New Season Kicks Off with New U.S. Army Teammate, New Crew Chief
Exciting New Paint Scheme at 58th NHRA Winternationals in Pomona
POMONA, CA – It’s a new-look U.S. Army Racing contingent in myriad ways as its 18th full season on the NHRA 
Mello Yello Drag Racing Series tour kicks off with this weekend’s 58th NHRA Winternationals at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona, California featuring a new teammate, a new crew chief, and an exciting new paint scheme.
First, the U.S. Army driver duo of Tony “The Sarge” Schumacher and Antron Brown, who have blazed to 11 Top Fuel world championships between them over the past 17 years, became the U.S. Army trio for 2018 with the addition of fellow Don Schumacher Racing driver Leah Pritchett and her DSR/Mopar/U.S. Army Dragster team.
Meanwhile, Schumacher opens his quest for a ninth career Top Fuel world championship and seventh career Pomona event title with a brand new crew chief and a stunning, new paint scheme for his U.S. Army Dragster for DSR.
The Sarge welcomes back an old, familiar face to DSR in the form of Mike Neff, who becomes his first new crew chief since the 2009 season. Neff’s first tour of duty at DSR began in 2001, when he was assistant crew chief for Funny Car driver Whit Bazemore. He was elevated to crew chief for the Funny Car first driven by Scotty Cannon the following season, then took on Gary Scelzi as a driver. The Neff-Scelzi combination amassed 11 event titles and 18 final rounds and the 2005 championship during its four-plus-season run. That 2005 world title, coincidentally, ended the streak of 12 consecutive championships by John Force, Neff’s previous employer from 2008 through last season. This season will be Neff’s first as crew chief of a Top Fuel effort.
Schumacher’s U.S. Army Dragster for this season is dubbed “M18-TFV,” for Model 18 Top Fuel Vehicle, and is the latest vehicle inspired by the U.S. Army. The M18-TFV takes on the look of some of the Army’s most heralded pieces of machinery, from Blackhawk helicopters to Stryker armored vehicles, with its olive drab green paint and stylish, high-tech accents. The new look was certainly a head-turner when it debuted at last weekend’s Nitro Spring Training test days in Phoenix.
Brown and his Matco Tools/U.S. Army Dragster for DSR, winner of three of the last six Top Fuel world titles, welcomes back the braintrust of crew chief Mark Oswald and assistant crew chief Brad Mason after the team bid farewell to longtime co-crew chief Brian Corradi, who took a Funny Car position at John Force Racing in the offseason. Brown, whose next Top Fuel event title with be his 50th since joining Schumacher as a second U.S. Army driver in the NHRA’s top division in 2008, is looking for his fourth career Pomona event title this weekend, his first in a season opener.
Pritchett and her DSR/Mopar/U.S. Army Dragster add a third championship-contending effort to the U.S. Army cause for the first time despite embarking on just her second full-time season in the Top Fuel ranks. Her 2017 season started with back-to-back event titles at Pomona and Phoenix, both from the No. 1 qualifying position to establish an NHRA record. She added event titles at Houston and Brainerd, Minnesota, led all Top Fuel qualifiers with six No. 1 efforts in 2017, reached six final rounds in all, and reset track records seven times during the season. Last weekend, Pritchett and her team picked up where they left off when they closed the Nitro Spring Training test days by setting the fastest unofficial 1,000-foot pass in Top Fuel history at 334.73 mph.
With nine event titles between them during the 24-event NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series campaign in 2017, the trio of Schumacher, Brown and Pritchett give the U.S. Army its best chance ever of hoisting a coveted Wally trophy at each and every event on the tour, beginning this weekend in Pomona.
Qualifying for this weekend’s 58th annual NHRA Winternationals are set for Friday and Saturday afternoons with one hour of live coverage on FS1 set for Friday at 6 p.m. EST. Three hours of live coverage of Sunday’s elimination rounds also will be carried by FS1 beginning at 4 p.m. EST.
