tency of his team throughout that time. Assistant
crew chief Brad Mason and car chief Wayne “Red”
Waite have been with Brown since his first race
in Top Fuel. Oswald and Corradi came along one
year later. In the fast-paced NHRA nitro racing
circles, where crew chiefs bounce around from
team to team, sometimes multiple times in the
same year, the ability of the core group to stick
together is a rarity. The unity of the Matco team
has made its crew members the envy of those
who aspire to join a championship-caliber Top
Fuel team.
“You have five of us that have been together
through thick and thin for the last nine years,”
Brown reports. “The other key-component guys
have been together with us for years. We’ve lost
guys one at a time, but it was when guys just
retired from the sport. The unique thing that we
August 2017
MAINTAINING FOCUS
Three championships into his 10-year
Top Fuel career, Antron Brown and his
Matco Tools team are as focused as ever
on securing race wins and and NHRA
Mello Yello Series world championships.
have with our team is we’ve never had somebody
who wanted to leave our race team to go some-
where else. They stay or they retire from racing
because they want to have a family and not go
on the road anymore. We have people waiting in
line who want to be on our team.
“When you have a team like that, people who
want to be here and have that same desire, same
passion, same determination; we don’t have to
motivate each other to do what we want to do. We
already got that. We can look at each other and
not even say a word and know what each other
is thinking. Once you get that symmetry, that’s
when you have those unbelievable things happen
like we’ve had happen, the round wins, the suc-
cess, the pushing for world records, winning the
championships and things of that nature,” Brown
offers. “That’s what comes with it.”
Unity within the team over several years has
allowed the group to develop a mentality that is
every bit as important to their ability to win as
the parts that make up the Matco machine and
the tools used to put it all together.
“We attack every event, every round of racing
that we do, and we give it our all. We never look
back at the end of a race and go, ‘Woulda, coulda,
shoulda,’ or ask ‘What could we have done dif-
ferent?’ We gave it our all and did everything we
thought was right at that given moment. Those
moments that don’t go our way, we go, ‘OK, well,
this is going to make us better.’ When we struggle,
that’s when it actually pushes us to step up to
that next level.
“That’s what we see each and every year. We
challenge ourselves every year. We start off the
year good and we battle for the points lead. We
had the points lead taken away, then we battled
back and now we have it back again. These are
the things that make us stronger and make us
better. We don’t fold. We don’t worry about, ‘We
messed up at this race.’ We look at how we can
be better at the next one and how can we raise
the bar and go beyond that. That’s the zone we’re
in right now.”
Though he might not spend much time looking
at the statistics or boasting about his success,
Brown appreciates what he and his team have
achieved during what is arguably the most com-
petitive era of Top Fuel.
“When we go back and look at our track record
for 10 years being in the nitro category, as a team
we’ve won more than 71 percent of the rounds
that we raced; that’s a high percentage,” Brown
asserts confidently.
“We’re beyond Force. We’re beyond Tony
(Schumacher). I never looked at it that way. To
have a record like that right now, in the last six
years of Top Fuel the racing’s been phenomenal
where we have over eight teams that can win
the championship and over eight teams that can
win a race. They didn’t have that back in the day,
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