Matt Hagan starts of the DSR Pre-Kansas Reports

Semifinal finish creates confidence for Hagan, Mopar team heading to Topeka after Monday’s rain-delayed Southern Nationals
Topeka, KS – Matt Hagan is excited. That’s because the 2011 NHRA Funny Car champion knows his Rocky Boots/Mopar team is close to flexing the muscle that saw Hagan win a category-best five Funny Car event titles last year.

“Right now it’s kind of a crazy deal with the weather,” Matt said. “Everyone expected to be home on Monday, but we raced in Atlanta instead so the guys had a lot of work to do before they left for Topeka. And they’ll have one less day to do it.

“Hopefully we have great weather in Topeka and the fans are always great on the Memorial holiday weekend. We’re going to have Rocky (Boots) on board for Topeka and we’re still looking to get a win for those guys. They’ve been supporting us and there’s no reason we can’t win for them in Topeka this weekend. It would be my first win there if we can pull it off; we’re just looking to get it done.”

Hagan, who owns 10 career NHRA Funny Cars wins, will fly the colors of Rocky Boots on his Dodge Charger R/T flopper for the second time this season. The popular driver who regularly Tweets with fans from his Twitter handle @MattHagan_FC, will promote Rocky Boots and meet with fans in Kansas’ state capitol city at Vanderbilt’s (3021 SW Topeka Blvd.) from 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursday.

A day later, he and his Rocky Boots team will hit the strip at Heartland Park as the Virginia cattle farmer hopes to build on the momentum his team experienced last weekend near Atlanta with a top-four finish after qualifying fourth.

“The car has really started running well and we’re coming off of our best qualifying effort of the season and our best finish since the Winternationals back in February when we went to the championship round,” Hagan said.
“It’s coming back around performance-wise, but Topeka will be a whole different animal than what we saw in Atlanta. I have all the confidence in the world in (crew chief Dickie Venables) and this team and I can’t wait to get to Topeka see more improvement from this team. We’re definitely going in the right direction and I’m excited.”

Massey hopes momentum of winning at Atlanta helps Battery Extender team continue winning ways this weekend at Heartland Park Topeka

– Spencer Massey knows the importance of momentum on the NHRA Mello Drag Racing Series circuit.

The 2009 NHRA Road to the Future rookie award winner hopes that a win at Atlanta Dragway on Monday during the rain-delayed Southern Nationals sparks his Battery Extender Powered by Schumacher team to another final-round effort at Heartland Park Topeka in Kansas this weekend.

“It was really important that we got a win early in the season,” Massey said of his 15th career NHRA win. “With the stretch of nine races in 11 weekends coming up we really needed to get some momentum going. It’s just a huge boost in confidence for everyone with this Battery Extender team.

“We felt like we were stuck in a second-round slump and that’s definitely over now. This is the time of year where our team gets stronger. In 2011 we won both Topeka and Englishtown (N.J.), so we’ll be trying to repeat that and go for three in a row. That’s definitely tough to do but I have a lot of confidence in this team that we can do it.”

Massey earned his first win with DSR at the Topeka track in 2011. He now has 13 wins behind the wheel of his Phil Shuler and Todd Okuhara-tuned dragster and has earned four victories in each of his previous three years under the DSR banner (2011-13).

“I like racing at Topeka,” Massey, a two-time Heartland Park finalist, said. “It’s a good racetrack and sees great fan support on the Memorial holiday weekend. I used to race a lot in Topeka because it wasn’t too much of a haul from Dallas, so I’ve been going there for many years.

“It’s also a track that has a special place in my heart because that’s where I got my first win with DSR in 2011. We went to the finals there the year after that too, so it’s really been a good track for this Battery Extender team. We just need to keep up our past success there and it’s great to try and do that coming off a win.”

Beckman, 2014 Valvoline team hope to regain magic of 2012 at Topeka

– Much like two years ago, this season has been a year of transition for 15-time NHRA Funny Car winner “Fast Jack” Beckman.

Following the completion of the fourth race of the season at Las Vegas two years ago, Jack experienced a major conversion of his Dodge Charger R/T team when Don Schumacher Racing switched his crew chief and crew with another DSR team. Four races later, Jack and his new team celebrated together in the winner’s circle at Heartland Park Topeka.

Jack, who is mired in the midst of a 34-race winless drought that dates back to September 2012, would like nothing more than to revisit the events of two years ago with his 2014 Valvoline squad that started this season with a new crew chief in veteran tuner Rob Flynn and nearly all new crew.

Further complicating racing in successive weekends was a one-day rain delay and a body destroying incident on Saturday at Atlanta Dragway.

