Lunch buddies Dixon, McClenathan both hungry for title
REACTION TIME
By Susan Wade
What kind of a guy wants to have to pick up the check at the restaurant —
and does it with glee?
Larry Dixon does — at least when he’s treating Cory McClenathan, his
closest rival in the Countdown for the National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel
crown.
The trouble is that McClenathan wants to pay the bill, too.
What’s with these two?
Points leader Dixon has two championships from his Miller Lite Dragster
days with Don Prudhomme’s organization and is going for a third in the Alan
Johnson-managed Al-Anabi Dragster. McClenathan, who has raced in Top Fuel for
20 years, has maybe the best shot of his career in the Don
Schumacher-stabled FRAM Dragster.
They had lunch together a couple of weeks ago, right after Dixon nearly
broke McClenathan’s heart in their final-round match-up at Reading, Pa’s Maple
Grove Raceway. Just when Dixon’s car lost traction early in the run and it
looked as if McClenathan would break Dixon’s string of winning final
rounds before it reached a dozen, the FRAM Dragster also smoked the tires. Dixon
was able to recover more quickly and pass McClenathan to stay 89 points
ahead with only two races left on the schedule.
“All I got was a gold man (the Wally trophy), not the championship. But it
was huge,” Dixon said. “You’re racing the No. 2 guy in points and you could
tighten it right up or spread it out. [In the final,] I blew the tires off
right at the start and I’m thinking I’m done. Then I saw his tires start
to get loose and I thought, ‘Maybe I can catch him.’ Our car just hooked up.
I had such a run on him and I blew by him so fast. When I saw the win
light come on, I was laughing and couldn’t believe it all at the same time,
because that’s a race you shouldn’t win, and I just won.”
McClenathan said, “It just makes it tough when you get down this close and
he’s beatable. He was very beatable there, but he just feathered back into
it and just motored on down through there. I had the gas all the way down.
He just blew by me. We had nothing. It isn’t over. I never stop fighting.”
On the racetrack, McClenathan will fight. But unlike in NASCAR or In the
IndyCar Series, he hasn’t been exchanging barbs with Dixon or anything
disrespectful like that. McClenathan and Dixon had lunch together during the
two-week break between the Reading race and this weekend’s Las Vegas Nationals
at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Both teams are headquartered at Brownsburg, Ind., where Dixon also
happens to own a couple of nearby buildings in the same complex that’s dotted
with race shops. Dixon is McClenathan’s landlord, for “Cory Mac” rents a space
in which he stores his 1966 Nova.
(When McClenathan rode out a scary crash in 2006 at Bristol, Tenn., that
broke his dragster in two, Dixon happened to be McClenathan’s landlord in
Brownsburg for that Carrier Boyz operation. He got on the phone with folks in
Brownsburg and helped McClenathan’s team get into the shop that Friday
night. By daybreak Saturday, Drew Olson, son of then-crewman Brian Olson, and
some team members already had loaded the spare car onto one of Don
Schumacher’s trucks and driven it to Bristol for McClenathan to race that weekend.
He skipped Saturday qualifying and ran that retrieved and hastily prepared
car in Sunday eliminations. So Dixon has a history of helping even his
on-track rivals, including McClenathan.)
“I’m storing my car over at one of Larry’s shops,” McClenathan said. “So it
was kind of one of those, ‘Hey, I’m going to bring the car over, drop it
off. And hey, while we are at it, let’s catch up and go to lunch.’
“It’s funny, because Larry paid the check, and he said: ‘You know, I
probably made a little bit more bonus money than you did last weekend.’ And I
remember laughing, thinking, ‘OK, you got me there.’
“So,” McClenathan said, “as we were walking out, he said, ‘You know, we can
probably do this a couple more times. I’m hoping to be able to pick up
that check.’
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll be trying my hardest to make sure I get to pick up the
check for those next two,’ ” McClenathan said.
“We’ll see how it rolls when it comes down to it.”
Yes, we all want to see how it rolls.
Tony Schumacher, so far back at 154 points off Dixon’s pace that Dixon and
McClenathan would have to fall off the face of the Earth for another one of
his Army Strong miracles to give him a seventh straight title, is out of
the picture in third place.
But Dixon has no sense of entitlement — he knows McClenathan will dig for
every single point he can get in the next two races to overtake him. He
isn’t assuming he’ll end Schumacher’s reign.
“I think Cory would have something to say about that,” Dixon said. “Tony
has been on a run for the past half a dozen years. Everybody in Top Fuel has
been trying to take him down a spot or two, and it hasn’t happened. But we
are going to keep trying and you keep plugging away, and you hope it’s
enough, but you just keep trying. It hasn’t happened yet. He’s still got a No.
1 on the car and he will until somebody does. And we are going to give it
our all in the next two [events].”
So is McClenathan.
