of anything. That along with the track prep and then you got to go and
you look at these ECU companies or these fuel delivery systems. I mean,
they’re so smart in the things you can do with them. And you give the best
tuners in a world that then let them collect data for two or three years. We
learn stuff every time we go out. We tried different stuff with mine and
we learn it, and the next thing you know, they take that back to somebody
else that they’re working with. That really becomes the evolution of how
we excel at the sport.
GA: You know, there hasn’t been one major thing. I think what finally,
everybody realized that it wasn’t just the engine that was going to make
you go with in this class, and it wasn’t just the driver that was going to
make it. You have to have everything right. Your car needs to be perfect
from front bumper to rear bumper, and when we all started paying more
attention to every aspect of the race car, every piece of the driveline in the
race car, that’s when we all started going forward. So they became way more
refined, and if you look
back 10, 15 years ago
back when I worked
with Warren [Johnson],
you didn’t spend
a lot of time with all
the other components
in the rig, in the car.
You just worked
on that engine. Anymore,
you’ve had to
look in all the other
directions. I’ve
kind of seen a lot of
finessing and a lot
of fine-tuning with
every piece of the
race car itself from
the front bumper to
rear bumper over the last 5-10 years.
I’ve worked on a lot of different things, and obviously working with
Warren for all those years, you learn to work on every single thing. You
don’t just learn one job and you have to learn to work on everything and
that’s kind of the way he was. That’s what I learned from being with
him. You work on a lot of different things. As soon as I started this team,
we hired people that were good at maybe this part of the job, and then
someone else was really good at this part of the job and another person
that was good at that part of the job. We really scratched all the surfaces
from front to rear of the car and the engine.
CC: In my eyes, the torque converter, fuel injection, tires, and track
prep. To me, those are the things that really allowed this stuff to take off.
I’m a clutch guy. I’m a 40-plus-year clutch guy and I had never sat behind
an automatic until five, six, seven years ago whenever I started playing
with them. And I hated it at that time just because it was a change, but
PHOTOS: JIMMY MOORE, JOHN FORE III
72 | Drag Illustrated | DragIllustrated.com
Issue 158