After parting ways with Don Schumacher Racing at the end of last season and returning to his roots as an independent rider, Craig Treble had one simple objective entering the 2009 NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing season: Go to a couple of races and see how he did. So far, he is doing quite well. At the four Pro Stock Motorcycle races this season, Treble has advanced to the final twice, and he sits solidly in the top 10, holding down the sixth spot. Those results alone are pretty good, but add in the fact that Treble has accomplished them running a bike that is 10 years old with a borrowed engine and a bare-bones crew, and his performance is downright impressive.

“I didn’t expect two finals in four races to be real honest with you, but I thought I could compete with these guys,” said Treble, who won in Houston and finished as runner-up at the most recent event, in Madison. “I thought I could run in the middle of the pack and hang in there. Yeah, there’s some new technology out there that I could use and take advantage of, but that old stuff that Vance & Hines built three, four, five years ago is still good stuff.”

Treble went back to that old stuff after Schumacher elected to go a different direction with his Pro Stock Motorcycle team this season. Treble joined the DSR team in Indy last year and finished the season with the crew, and though he would have liked to have stayed with the group, he says there are no hard feelings.

“As far as Don Schumacher goes, that guy is a class act,” said Treble. “You won’t ever hear me say anything bad about that man because he honored every word of what he told me and then some. I think he’s a straight-up, honest guy. By the same token, though, he’s a businessman, too. I couldn’t bring any sponsorship for the ’09 season, and unfortunately for me, Don’s a businessman, and he had to take care of his business. I have the utmost respect for those guys. I loved working with [Steve] Tartaglia and Tom [Patsis] and Jason [Jones] over there — those guys were a blast.”

Though Treble understood the reasons for Schumacher’s decision, it did leave him scrambling a bit to figure out what to do for 2009.

“I didn’t think, ‘Oh no; I’m doomed,’ or anything like that, but I was scrounging trying to figure out how I was going to go racing,” said Treble. “I knew I had a perfectly good rolling chassis that would compete sitting down in New Orleans in Ben Hatcher’s shop. Then, Michael Phillips and I got to talking one day, and he offered me an engine. There’s no way that I’m going to go out and buy a new motor — that’s just not feasible for me — so when Michael offered that engine, I jumped all over it, and I couldn’t do this without his help.”

Phillips, who has become somewhat of a teammate to Treble with the two sharing information, isn’t the only person who jumped to the aid of Treble. Hatcher offered his shop as a home base for Treble’s team, and Treble’s brother, Don Banaski, stepped in to serve as co-crew chief with Treble. At most events, it is just Treble and Banaski, but they get help occasionally from friend Scott Williams, and Hatcher is always a phone call away.

“Ben Hatcher is a good outside perspective as far as bouncing ideas,” said Treble. “He’s a pretty smart guy. I often refer to him as the mad scientist. He’s my go-to guy whenever I get stuck on something.”

Though he may not have the budget, the newer equipment, or the crew that other teams have, it hasn’t been a hindrance to Treble. In fact, he says one of his advantages may very well be one of the things that appears to be a weakness.

“I think one of the key things here is I know that motorcycle,” said Treble. “I’ve had it for a long time. I’ve won several races with it, and I know that motorcycle. I know its quirks. We don’t wear out chassis in the bike class, obviously, as quickly as Top Fuel or Funny Car or something like that. The bike still goes straight, still 60-foots good, and runs really strong on the back. I’ve got a lot of laps on that bike, and I know it, and that’s definitely a huge help.”

Also a huge help to Treble is his bracket racing background and continued racing in bracket programs. Treble, last year’s Division 4 Sportsman Motorcycle champion, has attended four bracket events already this year, and the added seat time has definitely made a difference at Full Throttle events, where Treble has won multiple rounds on holeshots and is consistently one of the best leavers in Pro Stock Motorcycle.

“You ask any active Sportsman racer that’s very competitive — Rampy, the Richardsons, Stinnett, Bertozzi, Biondo, any of them — there’s no replacement for seat time, so I try to get as much of that as I humanly can. I think my reaction times have been showing it,” said Treble. “I’ll tell you this, the bracket racers are tougher to beat than the Pro racers. That’s the toughest racing I’ve done. These guys that race on the full Tree all the time on the top bulb that have been doing it for a long time — and most of them have been doing it for a long time — are tough. They know the game, and they’re tough to beat.”

Thanks to his early-season performance, Treble will have more opportunities to put the skills he's picked up in bracket racing to use in the Full Throttle Series. Entering the season, Treble only had planned to attend the first two events, in Gainesville and Houston, but his Houston win gave him the funds to attend the following two, in Atlanta and Madison. He added another final-round showing in Madison, and now he can continue through the next two races.

“Right now, realistically, with what’s sitting in my bank account in my racing fund, we’re looking good through New Jersey [Englishtown], and that’s with no catastrophic failures or anything like that,” said Treble, who is still seeking a major sponsor to join associate backers Matco Tools, PowerSport Institute, SIS, American Fire, Speed Graphics, and CTS. “We just keep plugging away. Back in the days when Matco was my primary sponsor, I had the funding to where I could have a couple of extra engines in the trailer, and I could test a lot and try different things and try to be ahead of the competition. Right now, unfortunately, that’s not the case, but we seem to be doing darn good, and it’s kind of amazing to me. We’ve been very, very lucky this year with the way things have been going.”

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