The latest update as of March 11, 2025
Couldn't see this coming... or could we?
After the BIG announcements last week from the IHRA, I was somewhat skeptical of just how true the "acquisitions" of seven tracks, mostly NHRA sanctioned, were factual. Today's feature story on Drag Illustrated's Crew Chief Daily bulletin contradicts most, but not all, of the claims by the new IHRA president, Darryl Cuttell.
A separate article in the same bulletin details a response from one of the tracks involved in this "premature purchase" announcement Maryland International Raceway Clarifies Track Not Being Acquired by IHRA.
Despite requests for comment from IHRA, they have not responded to Drag Illustrated, or clarified any of their previous claims on the IHRA website. There's certainly more to this story coming soon, but for now, we'll just have to put it down to an over-exuberant new management at the International Hot Rod Association. Stay tuned for more, possibly much more on this story in the coming days and weeks.
Now let's get back to what was originally planned to be the focus of today's "What's New" update.
Post Race Gatornationals News
Before we get into some of the details and recaps of what happened over a very long and drawn out weekend at Gainesville Raceway, we've found an explanation for the disqualification of Angelle Sampey before the first round of eliminations in Top Alcohol Dragster. During a standard fuel temperature check in the staging lanes, her fuel was found to be colder than the minimum 50 (F) allowed for the class. Here is her explanation for the DQ.
Tough start to the year in Gainesville. After qualifying 7th with a 5.272 at 264.40, we were unable to make the run during the first round of eliminations due to having fuel that was tested under the minimum required temperature for our class. The NHRA 100% made the right call and we would expect them to do the same for others in violation. To be clear, the temperature was significantly under the minimum.
This wasn't an attempt to run right at 50 degrees for max performance, but rather a bad estimation on our part. To clear up speculation, it's pretty straightforward what happened. We are still running the original Top Fuel fuel tank in the car in the short term as we wait to take inventory of a smaller, purpose built A/Fuel fuel tank that includes an access hole for a temperature probe that regulates our fuel chiller's output.
With the current tank, we run approximately 5 gallons less fuel than what it is capable of holding and there is not an access hole to get our chiller's temperature probe into where the fuel sits. This probe regulates the overall operation of the chiller and stops the chilling process when the fuel gets to a predetermined temperature. Our current option to chill the fuel with this tank requires the chiller to run unregulated and we then estimate if it's close to 50 degrees by pulling fuel from the main fuel line supply to test it.
We knew it wasn't going to be 1:1 with the temperature of what was circulating in the tank, but we definitely did not expect that much of a difference. As mentioned above, we missed, that's on us, and we own it. We're working on alternative ways to monitor this until the new fuel tank arrives and we are ready to get this thing back on track in a couple days in Belle Rose, Louisiana.
The event at Belle Rose that she refers to is the first Central Region NHRA Lucas Oil Series Regional event of the season, running on Friday and Saturday of this week. We're more than quite sure that there will never be a repeat of this mistake by the Hangsterfer - Michalek Racing team in the future.