TONY “THE SARGE” SCHUMACHER, driver of the U.S. Army Top Fuel Dragster for Don Schumacher Racing
It’s a fresh, new start for more than the usual reasons for you and the U.S. Army team in 2018 with new crew chief Mike Neff joining the fold. Your thoughts on that?
“Mike Green and the entire Army team, we had a lot of success over the years. We had a lot of great years. The last two weren’t as spectacular as we had hoped. I think, myself, even Mike Green, the Army, we just expected better results and we had to make a change. Mike is an incredibly capable guy, a fantastic crew chief, a great team leader, and everything about him is good. But we had to make a change. We needed to see results and we were running out of time for that. Mike Neff had been with DSR for a long time. He went over to Force’s and has come back. He’s never worked on a Top Fuel car before but it’s going to be exciting, a little fresh blood, a little insight in some different areas we might have overlooked. When you get a guy from Funny Car over to Top Fuel, it’s just a whole, new game. It might take a little time, it might not, but I’m excited to be a part of it.”
Your 2017 season started strong with four event finals and a win at Gainesville over the first seven race weekends. Then it seemed like a struggle from there. Have you and the team been able to put a finger on why?
“We had a big clutch disc issue. When you run out of discs and you’ve got to make a change, sometimes you just can’t get it back. We made a few changes to the car and the chassis and little things like that and we just couldn’t get the car go quicker than the other guy. That was the problem. These drag races, unlike other forms of motorsports around the world, we don’t have 500 laps to make it up, and it’s simply amazing how people step up against our car. People run extremely well against us and I like that, I enjoy it. But what happened to us last year cost us a lot of rounds. Drag racing is a special sport. You have to run well and beat the cars you’re supposed to beat, and the ones you’re not supposed to beat, you need to beat them half the time to win a championship. We had a difficult time trying to find that kind of success. We didn’t beat enough of the cars we were supposed to beat and we didn’t beat the guys who are difficult to beat. We just didn’t have the right timing. So, you have to make changes. You can’t just sit there and be stagnant. We’re a hard-working team and we’re great under adversity. We’ve won more championships digging out of these holes and figuring out how to win, anyway. When we decided to bring Mike Neff on board, I struggled a bit with that because I didn’t want it to look like we were just giving up. What we’re doing is bringing in someone new with fresh eyes to a team that still has Mike Green and still has Phil (Shuler, assistant crew chief) as part of our camp, and let him bring his insight. You know, someone who’s done Funny Cars, a heavier car, it’s just different, to have someone that’s an outsider come to Top Fuel car and say, ‘OK, let’s see what you’ve got.’ I think it’s pretty brilliant. I’m looking forward to working with Mike (Neff). He’s a great guy and he’s super calm. He’s won championships. We’ll take that knowledge and see what we can do.”
Is it of much concern that he’s never worked on a Top Fuel program?
“We’re not concerned at all. Guys who have never tuned with their hands completely in it, sometimes they get great thoughts because they are operating outside the box. We get trapped in this little box, sometimes, looking and working on the same things, seeing the same parts and pieces. I think there’s where the shakeups come. We brought in a guy who’s worked in this company before. The pool is fairly small to choose from for qualified crew chiefs who’ve won championships and know what they’re doing. It’s getting bigger, I can tell you that. The last couple of seasons, it’s been beautiful. You’ve seen more teams win and run quicker than ever in the history of the sport, and that’s the result of the big teams helping the smaller teams and trying to make the sport great. Sometimes they beat us after we help them, but that’s OK because it’s part of racing. We’re not asking them to go take dives. We’re asking them to show up and bring everything they’ve got. The bottom line is, if we win enough races, we’ll be the champs. If we don’t, we’ll have to go over to the other guy and say, ‘Hey, great job,’ because that’s the way the game is played.”
ANTRON BROWN, driver of the Matco Tools/U.S. Army Top Fuel Dragster for Don Schumacher Racing
You’re coming off a solid Nitro Spring Training weekend in Phoenix and are headed to the season opener in Pomona. Your overall thoughts on the new season?
