I just got home from our test session in West Palm Beach. Towards the end of the race season last year once we knew that our DHL team was going to have a teammate in Alexis DeJoria and her Tequila Patron-sponsored car, the decision was made to build both cars as identical as possible. For us this meant a new chassis with a different design than we had run in the past. The new chassis was delivered to Kalitta Motorsports early in December and my DHL crew guys got to work on it right away. Since it was a bare chassis -- everything from brake lines to all the tabs to mount everything -- had to be fabricated and installed. Long story short, the boys thrashed away to get everything done and by the time I got to the shop a couple of weeks ago, the majority of the work was done.

Jon O and Nicky had some great plans for testing where we were going to try out everything from superchargers, to our spare ignitions and some different clutch stuff. Sometimes the best laid plans don't work out. With the data Del had learned from testing with Alexis's car last month, we thought we had a good baseline to start off with. Unfortunately our car didn't think the same thing and we ended up smoking the tires for the first day and a half long before we ever got to the tree. Eventually after making some big changes, the boys started to make some headway. On Wednesday we made a nice half-track run with numbers to run in the 4.15 range and then later in the day when the track was the hottest we laid down a great 4.16 run. Unfortunately, that's when we noticed that the flat black body we had borrowed from Alexis' team didn't work or fit quite the same way as it did on her car. Both front struts came through the body on that run and basically ended our day as the repair was going to take quite a few hours to fix properly. That was just the start and it took another day or two to get it right. I felt really bad for my guys Dan and Jared because I don't think they got out of the track until close to midnight for the next three days as they were constantly doing carbon fiber repairs on top of their normal duties. I want to thank Steve from Aerodyne Composites (who thought he was just going to hang out as a spectator) for coming over and getting his hands dirty helping my guys do some of the repairs and passing his knowledge along.

Enough about the body - We finally got it all figured out and all is good now. Jon O, Nicky, and Del got their heads together and we made a nice lap on Friday night running a 4.12 at over 306 mph, with the engine pretty backed down. On Saturday we finally got to test some new clutch stuff and it started to look pretty promising. We made an early shutoff 4.18 run and then on our last run, tried to run a 4.08. After a good launch, we ended up smoking the tires pretty early but the data on the computer still looked good, so I feel pretty good where we are at right now going into Pomona.

Alexis' car made some good runs as well and they got to test a lot of new things. The Kalitta Top Fuel cars were running really strong in testing with Connie and Grubby leading the pack for the first few days. Even though they weren't making full runs they had some of the best numbers to half-track out of anybody there.  Jim O and Doug's car was running good as well recording many runs in the low 3.80 range. Then on their last run of testing on Saturday night they ripped off a fantastic 3.78 which was good for low E.T. of the day. Great job guys!

All the rigs should be back at the shop by now and the boys will be hard at work for the next couple of weeks before they make the long drive out to Pomona for the Winternationals. We have a new paint scheme for our DHL Toyota Camry and I am looking forward to seeing it when it gets out here. It's going to be a tough year whether you are in Top Fuel or Funny Car but we have set new goals for all the Kalitta Motorsports cars and I am hoping for a great season for all of us.

See you at the races and thanks for reading!