Drag Illustrated Issue 118, February 2017 | Page 26

Dirt
Return to familiar Chevrolet
equipment has Erica Enders-
Stevens excited for 2017
By Brandon W. Mudd
O
ver the course of the two
NHRA Mello Yello Series seasons
spanning 2014-2015, Erica Enders-
Stevens was on top of the Pro Stock
world. The Texan earned 15 Wallys, 12 top quali-
fiers, two K&N Challenge wins, and, oh yeah, two
NHRA Pro Stock titles.
Last year? Not so much.
In a season seeing the class move to electronic
fuel injection and her Elite Motorsports team
change engine programs, the best finish Enders-
Stevens achieved was a trifecta of semi-finals
appearances. Stick-and-ball sports regularly see
the blame game during and after that kind of year.
Throughout it all, though, Erica was the model of
poise and grace, the epitome of which was shown
at Sonoma when her Elite Motorsports machine
refused to go to the line during the first round
of eliminations. Her response? An interview the
minute s he got out of the driver’s seat, showing
the world how a champion acts in the low mo-
ments of a career.
While it may not have gone exactly the way
she and team owner Richard Freeman planned
it, Enders-Stevens knew 2016 was going to be a
hard year. “You know, it was definitely a challeng-
ing year,” she said. “We knew that it was going to
be, heading into it. Any time that you start an
engine development program from scratch…it
takes time to do that stuff, you know?
“People from the outside, looking in, don’t nec-
essarily understand that it doesn’t happen at the
drop of a hat. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort,
a lot of resources. Not just money, but a lot of
sacrifice. So, we did the best that we could.”
Even with shorter fields than NHRA has seen
in a while, winning still isn’t easy. Last year, Ja-
son Line and Greg Anderson wore out the Pro
Stock field, with Line eventually earning his
third class title and Anderson finishing a close
second. Enders-Stevens knows how that kind
of domination feels after a nine-win season the
year before, but she also knows those wins can
dry up at any time.
“We’re a championship-caliber team and to go
out there and know that unless our competitor
went red or hit the wall, that we had pretty much
zero chance of winning, so it’s a different mind-
set, and it wasn’t something that we were used to,”
she said. “Having said that, it didn’t change the
way that we race; it didn’t change our confidence
level, and it didn’t change our people.
“I think that it built character, if anything and,
you know, people can say, ‘Oh, you get used to
winning’ and blah blah blah. Well, you never get
used to winning, and every time I’m in the win-
ner’s circle, I, like, soak it up, and I take a million
pictures because they’re so few and far between.”
It’s no longer 2016. Those days and those expe-
riences are in the past. For Erica, in 2017, there
is the expectation of returning to the winning
ways that brought two championship trophies
to Elite Motorsports.
“It was nice to have the feeling that we had ‘14
and ’15,” she said, “any time you roll on the prop-
erty that you have as good a chance as anybody
to win the race and we did not have that chance
in 2016. So, to have that opportunity back is
awesome, you know? It’s .005 away from making
it to our first final round in like sixteen months
or something crazy, and, you know, it’s just the
beginning for this new program for us, and I
think the sky is the limit.
“I’m very excited; I’m very optimistic
about 2017.”
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I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
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Issue 118
Optimism Renewed