Drag Illustrated Issue 153, February 2020 | Page 32

Special Section
LONGTIME NITROUS PRO MODIFIED RACER CHRIS RINI ENJOYED A CAREER-BEST SEASON IN THE PDRA’S SWITZER DYNAM-
ICS PRO NITROUS CLASS IN 2019. HE NOT ONLY SET HIS CAREER-BEST NUMBERS, GOING AS QUICK AS 3.636 SECONDS
AND AS FAST AS 207.60 MPH, HE WAS ALSO BRILLIANT ALL SEASON LONG. HE HAD HIS BEST FINISH IN PRO NITROUS POINTS
– FOURTH – SINCE JOINING THE CLASS IN 2014 DURING THE PDRA’S INAUGURAL SEASON, BUT AN EVENT WIN ESCAPED
HIM. THE NEW YORK NATIVE-TURNED-NORTH CAROLINA RESIDENT IS DEAD-SET ON CHANGING THAT THIS SEASON.
Rini in his ATI Performance Products
’69 Camaro was a consistent late-
round player throughout the 2019
season. The Buck 959ci-powered,
Bickel-built entry reached the semi-
finals at four of the seven races, com-
pletely avoiding first-round exits. Rini
had one of the best qualifying aver-
ages, second only to maybe world
champion Jim Halsey, with a best of
No. 2 and worst of No. 6.
“I think some of our performance
last year and more of our perfor-
32 PDRA660.com
mance this year is going to be basi-
cally coming through not just me
the driver,” Rini starts, “but Charlie
Buck Engines, our 959s, Brandon
Switzer and MoTeC and all his design
changes with the software and
nitrous. We’ve got a lot of good
companies behind us.”
As the 2020 season approaches,
DRAG ILLUSTRATED spoke with Rini to
discuss his career-best season and
how he intends on improving his
performance this year.
That career-best finish, was that a
result of years of working at it, or
did you really make a major change
last year?
We put a 959 in the car the year
before, midseason, and there’s
always a learning curve involved
with a change like that. It took a little
bit to get a handle on it. Going into
last season, we had a lot of things
worked out with the new combina-
tion. For the most part, the whole
program really started to jell to-
gether. We had good ratios, a good
transmission combination, a motor
that we had enough runs on that
we had documented runs to look at
when we went into these different
environments. We just had more
data to work off of. Brandon [Switzer]
is involved with tuning. We made a
lot of good calls.
I think a little bit of it was we didn’t
go into the season with anything
really new, which helps. You have
to go new sometimes. You change
combinations and sometimes it’s a