Tuned In
With a car capable of putting up big numbers
with the “Big Three” mega-teams, Millican is as
focused as ever on winning his first NHRA Top
Fuel race. He’s qualified No. 1 at two consec-
utive races this season. The Stringer Perfor-
mance team’s ability to run the numbers have
many fans and insiders expecting Millican to be
the next first-time Top Fuel winner on tour.
it’s a nice building – heating and air, nice floor
in it, but there wasn’t a tool, there wasn’t a truck,
there wasn’t a trailer; there wasn’t anything. This
was in early December. Oh my goodness, was
it a lot of long days and late nights gathering
everything up. It was me, Doug, Lance, and this
one young kid Doug hired locally. That was the
team at that point.
David “Grubby” Grubnic, who was your
competitor for several years when he drove
Top Fuel for Kalitta Motorsports, was hired
as the team’s crew chief. How did you decide
to hire him?
My wife, Donna, suggested we hire David. I’m
always running my mouth doing these things
and she stays in the background all the time and
that’s how she prefers it to be, but she said, “We
need to hire David Grubnic.” That previous year,
Grubby had been away for basically a year. He
was done driving at Kalitta’s and nobody knew
what he was up to. Well, Grubby showed up and
helped the Rapisarda team at Indy. They went
out within a couple runs and ran the quickest
et they had ever run – they ran in the 3.70s for
the first time. Donna was like, “You remember
what David did with Rapisarda? That’s who we
May 2017
should hire as the crew chief.” That was our next
call, David Grubnic.
He flew in and we all met and it’s like, “Man,
this guy is awesome.” I knew him from racing
against him but I didn’t know him. You see people
out here all the time that you race against but
you don’t necessarily know them. The first thing
I knew was this guy is incredibly smart. I had
never talked to a crew chief who had that kind of
thinking since Mike Kloeber. He can not only tell
you how it works, he can tell you how it was de-
signed. He’ll lose me when he’s explaining things.
It was assumed early on that the team was
using a “store-bought” tune-up to get started,
but that wasn’t the case, right?
Grubby has his own tune-up. A lot of teams
out here base their tune-up off of someone else’s.
We ended up buying a complete, ready-to-go
Top Fuel car from Steve Torrence. We ran pretty
well from the get-go. It was very last-minute in
getting everything put together. For our first run
at Pomona, Grubby said, “Just go to half-track
and shut it off.” I don’t remember the exact mph,
but we went 3.81 coasting from half-track on. I’m
like, “Oh yeah, this is going to be a good race car.”
He’s brilliant, super-smart. He’s fun to work
with for me because he drove for 20 years. It’s the
first time I’ve ever worked with a crew chief who’s
driven. I can go in the crew chief lounge after a
run and tell him I felt the car do whatever and
he’s like, “Yep, yep, I know what you’re saying.”
That’s fun. I can make a mistake and he’s like,
“It’s fine. I’ve done it. I understand.
Don’t worry