Allen Johnson
Heading out to Memphis for the third event in the NHRA Countdown to 1 playoffs, we drove to the race because it’s in my home state of Tennessee. I love traveling across the state and seeing all the beautiful scenery. This country this time of year is absolutely gorgeous.
I got to Memphis and did the NHRA Fan Fest event on Thursday prior to the race. The event was on Beale Street in downtown Memphis and it gave me the chance to meet a lot of fans and a lot of cool folks that work for Memphis Motorsports Park. I made it to the quarterfinals at Memphis, and then we had no time off before the next event in Richmond, especially considering the rain-delay at Memphis, which pushed back eliminations to Monday.
Tuesday morning after Memphis we drove to Budds Creek, Md., an eight-hour drive. I had a couple of good days of testing there and won the Pro Stock Open. We really thought we had our ducks in a row. We drove on over to Richmond, had a day-and-a-half of great qualifying, were sitting in the fifth spot, and then experienced some terrible bad luck and wound up getting stuck with a DNQ.
We were actually honing in on it on each run. The Mopar®/J&J Racing Dodge Stratus R/T got better in each of our first three qualifying runs. Then the air just turned awesome all of a sudden during the fourth and final round of qualifying. Everybody qualified behind me started running better times than I had run, and by the time I came up for my final qualifying pass, I was already bumped to No. 17, one spot out of the show.
We knew what we had to and we were set to do it. But I did my burnout and when I backed up, I noticed the car missing gears, and it got worse while sitting at the starting line. Dad [Roy Johnson] appeared in the windshield and gave me the sign telling me the car was broke. I said, “Just move out the way. We’ve got to go for it. I don’t care if the engine comes completely apart; we’ve got to try to make it down the track.”
I took off, and through the first couple of gears I thought the Mopar Dodge was going to be okay. Then about third gear it started diving over, and in fourth gear I could feel the motor start to bind up. At that point I knew I was done, so I just clutched it. We found out the problem was that a roller on the tip of the lifter broke—a $30 part. We just had some really bad luck.
We’re going to change our strategy at the final two events of the year, at Vegas and Pomona. We’re going to throw all of our test technology at two or three different motors and go into Vegas with quite a bit of new stuff in the motors. We feel the changes will be for the better, but we don’t know if they’re going to last or not. We’ll have a backup motor on hand that is proven, but we’re going to throw a bunch of things out there, try to gain power from our Mopar HEMI® engines, and go into these last two events with guns a-blazing and try to win ‘em!