Hello fine people, Tom Abbett here for my first rendition of the Team MAR NHRA.com blog. I hope Antron doesn’t mind me jumping in here for a non-hostile takeover of the internet portal for just a minute to fill you great NHRA fans in on what the “Big Blue” crew has been up to in the past few days following testing at Phoenix.

As you all know, if you are faithful blog readers and NHRA.com followers, our preseason testing of the Matco Tools Top Fuel dragster went pretty much according to plan. I mean, how can you argue with an out-of-the-box 3.88, a tweaked 3.86 and an early shut off 3.82? If that wasn’t enough to get everyone’s attention, our hole card was a testing-best, and personal best for Ant, 3.781 at a thundering 316.45. First hand accounts from the pressroom at Firebird Raceway reflected a sense of excitement and awe as everyone realized that a shot across the bow had just been fired by the Brian Corradi/Mark Oswald tuning duo. It certainly didn’t hurt that Antron did the most amazing job of staging that I have personally ever witnessed. I can assure you, he didn’t leave an tenth of an inch of roll out on the table on that one. I have seen well over 3,000 nitro car launches and staging jobs in my 11 years in the sport and that one left me in astonishment, as the stage light flickered on and off at least 5 times before settling in to a bright, full filament burn. Do we know how to pick a horse or what?

Okay, enough of blowing our own horn, we will just let the performance speak for us from here on out. What I’m most excited to share with you is an exciting experience that took place a few days after testing. When MAR originally made plans for Phoenix test we anticipated a steeper learning curve and had made plans to stay and run thru Tuesday, service Wednesday and fly the boys back home to Indy on Thursday. Even Antron and I were not scheduled to fly out until late Wednesday night. What ended up happening is we ended testing a full day early, so the crew was able to service and pack up on Tuesday, which left a full day of nothing to do on Wednesday. I don’t know how much any of you have been around a fuel crew, but they don’t sit still very well. Something that has been running through my mind for the past couple of years that we have been testing and racing at Firebird started to really pound its way to the front of my cerebral cortex. On the same piece of Sonoran desert real estate is the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving. I have often wondered what would happen when you take a group of highly tuned, ultra competitive crew members that were used to seeing the world in a straight line and turn them loose in a world of apexes and s-curves. Every year, twice a year, that we visit this track we are subjected to the squealing of tires, the clouds of wispy white smoke in the distance, and students and instructors at the Bondurant school, torture the never endless supply of Goodyear Eagle street radials. So I put my thinking cap on and hopped on one of Antron’s Suzuki-supplied pit bikes and take a chilly early Tuesday morning ride over to the office of the school and see what’s what.

I was greeted at the door by the – get this stuffy title – Director of First Impressions, Melanie Mooney. A title I must admit, she carry’s off very well. I tell her what’s on my mind and ask if they have a program that will let my guys blow off a little steam, have a little fun and maybe learn something along the way. Melanie directs me to Matt Williams, Corporate Sales Manager for the school and we proceed to work out a program that will fit the bill and the budget. Now, at this point I haven’t said anything to anybody yet and I wanted to run this by the boss, that would be the worlds fastest Funny Car pilot Mike Ashley, and get his blessing before burning up the American Express. We discussed it, he understood the value of this as a team building experience and was on board right away. One of the first rules of Salesmanship 101 is, once you get the customer to say Yes, do not keep selling the idea. Mike said yes so fast, I keep going on about how we saved some money by not testing the extra day, how it was going to cost a lot to fly everybody back home a day early, yada, yada yada… Mike chimes back in, “You sound like my wife, honey, we’re saving money as she is getting out her own American Express card.” Point well taken.

I left Bondurant’s all giddy as I head into the trailer to lay out the news to the crew. Bad news is, we are not flying home a day early. Good news is, we get to run the guts out of some brand new Electric Yellow sixth generation Corvettes. Everyone to a man lit up and I knew I had the right group of guys on our team this year. My first major decision as Team Manager and everyone was on board. Antron, Brian and Mark unfortunately had other commitments and were not going to be able to hang out the extra day, so it left us with eight straight-line addicts to punish four very compliant Corvettes.

Bright and early Wednesday morning we hop in the Toyota Sequoia team support vehicle and head to Bondurant’s. We do a little waiver signing, something about a $6,000 deductible for student induced damage, have a little class time with our instructor Mike Speck, and before you know it, we are getting the once over on how to strap in the drivers seat of some of the brightest Yellow fiberglass that the General has ever produced. We pair up, strap in and follow Mike in the lead car, a Cadillac CTS, like baby ducks following momma duck. Our first experience of the day is what they like to call Evasive Maneuvering and Collision Avoidance. Starting out a mere 25 mph you drive down a coned off one lane strip that empties into a three pronged decision making area. This “decision making area” is where the instructor will turn on a series of lights that will indicate which of the three lanes you are supposed to steer your steed into, with only a thin margin of think time before you must react and make the proper choice without mowing down innocent cones, which in the real world would be people, pets or other vehicles. Sounds pretty easy right? Okay, now you speed up the process a few notches to the 45-50 mph range and suddenly your decision making time is cut in half, you car is moving twice as fast and BLAMMO…innocent cones have to die! Just to keep you guessing, every once in a while the instructor will give you a “panic stop” situation where you get no lane designation but all red lights and you have to whoa the car down before plowing into an imaginary tractor trailer that is suddenly motionless in front of you. Brad Mason, our blower guy, killed us twice, for the record.

Next event is the nine-cone slalom course. Easy enough right? Try it in a 14 passenger van! Mike put us all in the short bus and proceeded to give us the finer points of how to take the cones. Quick turn in, slow recovery, quick turn in, slow recovery, lather, rinse, repeat. The back seat of the van felt like it was going to pass the front by the time we got the last cone in the 35 mph range but it was a fun ride. We pile out, hop back into our Corvettes and tackle the line of cones with abandon. Mike had the illustrious job of replacing the cones that were sent flying from time to time and it seemed like that pesky second cone just would not stay put. You know how some people just don’t make good passengers? Whether it be control issues, where they are trying to drive from the passenger’s seat or just the motion sickness that can come about by not being the one driving? Well it seems that Robb Hauser, our clutch guy, is the latter. This guy is fearless in a straight line, does real well at any speed as long as he is in control, but apparently his equilibrium gets a little rattled when Wayne Waite, our short block guy, is at the wheel, hooking and grooving in and out of the little cones. I’m coming around to get back in line for another run and I see Robb out of the car, holding up the nearest fence expelling the mornings breakfast. Classic, good old team building at its finest I tell you.

I can’t possibly put an entire day's activities in this blog, I am too long winded and want to tell you the story on a play-by-play basis. Suffice to say, we all had a good time, we didn’t wreck anything, although I did slide one of the Vettes out into the dirt a few times on the nine turn road coarse, to which the instructor indicated that I should be wearing a John Deere hat, in reference to all the dust I was producing, and we learned a lot about each other as people, teammates and now friends. We are a better and stronger team because of it.

If you guys want a second installment of this, email me at tom@mikeashley.com and if there are enough requests, I will continue in a few days.

PS: In this last photo, that represents our entire clutch department of the Matco Tools Iron Eagle Top Fuel dragster, Robb and Tony Derhammer. The also happen to represent both ends of the awards spectrum as Robb proudly displays the “Cone Killer” award and Tony “the Hammer” Derhammer proudly displays the overall driving title for the days activities. That kid is a natural talent folks, you heard it here first.

Until next time, to borrow Anton’s tag line, I’m out like shout.