Stunning. And Well Deserved

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May 5th, 2016

The NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing season is officially at the quarter pole, which is what we call a metaphor since quarter poles are in horse racing and not drag racing. Still, the season is 25 percent complete. And guess what…

Tied for first. And on a hot streak.
Tied for first. And on a hot streak.

Tim Wilkerson is tied for first place in the Mello Yello points race. It doesn’t necessarily look that way in the standings, because when two drivers are tied for any points position they are listed alphabetically and Force (as in Courtney) comes well before Wilkerson (as in Tim) in terms of that pesky alphabet. This is a subject of which I’m well aware and familiar. Throughout grade school and high school my seat was always near the back left corner of the room. Students like Mike Abels and Tom Altepeter were always near the front, by the door.

Back to the more important guy with the W name, though. Looking at the glass half empty, you could point out the fact that Wilk shares the top spot in the standings despite the fact he’s lost in the first round at half the races. But the glass is far more than half full when you realize he’s been to the final round at the other three, and won two of them.

I was at Mall of America with family when Wilk won in Phoenix, and high-fives were shared all-around as we enjoyed some appetizers at Hard Rock Cafe. It was a nice bounce-back effort after the opening-round loss in Pomona, although it wasn’t world domination out in the desert. Wilk qualified 8th and had a couple of those “fortunate rounds” we all tend to convince ourselves that you must have, in order to win a race. But, a win is a win and it was awesome to see.

Then he qualified 4th at both Gainesville and Vegas, indicating that the Levi, Ray & Shoup Mustang’s performance was coming around. Unfortunately, both of those solid qualifying efforts turned into opening-round losses. This sport is hard. It happens.

After that, please call Katie and have her bar the door. Another No. 8 qualifying spot at the 4-Wides in Charlotte was followed by an absolute display of smash-mouth drag racing. Hopefully Lewis “Stat Guy” Bloom can tell me how many Funny Car drivers have won the 4-Wides while running the table (a metaphor again, since that’s a billiards reference) by winning each round outright. We, again, convince ourselves that winning NHRA races is so difficult you probably have to come in second at least once to win the 4-Wides. Not true. See: Wilkerson, Tim – at Charlotte. First across the stripe in all three rounds with three clean and fast runs. We call that domination.

And then it was on to Houston. No. 1 qualifier, then 4.03 in the first round, 3.92 in the second round, 3.90 in the semifinal, and 3.94 in the final round. The only thing to stop the Wilk juggernaut was Courtney’s 3.91 that earned her the trophy in a very tight (great) race.

An 11-4 round record after six races. Two wins and one runner-up. All from an under-budgeted team that has always found a way to stretch and pull a dollar bill until it pays for two dollars worth of stuff, taking out teams with resources and talent pools that are so vast it’s hard to see the bottom.

Tim Wilkerson is a smart guy. In 2008 he took the championship battle to the final day of the season before finishing second. That left a whole lot of people on very big teams either shaking their heads or bowing in his general direction. Remember, it’s a very hard sport. 10,000-hp Nitro-burning cars are such temperamental beasts they’d fit right into a Harry Potter movie, playing the role of the fire-breathing dragon. You’d think it really does take four cars, eight crew chiefs, and 100-person staff to win these things, especially in the dominating fashion Wilk has been showing. What it takes is a lot of smarts, good solid parts (rhyme unintended), consistent mechanical application, and chemistry. And the chemistry is of the human kind.

I’ve seen enormously talented teams fail in a lot of different sports. Imagine putting eight of the best Olympic rowers in a boat, and then watching as all eight of them try to do it themselves instead of rowing in sync, as a team. It doesn’t work. I’d rather have eight really good oarsmen who all pull in unison. Team Wilk is that group.

Wilk makes a point of recognizing “my guys” whenever he’s interviewed. Knowing they’re out there in the pit not just bolting it together “right” but bolting it together consistently to the same tolerances, gives him the confidence to get after it in terms of the tune-up. When things aren’t consistent, nothing seems to go right. I spent 20 years in the sport, and saw that problem rear its ugly mug on too many occasions.

And then there are two words that sum it all up: Richard Hartman.

Richard Hartman.
Richard Hartman.

I’ve known Richard for a long time. He and Del Worsham were already longtime friends when I joined Del in 1997, and Del always made it clear to me that Richard could not just do anything, he could do everything. He knows these cars inside out, he’s driven like a champ, he can tune, he can read the track, and he can oversee the mechanical side like few others.

When Tim hired Richard before the 2015 season, I was as pumped up as I’d been in years. Then, I was stunned when a very small minority of people derided the move. They obviously didn’t know Richard as well as I did. They couldn’t have known him at all. I knew exactly what he was bringing to the LRS party, and it wasn’t chips and dip.

