Drag Illustrated Issue 148, September 2019 | Page 80

Billy Stocklin
STOCKLIN AND JACKSON HAVE
BEEN A DYNAMIC DUO IN NHRA
PRO MOD RACING, WINNING SEVEN
TIMES SINCE 2017 AND MAKING THE
QUICKEST RUN IN CLASS HISTORY.
"What I do is I put it into my
spreadsheets," Stocklin reveals.
"I put in all the data, and all the
information, and I just spreadsheet
the crap out of everything."
dozen logbooks filled with data, just for Jackson’s
car dating back only two years. It’s filled with
patterns and trends, but Stocklin doesn’t see it
as work. If it translates to an extra round win
because his numbers led to an adjustment, then
it’s all worth it.
“It’s like a feeling and sensing things over and
over,” Stocklin says. “It’s kind of a systematic ap-
proach where I like to be consistent and always
do the same stuff. If you watch the details really
close, the big stuff takes care of itself.”
Says Jackson: “The attention to detail finds
problems before they’re a problem. He will find
things and develop a pattern because of data anal-
ysis. He sees data differently and quicker than
most people. He sees numbers and I see parts,
and together, it’s magic.”
The upside is the track record Stocklin has
racked up, from outlaw doorslammers to the drag
radial world to, now, the NHRA Pro Mod scene.
He’s worked with drag radial standouts like Ja-
son Michalek, he’s tuned Mountain Motor Pro
Stock cars, Limited 275 and Ultra Street cars with
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I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
Mike Terry, and everything in between, boasting
a tremendous track record in whatever the class
or engine combination.
The downfall, if you want to call it that, is the
extreme amount of work Stocklin must do to get
to that point. In his mind, though, it’s what he has
to do. It’s taking care of an itch that needs to be
scratched, run after run, race after race.
The result is world records, wins, champion-
ships, consistency and an ability to find a different
way to get the job done with volatile equipment
in a volatile sport.
“What I do is I put it into my spreadsheets,”
Stocklin reveals. “I put in all the data, I put in all
the information and I just spreadsheet the crap
out of everything. You go back and you look at
the good runs, and then you go back and you
look at the data from the good runs, and things
become clearer. You know, to me, there’s lots of
guys that are way too cowboy-ish. And I know
that when you watch our car run, it has a very
cowboy attitude going down the racetrack, but it
is tremendously calculated. My approach to that
cowboy attitude is very un-cowboy. I’ve crept up
on that limit of what it will do very, very slowly,
and that’s why Stevie and I are a good team.”
S
tocklin and Jackson weren’t always
a good team. There wasn’t a team
at all. In fact, they really didn’t
like each other as both were on
the come up in the sport. Stock-
lin thought Jackson was a smart-
mouthed kid, while Jackson believed Stocklin was
an overrated tuner from Texas.
It only drove each of them to defeat the other,
and it took a trip overseas for the relationship
to turn from rivalry to what Jackson now calls
“family.” Both ended up in Qatar to race over the
winter in 2012-2013, as Jackson was driving and
Stocklin was tuning a Pro Extreme car. It was
there that a friendship was formed, especially as
the duo found magic in a Pro Nitrous Camaro that
had been basically kicked to the curb.
The Al-Anabi Racing team told Stocklin they
wanted him to tune the nitrous car along with his
regular duties that winter, and based on what he
knew about the car and how much it had strug-
gled in recent years, he thought Jackson would
be the perfect fit to make it come alive. “Nobody
could get it down the track,” Jackson says. “It was
behind the shop, it was a piece of junk.”
But then the ante was raised for both. If they
could get the car to run in the 3.70s in Qatar,
Jackson could race it stateside in Pro Nitrous
during the 2013 ADRL season.
Issue 148