“It’s good to be back in the trenches again. The cool part about testing is it’s like boot camp for everybody, spring training. It’s about getting the team back together, getting them to gel together and working together and just working out all the cobwebs for everybody, including myself. We haven’t been out there going 300 mph in about two months so, to get back out there and get back in season is a good feeling. We had good weather out in Phoenix. That helps build the morale and just gets us ready for the season opener. Going into Pomona, we’ve got a good setup. Not much has changed. We just got a grasp on everything and went through all the parts and pieces of everything we currently have. We’re just going to pick up where we left off last year. We had a great setup at Pomona and ran a 67 (3.67 seconds) our last pass down the racetrack, so our whole mindset is to pick up where we left off. It’s going to be warmer this year, in the mid to high 80s, which will make the racetrack challenging, but our whole Matco Tools/U.S. Army team is always looking forward to that challenge.”
How important is it to do well at Pomona in this first event of the season?
“It’s always important to get off to a great start. In hindsight, you always look at the first four races where you’re trying to build momentum. If you can get off to a great start, that really paves the way for all the other races and makes it easier. At Pomona, our first race of the year, our main focus is to go out there on Friday and have two great qualifying runs and be in the top half of the field. That’s the game plan. Then, on Saturday, you want to improve upon that and get ready for race day. And then, on race day, you want to go out there and take it one round at a time and see where we’re at.”
LEAH PRITCHETT, driver of the DSR/Mopar/U.S. Army Top Fuel Dragster for Don Schumacher Racing
After your best NHRA season to date in 2017, you seem to be back even stronger for this year with that added prestige of now racing for and representing the U.S. Army. Talk about that.
“As every year becomes slightly more surreal, this is yet another new chapter, one that carries the prestige and the honor with my two teammates of representing U.S. Army Soldiers around the world. Our goal is to win on the track for my team, win for the Army in the communities we visit, and represent the U.S. Army with our entire heart and soul. Overall, it was a good offseason for me. I think it was very much one-of-a-kind, the kind I’ve never had before, because 2017 was the first real season where I got to do all the races, and then having an offseason that was really stable was exciting, and that’s going to translate into the 2018 season. Living in Indy, I got to be at the race shop every day and work with my guys, whether it was with the racecar or the programs we’ve been working on, lunch with them every day. They’re my family. None of my family lives in Indy besides my husband. For me, I really enjoyed it, especially being able to be in tune with Todd (Okuhara, crew chief) and Scott (Okuhara, assistant crew chief).
You had a strong finish to last weekend’s preseason testing in Phoenix. How important was that for you and the team?
“It was incredibly huge. I had a smile from ear to ear. At 250 feet into the run, it had a nice little chatter to it. That’s the first real indication that it’s going to be on a full pull from the tune-up standpoint. It took us three days to be able to formulate a new tune-up for the additional amount of power this Mopar Dodge/U.S. Army team was able to find in the offseason. On our fourth day of testing, we were able to lay it down and, man, we needed that. That run right there was what we needed as a team to go into Pomona hot.”
Your 2017 season started incredibly well with back-to-back event titles at Pomona and Phoenix, and your third title three events later in Houston. But things then leveled off some the middle part of the season. What did you and the team learn from that?
“I really feel like we were confident and comfortable in our cool-weather conditions and we really built upon that. I think what we’re going to be able to do is focus on our hot-track setups, where we find weaknesses and focus on what we know even better. We had some issues with our clutch last year that we feel like we have fixed. So, I believe focusing on our hot-track setups for the middle of the season will give us that perfect yin and yang as far as how strong we’ll be able to perform in the cool weather and make this thing come full circle. There was nothing more difficult than knowing how good we were at the beginning of the season and the expectations we had for ourselves. They were so high and we knew it would be difficult to maintain that. You can’t win every race, but you can sure be in the hunt every time. We’re looking to come out in 2018 just as strong as before, but we’ve identified our weaknesses. Still, last year was hard to beat – any driver, whether it’s your first full year like it was for me, or for a guy like Clay Millican going after a national event win and finally getting it – shows how difficult it is. And to want more and to expect more in 2018 is realistic. Honestly, that’s what Don Schumacher and our partners expect, and that’s what we expect to deliver.”