When you add a guy like Richard Hartman to the mix (and there aren’t too many like him) what you get is a team that’s far greater than the sum of its individual parts. He makes everyone better. He makes Tim better. He gives Wilk the confidence to go for it, and he communicates with Wilk in a way no one else ever has. He’s been in the car, he knows how it feels, and they understand each other at an almost psychic level. It was fun to watch last year, and it’s been even more fun to watch this season.

The timing of the move to Fox Sports 1 and the addition of NHRA All-Access couldn’t have come at a better time for a guy like me. I’ve been following along on everything from the big screen TV in the home theater to my iPhone at Mall of America. It’s been a great first quarter.

Team Wilk could have the same 11-4 record with two wins right now, but in a totally different way. String together some rounds where the other guy red-lights, or crosses the center line, or goes up in smoke at the hit, and you can talk yourself into believing you’re better than you are. I’ve been a part of some wacky wins (hello Cory Lee!) and while they’re fun they leave you feeling very fortunate instead of very good. These last two races have been whippings, with the exception of Ms. Force in the Houston final, which was basically a draw that she deservedly earned by inches.

With that in mind, I don’t see this team fading away. They’re on the mark right now, and have been running fast in every possible set of conditions. Wilk used to be known as a “hot-weather ace” which is a nice way of saying “He doesn’t make the horsepower to win in prime conditions, but he can get down a gravel road when everyone else is smoking the tires.” That is no longer true. For reference, I point you toward a 3.899 (at 327 mph) on a stout 90-degree track in Houston.

To be realistic, the sport remains really hard. Great teams struggle all the time. The more writing I’ve been doing on “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” the more I see correlations to baseball. When things aren’t going well, it feels like you have two strikes on you when you walk to the plate. You start thinking too much. You decide to get aggressive and then you swing at bad pitches. You decide to be patient and the pitcher pours strike after strike across the plate. You’re always playing catch-up. Always one pitch behind. When you’re hot, the ball looks big and the pitches all seem to be right in your favorite zone. It seems easy. It’s not.

There will be some more struggles for Team Wilk. But this group has shown me that they can overcome that and win. I’m not going to make any predictions and I’m not going out on any limbs. Let’s just sum it up by saying that NOTHING this team might do will surprise me. Nothing. And anything is possible.

Go get ’em, guys!

As for the book, I just completed Chapter 17 and it’s an important one. It address my final two years in baseball, as a Scouting Supervisor for the Toronto Blue Jays. From here, in terms of the chapters to follow, we will head off into my sports-marketing career, which includes multiple stints as a senior-executive for professional indoor soccer franchises (hence the word “Balls” in the title). That’s important, because it was Bill Kentling, the Commissioner of the Major Indoor Soccer League, who got me into racing. There are still many chapters, many pages, and thousands of words left to write, but when I started this in January it was nothing more than an idea and an outline. Right now, it’s more than half of a book.

I haven’t done a snippet in a while, so here’s a new one from the end of Chapter 17. I’d played baseball my whole life. I’d chased the dream until two Major League clubs told me to kindly take my glove and bat, and go away. I’d scouted for four years because the Blue Jays had offered me a job and I took it. I had no idea what I was getting into. Some of it was awesome. A lot of it was not. And as the calendar flipped over to 1983, my final season as a scout, I started to feel like I was in the wrong place.


 

It struck me that I wasn’t having much fun. I’d consciously elected to go into scouting because it kept me in baseball and it sounded far more enjoyable and rewarding than broadcasting or anything else in the real world. I began to realize I might just possibly have been wrong.

It’s a lonely job, for one thing. You mostly work alone and are on the road for months on end, driving tens of thousands of miles, staying in lousy hotels, and eating terrible food. You see the actual people you work with, as part of your organization, just a few days a year. You run into scouts from other organizations haphazardly, but even that meant very little to me, being the youngest scout in baseball. Most of those guys were my dad’s age while I was still just 26. And you watch an awful lot of bad baseball just to hopefully find a gem hidden here or there in the tall grass.

It was beginning to sink in that maybe, just maybe, I needed to find the next great thing. 

 


 

By June of that year I resigned. My sports marketing career re-energized me and took me to places I never dreamed I’d be, both geographically and professionally. In just a few more years I’d be standing at the starting line at Heartland Park Topeka watching Gary Ormsby and Lori Johns match-race in their Top Fuel Dragsters, and nothing would ever be the same again. Still plenty of ups, downs, and challenges for sure, and times when I felt like the failures and tests were going to overcome me, but I never quit. It’s going to be fun to write it all down and finish this monster.

Thanks for following, everyone. And…. GO WILK!!!

Bob Wilber, at your service and typing like a mad man.

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