“I was joking around, but kind of not joking
around at the same time because that’s just my
personality,” Mills recalls. “I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I was
just joking,’ but I wasn’t really joking. So I asked
my dad, and he was like, ‘Well, you need to fig-
ure out how to do a burnout without the burn-
out switch.’”
It was a fair request, Kallee admits. She was
used to using the burnout switch in her X275
car, and as its name suggests, the “Golden Pan-
da” is considerably tamer than the twin-turbo-
charged, 572ci Pro Line 481x-powered “Golden
Kong” no-prep car.
“I’d never even thrown the ‘chutes or done any-
thing like that in the X car because we run eighth
mile and I’m only going around 165 mph,” Mills
says. “That’s pretty fast, but to me it’s not that fast
because I see my dad’s going 200 mph.”
So Mills complied with her father’s request,
turning off the burnout switch and learning to do
burnouts manually. She didn’t push the subject
again all summer until the tail end of the No
Prep Kings schedule, by which point “Golden
Kong” had won six races in nine final rounds
in the Future Street Outlaws class. DeWayne
gave in and offered to let Kallee start testing
in Kong when the team went testing in Florida
over the winter.
“We decided I was just going to test the car and
get comfortable in the seat and not take over until
I felt comfortable in the car,” Mills says. “After that,
I didn’t really think anything of it. And then we
got a call from Goodridge and they asked if we
wanted to put the car on display in their booth
at the PRI Show. We said yeah.”
Two weeks before the Mills family left Tulsa to
head to Indy for the PRI Show, DeWayne received
a concerning call from his doctors.
“He didn’t really say anything to me about it,
but his doctors had been watching his PSA levels
because he had thyroid cancer before, so he had
to take radiation and stuff for it,” Mills says. “So
they always have made sure they stayed on top
of his health.”
The doctor was calling to notify him that he
had prostate cancer. They would need to give
him radiation treatment or surgery to remove the
cancer cells. After the surgery, he would need to
stay out of the car for at least eight months. “So
that’s when I was like, ‘Well, you know what, I’ll
get in it. I’ll drive,” Kallee remembers.
That quickly changed the nature of the family’s
trip to Indy. They decided to take advantage of the
large captive audience to break the news.
“The original plan was to roll the car into PRI
with the stickers that had my name on it,” Mills
says. “What’s a better time to reveal that I’m run-
ning the car than PRI when everyone is there?
Everyone who is big in drag racing is at PRI.”
Mills forgot to order the name stickers until a
couple days before leaving for Indy – remember
the whole “last minute” thing? – so the car was
already in place in the Goodridge Hoses booth in
the Indiana Convention Center by the time the
Stav Ink Designs decals came in. That led to an
impromptu sticker ceremony during the show,
after which Mills posted a photo of Kong’s new
window vinyl on the Mills Racing social media
pages, as well as her own accounts. The posts
quickly spread online.
“I was walking down the street and people were
like, ‘Hey, are you excited?’ And I’m like, ‘For
what?’” Mills laughs. “Then I realized what they
“THE ORIGINAL PLAN WAS TO ROLL THE CAR INTO PRI WITH THE STICKERS THAT HAD MY
NAME ON IT,” MILLS SAYS. “WHAT’S A BETTER TIME TO REVEAL THAT I’M RUNNING THE CAR
THAN PRI WHEN EVERYONE IS THERE? EVERYONE WHO IS BIG IN DRAG RACING IS AT PRI.”
72 | D r a g
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
Issue 155