ST. LOUIS, Mo. – As a previous winner of the O’Reilly Auto Parts Midwest Nationals as well as last year’s runner-up, Mike Neff must be considered one of the Funny Car favorites this week when the NHRA Full Throttle tour makes its annual stop on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River at Gateway International Raceway.
Gateway was the first track on which the 42-year-old Neff reached the final round as a driver and it also is the track on which, as crew chief, he won the Funny Car title in 2005 – although not with the driver one might expect.
Even though Neff and Gary Scelzi won the 2005 NHRA championship together, denying John Force Racing, Inc., its 13th straight title, it was Ron Capps with whom Neff shared the winners’ circle the same season at Gateway International.
“I was helping Capps because ‘Ace’ (crew chief Ed ‘the Ace’ McCulloch) was gone (on temporary medical leave),” Neff said. “We qualified No. 1 with Scelzi and No. 2 with Capps but we had a mechanical problem on Scelzi’s car (in the first round). Capps went on to win the race. It was a good day.”
While nowhere is Neff credited for the Capps’ win, he and Scelzi are in the Gateway record books for the 4.724 second quarter mile they rang up in 2004, a mark that will stand at least another year as the track’s official quarter mile record.
As a driver, Neff has excelled even though he still is seeking his first win in the Ford Drive One Mustang. Last year, he drove his way into the Midwest Nationals finale before losing to Tim Wilkerson by a scant .017 of a second. That performance propelled him to a 10th place finish in Funny Car points and to NHRA Rookie-of-the-Year honors.
Despite all of his success, Neff will have to share top billing among the Ford drivers with Ashley Force Hood.
Force Hood, daughter of 14-time series champion John Force, is coming off a runner-up finish with her Castrol GTX Ford Mustang two weeks ago at Atlanta, Ga. On the way to her seventh career final round, the 26-year-old posted the three fastest speeds achieved in the slightly less than one year races in Top Fuel and Funny Car have been contested only to 1,000 feet.
She also had the four quickest times of the event, losing in the final to Jack Beckman only after becoming disoriented and stepping off the gas as she was trained to do. As a result, her Mustang fell off its torrid 4.0 second, 310 mile per hour pace and Beckman snuck by for the win.
Nevertheless, Ashley moved to within 70 points of Capps, the Funny Car leader, and could start Sunday’s eliminations in second place depending upon what occurs during the qualifying phase that begins on Friday.
The graduate of Cal State-Fullerton presently trails Beckman by a single point in the race for the No. 2 spot. She could move past her former driving instructor simply by qualifying in the top half of the field and at least two positions ahead of him.
“I think I just got lost and couldn’t figure out where I was on the track,” Ashley said of the Atlanta final. “I was just really upset that I gave up such a great car. A combination of different things made me feel like I was lost. It was frustrating. I just feel like I need to make more runs at night.
“Our team has always believed that consistency is the key,” Ashley said, “and the consistent car we had at Atlanta is the same one we’re bringing to St. Louis. Maybe we haven’t (always) had the fastest car, but recently we have really been able to keep the consistency but kind of take it up a notch.
“Now we’re running consistently and running at the top of the pack – and that is the best of both worlds. We’re really excited about this weekend even though we still have a few kinks to work out.”
The first woman to race in a Funny Car final, the first to win a race, the first to lead the points and the first to finish in the Top 10, Ashley historically has qualified well for the Midwest Nationals but has yet to race for the money. She qualified No. 3 as a rookie and No. 4 last season. Her best finish was a semifinal loss to Capps in 2007.
Even if Ashley and Neff should stumble, JFR should have be able to interject two other drivers into the fray including drag racing’s biggest winner.
John Force, who on Monday will celebrate his 60th birthday, is a two-time winner of the Midwest Nationals (1999, 2002) whose Castrol GTX High Mileage Mustang recently has begun to show flashes of the form that made it almost unbeatable in the late 1990s.
According to Force, who hasn’t won a race – or even reached the final round – in almost a full year, it’s about time.
“We’ve got a good hot rod, but we don’t have the consistency we used to have,” said the 126-time tour winner. “I keep thinking every week that ‘this is our race’ and I’m thinking it again. Ashley’s got the best car (among the four JFR Mustangs), but we’re getting better.
“Coil and Bernie (co-crew chiefs Austin Coil and Bernie Fedderly) are the smartest guys I know. They’ll figure this all out. We’re not done yet. They may think we’re done, but I think we still can win out here.”
Force, who needs to win to extend to 23 the number of consecutive years in which he has claimed at least one NHRA tour event, hasn’t been in a final round since he won last year’s O’Reilly Summer Nationals at Topeka, Kan.
To put Force’s frustration in perspective, that’s the longest he has EVER gone without reaching the finals. The previous longest final round drought endured by the 14-time Auto Racing All-America selection was 22 races from July 15, 1979, when he was runner-up to Raymond Beadle at Englishtown, N.J., to July 18, 1983, when he was runner-up to Mark Oswald at the same race.
That said, Force insists he and his team are miles ahead of last season when they finished seventh in the NHRA point standings despite a career high four DNQs.
And then there’s Robert “Top Gun” Hight who, over the last four years, day-in and day-out, was the team’s top performer at the wheel of the Auto Club Ford Mustang.
Although he never has failed to log a Top 5 finish, the 39-year-old Hight finds himself presently tied for ninth place.
That is particularly disconcerting for the 2005 Rookie-of-the-Year insomuch as he began the season by qualifying No. 1 (for the 29th time in his brief career) and reaching the semifinals at the O’Reilly Kragen Winternationals.
“We are still battling some issues,” said the 11-time tour winner. “We didn’t get a lot out of testing in Las Vegas (following the April 5 SummitRacing.com Nationals), so we are a little behind. I know (crew chief) Jimmy Prock and my guys can figure it out, but that can’t happen soon enough for me.”
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