Dirt
back in the seat and one you’re kinda up in the
seat, waiting for it to make a move.
At one time you said you preferred Pro Ex-
treme to no-prep. Are you warming up to no-
prep more now?
I don’t know. I’m still just playing with it right
now. When you start winning at something, you
get more interested. Right now we’re just playing
around. We’ve added quite a bit of stuff to it and
we have a baseline to go off of now, so hopefully
it’ll make some progress.”
Can you apply data from Pro Extreme or is it
so different that it’s hard to really get any data
that you can utilize between the two?
Yeah, you can’t really use too much from either
one. Because one’s trying to go fast and the other
you’re trying to babysit to keep the tire hooked
up, but they do have the same engine setup, the
Noonan motor with a Hemi in it. I’ve got it to
where each motor will go into each car. It’s got
the same motor mounts, same motor plate, so we
can swap motors between the cars.
So for Indy, we’ll pull the motor out
of the Camaro, take it for a backup
for the Pro Extreme car and then vice
versa the next weekend for Redemp-
tion 8. All we do is bas ically slow the
blower down quite a bit. It runs the
same compression and most of the
engine setup is the same. We just
slow the blower down. It’s a fairly
easy adjustment.
Any other plans this season?
Donald Long is doing some big
stuff with radials, so we’re going to
start testing [the no-prep car] on
radials here shortly after more of the
no-prep season is over. Then we got a couple more
races in no-prep and then we’re going to do some
of the bigger money races in radial. The car was
actually built for 10.5 tires and the radials fit up
under it real good. We helped Jason Michalak
and Kyle Huettel back two years ago when he
was really dominating, so hopefully we can do
good like they did.
It’s never boring at our place.
The PDRA has talked about allowing nitro
in Pro Extreme. Obviously, they recanted that
for this year. What are your thoughts on it?
It don’t matter to me. I told them to allow
Alcohol Funny Cars into the class. The reason
they don’t want to do that is they don’t want it to
become a predominantly Alcohol Funny Car class.
It’s a door-car class and they want to try to keep
it that way. That’s fine, too. Randy Merrick and
Scott Palmer both have nitro cars. It’d be cool to
race against ‘em if they figure it out.
Would you put nitro in yours?
No, I can’t afford that stuff. Nooo. We’re lucky
to get to race with what we’ve got. Nitro will tear
stuff up. Back when we ran against some of the
Super Chevy Nitro Coupes, they only had 30-per-
cent nitro and they were tearing stuff up left and
right. I’m not sure if it would be cost effective or if
they would have time to turn it around between
rounds. You have to run it real hard. I don’t know
if it would even be worth it.
Whatever they can do to get cars to come in the
class would be cool, though. We got nitrous now
[in the class]. We experimented with it a little
bit; we didn’t really try a whole bunch. I don’t
see that picking you up like everybody thinks it
does. We’re just running it on motor with a blower.
There’s a lot of money in these things to go out
there and say, “Oops, that didn’t work”, ya know?
Noonan’s got that new 4.900 motor coming
out. I’m kinda curious to see how it runs.
Got any more appearances on TV com-
ing up soon?
Nah. They’ve been trying to talk me into racing
my blue car on the street. That’s a lot of money
to take to the street, know what I’m saying? The
no-prep stuff, I don’t mind doing that, but we
quit the street racing stuff a long time ago. We’re
just sticking to the track. And once we get this
no-prep deal figured out it should be a pretty
fun little car.
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FRANKIE TAYLOR