Allen Johnson
After my win at the Mopar Mile-High NHRA Nationals in Denver on July 12, the Mopar/J&J Racing team moved on to the last two of three events on the NHRA’s Western Swing, at Seattle and Sonoma. My wife Pam always enjoys going to downtown Seattle with all the girls and going to the Space Needle and shopping a bit. Saturday night we always enjoy going over to Don Schumacher’s spread at the track and having crab legs and seafood. Don came over and invited us to that, and the whole team went. He has a big party in the hospitality area of his pits, with fresh seafood, each year at Seattle.
Pam and I flew to San Fran for the Sonoma event with my mom and dad. The team went their own separate ways and did their own thing. Pam and I stayed at the Huntington Hotel in downtown San Francisco. They have a really good spa there. We did all the spa stuff for two days, worked out, and walked down to Union Square for some shopping. Every night we were there we ate at a really good restaurant. We ate at the House of Prime Rib, Sinbad’s, Bob’s Steak and Chop House and, of course, at Scoma’s, on Fisherman’s Warf. We met the team at Scoma’s on Thursday night and had a big seafood blast there before heading up to Sonoma for the race.
As for the races at Seattle and Sonoma, we had a boo-boo in the semifinals at Seattle and shook the tires. That’s one of the things we’ve got to get rid of. We did it at Norwalk also. Hopefully, we’re learning from our mistakes, but we should have been in position to win at Seattle. So I wasn’t very happy about that.
In Sonoma we took what I call the “A” combination I ran at Seattle and put it in my partner Johnny Gray’s Mopar Dodge. We pretty much put the “B” combination in my car, and we still qualified third and did okay, but that “B” combination is not totally perfected yet or I think we could have qualified No. 1 and beat Jeggy [Coughlin] in the second round. Johnny actually had trouble with the “A” combination in his first run, so we had to take it out and put in the “C” combination in his car. But he still qualified seventh and won a round, and gained a round on Warren [Johnson], as he tries to make the top 10 in points and qualify along with me for the NHRA Countdown to 1 playoffs.
We have a nice little break now before we head to Brainerd on Aug. 14–16. Pam and I will probably go to the lake house we own about 40 miles from our home in Greeneville, Tenn. We’ll do a little R&R—some boating, water skiing and hang out there at least one weekend while we’re off. We’ll spend some time at home, maybe ride some motorcycles and play a little golf for a week. Then it’s back to the races as I try to get my third win of the year in my Mopar/J&J Racing Dodge!