Scott
Palmer
PHOTO: TERA WENDLAND GRAVES
IN THE HUNT
Despite running a limited schedule
and admittedly operating as a
“small budget” team, Palmer and
company have established their
Top Fuel dragster as much more
than a lame duck on race day.
the throttle is and it basically just lets the clutch
off and the props do the work. You’re kind of at
the prop’s mercy so you can’t really leave too hard
or you’ll basically spin the props. I don’t even
know all the language of it. I’ve only been doing
it for a little while. They call it something fancy.
But to me, it’s just smoking the props because
you just spin the props too hard.
They don’t control it with the clutch, which,
honestly, I think boats would go faster if they used
the clutch. But we don’t want to be the ones to try
it because the maintenance on a boat is less than
a car and the main reason why is you don’t have
to service the clutch every run. It doesn’t murder
the clutch. It’s locked up. It doesn’t wear. There’s
guys out there who have run the same clutch pack
all year. So we don’t want to try it. We think they
would go faster, but we don’t really know that and
we’re not going to experiment. We’re out there
to race and learn more about boat racing and
promote the sport out here.
You have to pull the motor out and set it on a
stand. We actually have a stand that’s the same
height as the dragster. We have it rigged up to
where we pull the motor out of the boat and spin
it around because it’s in there backwards. Everything is on backwards – the injector, headers
– so it looks weird. But I do the bottom end, so I
want to be on the same side as the car because I
don’t want to change the routine. Our head parts
are rigged up to where we don’t have to change
anything to go around the boat.
You made headlines this year when you debuted your Top Fuel Studebaker Pro Mod at
Jeffers Motorsports Park in Sikeston, Missouri.
What made you decide to slap a 10,000-horse-
August 2016
power Top Fuel motor into a short wheelbase Pro Mod?
I thought about it forever, since we got a Top
Fuel car. I’ve always wondered why nobody has
done it before. And I know there’s been Nitro
Coupes running 30-percent and I know there’s
a couple of guys who have put what I would call
more like nostalgia setups in a door car with the
smaller pumps, and they’ve done it. It’s kind of
been done, but it’s never really been done with
a full-fledged Top Fuel setup and I just never
could figure out why. I’d rather race a door car
than anything. That’s my favorite kind of racing.
I like the small tire racing, but I love Pro Mods.
Pro Mods are my thing. I would run NHRA Pro
Mod but, honestly, those guys probably spend
as much money as we do in a fuel car right now.
That’s an expensive class to stay on top of. Our
team actually just wanted a Pro Mod where we
could go to the local track and have some fun. And
we love this old Studebaker that has been around.
Chuck Weck from the Chicago area never gets
enough credit. He deserves credit for building
that car. We just modified it. A friend of mine
modified the firewalls and Rick mounted the
12-inch Chrisman in it, and we mounted it solid
like a Funny Car.
To me it just seemed like a good idea. I know we
caught a lot of flak over it, about it being a dumb
idea. Evidently from the response we’ve got, it has
not been a dumb idea. And it’s worked so good.
Now, granted, we’ve only made one 200-foot
run, but it was impressive to me when I stepped
on the gas and how good it worked the first run
because everybody said it’ll never leave the starting line. We slowed it down for 60-feet and then
opened clutch. It has clutch management. It is
100-percent exactly like the dragster is. It has the
same management, same 102-gallon fuel pump,
a setback billet blower on it. It has everything. If
you want to know the truth, we tested that Pro
Mod. It had a brand-new motor in it. Brand-new
block. We tested it. Set the crank trigger. It has
the same MSD box on it. Everything is the same.
We took that motor out and that’s what we ran
in Sonoma. We won the first round in Top Fuel
with the Pro Mod motor.
That has to be a first.
That was crazy. Darren Mayer built us this new
badass blower and it was ahead of us there for the
first couple of runs and then we kind of figured it
out. We calmed it all down and it had a .838 60foot and all that. We’re on the return road coming
back down and I was like, ‘Man, this has got to
be the fastest Pro Mod motor ever right there.’ It
just ran 307 [mph] on an easy pass, you know?
What was it like standing on the gas for the
first time?
The header flames were crazy. It looked like I
was driving through a fireball. I think that thing
right there is the coolest thing I’ve ever driven in
my life, and I’ve been lucky to drive some cool shit.
You knew you were in something badass when
you stepped on the gas in that thing.
The Top Fuel Pro Mod is basically one of a
kind at this point. Do you know of anyone else
who’s building another one? Is there potential
for future Top Fuel Pro Mod match races?
We’re building a ‘70 Chevelle right now that’ll
be done in a month or so, I would say. It’s got
the same style setup in it. It’s a friend of mine’s
– JR Sandlian – and it has a similar setup but it
DragIllustrated.com
| D r a g I l l u s t r a t e d | 83