“The team is going to scramble back to the shop and switch bodies for that race and drop off the parts that need to be repaired,” he said after an engine explosion destroyed his primary Valvoline MaxLife Dodge Charger R/T body in the final qualifying session. “You don’t have time to take a breath. We’ll go to Topeka and there’s another race the after that in New Jersey. Then as you look down the road you’re going to have 11 more of them in a relatively short period of time.”

Jack and his Valvoline MaxLife team are facing a bit of adversity, not only in the NHRA Mello Yello Funny Car standings, but to gear up for consecutive races in Kansas and New Jersey before an off week of NHRA action to give the team a breather and the chance to gather itself before a run of four straight races in June and early July.

“You can’t go into a slump right now,” Jack said. “You’ve got to stay in the Countdown (to the Championship) and there are two really good cars that aren’t in right now. We have to keep our position up, we have to win rounds. You usually win rounds by making good qualifying runs and you do that by having good data to go off of. We’re not going to use what we learned in Atlanta. The racetrack was an issue, the weather was an issue and then we had a parts failure on our fastest qualifying run. It is what it is. We’ll move on to Topeka”

Jack, who dropped one spot to seventh in points, needs a get-healthy weekend. The 2012 NHRA Funny Car champion advanced to the final round two races ago near Houston. Now, four win lights on the same Sunday are the perfect remedy for the Valvoline team.

Capps confident in NAPA team’s experience heading to Topeka

– With 41 NHRA event titles and more than 500 round wins under his belt, there aren’t too many drivers with more experience than Ron Capps.

Some drivers may fret about losing a day of preparation before a race but not Capps. After Mother Nature washed out Sunday’s elimination rounds of the Southern Nationals near NAPA AUTO PARTS headquarters in Atlanta, the NHRA teams were forced to race on Monday.

Capps, who has moved up one spot to fourth in the NHRA Mello Yello Funny Car standings, drove his NAPA Dodge Charger R/T to a top-three finish on Monday at Atlanta Dragway. The “Monday Nationals” means his team will have to tap into their Carlyle Tools bag of NAPA Know How as they have one less day to prepare for this weekend’s Memorial Day affair at Heartland Park Topeka in Kansas.

“Some teams might struggle with losing a day of preparation because we raced in Atlanta on Monday, but not this NAPA AUTO PARTS team,” Ron said. “We have the best crew guys in the business. With the equipment that we have and the Carlyle Tools that Don (Schumacher) gives us, it’s not a big deal.

“That’s another benefit of having a crew chief like Rahn Tobler. Going from the conditions that we had in Atlanta to Topeka that we know is going to be completely different and then somewhere different after that the next week in Englishtown (N.J.) it pays to have a guy as experienced as Rahn Tobler; and crew guys that can prepare the car as well as they do for every run. It’s not going to affect us having a short week at all.”

With his track record at Heartland Park, it shouldn’t affect Capps’ crew one bit. Topeka is one of the better tracks for the NAPA driver. The veteran racer has been to the final round at Heartland Park five times with three Wally trophies that read “Topeka” sitting on his mantle at his home in Carlsbad, Calif.

“Topeka has been good to me. We’ve been to the finals there a few times and have wins there in 2009 and ’06 for DSR. I know that with this team that any racetrack we go to we have the potential to win so we’ll be re

Brown, Matco Tools team looking for race day success at Topeka
– Antron Brown has tasted success at Heartland Park Topeka. Just not on race day.

The 44-time NHRA winner, who has an average qualifying position of 2.86 in seven races this season, is a three-time pole winner at Heartland Park. Yet he has never advanced further than the semifinals and that was in his rookie season as a Top Fuel driver in 2008. In his last five trips to the Sunflower State, the 2012 NHRA Top Fuel champion hasn’t advanced past the second round of eliminations.

“It’s going to take some solid laps and that starts off in qualifying and getting a good qualifying spot,” he said. “We’re going to take it one run at a time. That track can be tricky. It can be really good then it can get slimy and slippery. It’s always been tricky, but we’re going to work hard to tame it and race smart.”

NHRA series sponsor Mello Yello started a new tradition in 2014, rewarding the pole-sitter with a race-specific green No. 1 Qualifier Mello Yello Drag Racing Series hat. While starting from the No. 1 spot is great, the hat Brown and his Matco Tools/U.S. Army team want to be donning at the end of the weekend is the bright yellow Mello Yello national event winner hat. And that would be the eighth Mello Yello winner’s hat in Brown’s collection and fourth of 2014.

“We’ve always wanted to win at Heartland Park,” Brown said. “I think the problem is we’ve always wanted to win there so bad. But we are going to go in there this year and try a little different method. We’re going to take it one round at a time like we have at every race this year and hopefully some of the chips will fall our way. Hopefully we can sneak out of there with a little gold man from Topeka and a day later tell him ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore Wally’.”