“You know, 89 points is still not insurmountable,” he said. “It’s still a
doable thing for me as far as I’m concerned. If Al-Anabi, if they slip up at
all or if Larry has a bad day with his car, then we are going to be right
there when it goes into Pomona.”
The season will end with the Nov. 11-14 Auto Club of Southern California
Finals at Pomona, Calif.
“Larry knows it’s not over by a long shot and I’m certainly not going to
give up any time soon,” McClenathan said. “He knows he’s got a battle ahead
of him, still. It’s always been straight up with me and Larry. There’s no
gray area. I was driving a Top Fuel car before he even started, and it’s not
always a battle between us. But when we get to Las Vegas, I guarantee it
will be a battle.
“Obviously it’s hard to go out there and say, ‘Well, let’s qualify one or
two, and we have got to wait until the finals to race each other.’ It’s
going to be kind of up to other people to do my dirty work for me,” he said,
“because obviously we want to qualify well in the field. We want to get those
little points as well as the bigger points, to be the quickest car each
session in the qualifying. There’s some good points to be had right there,
and it might make a difference come Pomona.”
No need to tell Dixon — he lost last year’s championship to Schumacher by
two points.
Said McClenathan, “We are going to go in business as usual, go out, get
qualified, go for it Friday night, and then let everything kind of speak for
%
The season will end with the Nov. 11-14 Auto Club of Southern California
Finals at Pomona, Calif.
“Larry knows it’s not over by a long shot and I’m certainly not going to
give up any time soon,” McClenathan said. “He knows he’s got a battle ahead
of him, still. It’s always been straight up with me and Larry. There’s no
gray area. I was driving a Top Fuel car before he even started, and it’s not
always a battle between us. But when we get to Las Vegas, I guarantee it
will be a battle.
“Obviously it’s hard to go out there and say, ‘Well, let’s qualify one or
two, and we have got to wait until the finals to race each other.’ It’s
going to be kind of up to other people to do my dirty work for me,” he said,
“because obviously we want to qualify well in the field. We want to get those
little points as well as the bigger points, to be the quickest car each
session in the qualifying. There’s some good points to be had right there,
and it might make a difference come Pomona.”
No need to tell Dixon — he lost last year’s championship to Schumacher by
two points.
Said McClenathan, “We are going to go in business as usual, go out, get
qualified, go for it Friday night, and then let everything kind of speak for
itself on Sunday. Larry and I have had talks a lot in the past, and we
always like to leave it up to the cars, let the cars speak for themselves.
That’s what we are planning on doing.”
Dixon isn’t one for stirring the pot. He’s an unflappable pro, and it
doesn’t matter who his opponent is in the next lane or who his lunch partner is
across the table.
“Oh, for me I just try to keep my head down and just worry about the run in
front of me,” Dixon said. “It’s great to read the stories that everybody
is doing, but at the same time, I need to just pay attention to what we are
doing with our car and our team and just try and make every run as great a
run as we can and hope that’s enough. Keep it simple.”
Dixon isn’t smirking about the fact he gained the points lead with his
final-round victory at Las Vegas in April against McClenathan and has dominated
ever since. Dixon won’t catch Schumacher’s 2008 record for most victories
in a single season (15), but so far he has won 12 races, leaving little for
anyone else. Schumacher has grabbed five. But Dixon is well aware that
McClenathan has had a spectacular season, winning at Phoenix, Charlotte, and
Seattle and staying in the top three in the standings all year long.
“This is what we all live and dream for . . . an opportunity to race for
not just race wins but championships,” Dixon said. “You just — you try
every week to do your best, and some weeks it works out and other weeks it
doesn’t. But I can’t try any harder at these next two than I’ve been trying
every week, every race, every year.
” If you go up like it’s the final round and all of the chips are on the
line, and it’s only the first qualifying run, you put it all on the line for
that run,” he said.
“So when you get an opportunity to get in that position, it’s no different,
at least in my head. Everybody has got a different way of motivating
themselves. And I’ve worked with a lot of great crew chiefs . . . working for
Snake and now Alan Johnson . . . crew chiefs, too: Dale Armstrong and Wes
Cerny and now Jason McCulloch, Dick LaHaie. And working around these guys,
there’s things that they can feed you to help you and guide you along. I’ve
learned something from everybody I’ve been around,” Dixon said, “and you hope
what you bring to the table is enough to get it done.”
McClenathan is especially proud of his Todd Okuhara- and Phil Shuler-led
crew, for every one of the team came from Funny Car backgrounds.
“I think my guys have done a great job for the last two years, and I look
forward to sticking it out with these guys and trying to win championships
with them, because I do think they have what it takes,” McClenathan said.
“It’s all about the relationships with the drivers, the crew chiefs, and
the guys that you surround yourself with,” he said. “I’ve always said that
and I’ll keep on saying it, because that’s really what it takes to go out and
win championships
