leader Chris Demke atop the national Top Alcohol Dragster standings – and he’s done it in two fewer starts. The Grand Junction, Colo., driver dominated this one from start to finish, qualifying No. 1 with a 5.47 and running more than a tenth quicker on his slowest run all weekend than any other driver did on his best.
“I tried to make sure I saw a little more of the bulb than usual before I left,” said Whiteley, whose only loss in the last five races came on a -.001 red-light in the Topeka semi’s. “It’s actually kind of hard to slow yourself down just a little bit on the Tree without slowing down a lot. We’ve had a decent advantage on the field a time or two over the years, especially here, but never this much.”
Alcohol Funny Car Pilot Paul Gill Races His Way
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Photo by David Smith
Paul Gill doesn’t look around to see how everyone else does things. Doing it his way has made him one of the leading Alcohol Funny Car drivers of the past 15 years, with multiple national event titles and five divisional victories since
the late 1990s.
Just don’t look for him in the Top 10. Gill doesn’t run enough races to contend for championships – doesn’t particularly want to. He hasn’t finished in the top 15 in years, but nobody else with national rankings like his over the past 10 years – 16th, 29th, 39th, 35th, 49th, 34th, 33rd, 30th, 27th, and 17th – was a legitimate contender to win every race he entered. Gill was.
Just last year, Gill ventured west to the back-to-back-to-back events that close each season – the Big O Tires Nationals at Las Vegas, the divisional race there, and the NHRA Finals at Pomona – and set low e.t. at two of three, just missing the 5.40s at Pomona with a 5.50. The week before that, he had a very tough field that included national event winners Jay Payne, John Lombardo Jr., Clint Thompson, Doug Gordon, and Steve Gasparrelli covered by almost a full tenth of a second.
Reichert, Ferro Survive Close Calls For Pivotal Wins
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Photos by David Smith
Joliet, IL – If Bill Reichert ends up with a record sixth Top Alcohol Dragster championship this year, he can look back on the Midwest Regional at Route 66 Raceway outside Chicago and know that it probably wouldn’t have happened if he
hadn’t won this race. In Top Alcohol Funny Car, Mickey Ferro, who crashed at the Jegs Allstars race in his last appearance here, prevailed over perhaps the best field ever assembled.
“We really, really needed this,” said Reichert, who was upset in the first round in his first two regional appearances, in Indianapolis and Norwalk. Under the new format introduced this year, national championships are determined by each driver’s best three of five regional events and best seven of 10 nationals – not five of eight divisionals and five of eight nationals, as in years past – so after Reichert’s early exits at his first two regionals, he absolutely had to sweep three straight for a perfect regional score.
Severance, Gasparrelli lead Mission wire to wire
Written by Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association
Mission, BC – Joey Severance dominated Top Alcohol Dragster at the LORDCO Auto Parts BC Nationals, the Western Regional event at Mission Raceway, qualifying No. 1 and setting low e.t. of all three rounds en route to victory, and
defending division champ Steve Gasparrelli did likewise in Top Alcohol Funny Car.
Severance was the only driver in the 5.30s and the only one to crack to 270 mph in qualifying with a best of 5.35, 270.86, half a tenth ahead of eventual runner-up Ray Martin’s 5.40. He established low e.t. of the meet on his first-round single with a 5.33.
Martin ran a competitive 5.44 in the opening round to take out Greg Sereda’s 5.58, and Canadian Gord Gingles dipped into the 5.30s with a career-best 5.39 in a win over quick-leaving Greg Hunter. Gingles fouled away a 5.41 in the semi’s opposite Severance’s 5.369, and Martin moved to within striking distance of Severance with a 5.372 on his semifinal single.
