A late-night phone call in April 2008 informing him that he would be a free agent dissolved Top Fuel racer Clay Millican’s carefully constructed plans to compete in a full season of NHRA Drag Racing and make a run for the world championship. But Mark and Lauren Pickens soon stepped in and provided the necessary tools to put Millican back on the track, this time in the Hope4Sudan/Motorvation Top Fuel rail.

With the help of the Pickenses and a few others, including Nitro Fish team owner Kenny Koretsky and Lend America’s Mike Ashley, Millican returned to action in Reading and competed for the rest of the season, finishing 16th in the Full Throttle standings. This year, the Drummonds, Tenn., resident is fired up to make a run for the world championship and is utilizing every means possible to make that happen. Some may consider it a long shot — Millican has yet to finish in the top 10 in NHRA competition — but the energetic and optimistic racer sees it as an absolute possibility.

“We are starting to get our stuff together, that’s for sure,” said Millican. “We’ve put in lots of hard work and persistence, and we’ve got a group that’s been together for a lot of years. This team is a group of winners, and they always have been, and like my mama said, ‘How bad do you want it? If you want it bad enough, you can work it out.’ We just have to keep working at it. This is a great group, and I’m proud to be a part of it.”

Millican, a multi-time IHRA Top Fuel champion, has a team chock-full of experience on his side; crew chief Lance Larsen has been with Millican for four years and prior to their alliance spent 10 years working on Funny Car racer Dean Skuza’s team. Larsen is assisted by Justin Crosslin, a seven-year Clay Millican Racing veteran.

Experience aside, racing to 1,000 feet turned out to be quite a challenge for the newly restructured team, and early in the 2009 season, the struggle was evidenced by a nonqualifying effort in the single qualifying session at the rain-drenched Kragen O’Reilly NHRA Winternationals that was followed by two first-round losses.

“Man, the guys have worked really hard to figure out how to make the car run better to 1,000 feet,” said Millican. “We knew it was going to hurt, but I just didn’t know how much that shortening the racetrack up was going to hurt the way Lance ran the car. We missed Vegas earlier this year, and that was my decision because we weren’t running great. I know that with the budget we had, it was a smart thing for us to miss that race. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made because I’m a guy that wants to mash the gas on one of the fastest cars in the world, but it was purely a financial decision.”

Millican returned in Atlanta and suffered through three more first-round losses, but in Madison, the team began to see the light at the end of the tunnel and kicked off a string of five consecutive starts from the top half of the field. By Topeka, things were really turning around; Millican made his way to the final round for the first time since 2004.

“By the time we got to Bristol, I was pressing the panic button looking at the top 10,” said Millican. “We’ve been swapping information with Antron Brown’s Matco Tools team, and so Lance and I got together with [crew chiefs] Brian Corradi and Mark Oswald, along with our clutch guys, and looked at what we were doing. They gave us some great ideas, and then we went to Atlanta and qualified OK, but we didn’t race real well, so we made the decision to go and test. It was a day at Disneyland for me because not only did I drive our car, I made four laps in Antron’s car. We found some things, and in [Madison], we lost first round to Brandon Bernstein, but it was the perfect example of a close race. We ran pretty good, and then we went to Topeka, and everything changed. That day was phenomenal for us.”

Topeka, notorious for being a hot and sticky racetrack that makes for tricky tuning, lived up to its reputation, but Larsen had the right combination, wrenching Millican to a start from the No. 5 position and setting him up for bracket-like race-day runs of 4.05, 4.02, 4.02, and 4.05 that culminated in a runner-up finish to Larry Dixon’s 3.97 in the final. A semifinal finish at the following event in Chicago allowed Millican to break into the top 10, a position he still has a grip on and is fighting to protect.

“We made up a huge gap in the points in Topeka,” said Millican. “In Englishtown, we beat Doug Kalitta, and that was big for us because he’s No. 9 in points, and he’s one of the best drivers in the business who is rarely going to make a mistake. Antron beat Joe Hartley, and that was big for us, too, because he’s right behind us, and then we both did the same thing in Norwalk; I beat Doug, and Antron beat Joe Hartley.

“Being in the top 10 makes a big difference, especially if we can stay there through Indy when they reset the points. We’ve seen people get on a roll; look at Cruz Pedregon [2008 Funny Car world champion]. I know our team is capable of that, and I love what I get to do. Mark and Lauren Pickens are just awesome, and I want to do my best for them. It goes back to what my mama said, ‘You gotta want it.’ And I’ve learned to simply not give up, keep pushing forward, keep working on what you’re doing, and you’ll get it figured out.”

This story is copyright 2009 National Hot Rod Association. It may not be reprinted or retransmitted in any form without the express written permission of NHRA.com.