Anyone who has been around NHRA drag racing knows that Doug Kalitta is one of the premier drivers of all-time.

Those who enjoy statistics could recite that the Top Fuel racer recently became the third this season and 16^th overall to record 500 elimination round-wins. Or they might point out that he registered the third-quickest elapsed time in NHRA history (3.713 seconds) at the season-opener in February and owns the third-fastest speed (331.45 mph from 2010 at Reading, Pa.). They might recognize that 35-time winner Kalitta tied “Big Daddy” Don Garlits on the NHRA’s all-time Top Fuel career-victories list with his victory at Seattle and is just six Wally trophies away from passing Kenny Bernstein for No. 4.
Observers who have followed just the 2014 Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season have heard the name “Doug Kalitta” at every turn. After all, Kalitta has fallen out of first place for only one race since he took over at the February Phoenix event. He reached the final round at seven of the year’s first 11 races and led the field five times in the first 12.

With his No. 2 start at Seattle’s Northwest Nationals, he has qualified for 86 consecutive races since the 2010 fall Las Vegas visit. (Never mind that that achievement is just a little more than half as impressive as his streak of 164 starts between the 2000 Phoenix race and the spring 2007 one at Las Vegas. That added up to 164 events in a row.)

Say “Doug Kalitta” and most folks would associate him with his uncle and racing-team owner Connie Kalitta or longtime sponsor Mac Tools or Ann Arbor, Mich., or Kalitta Charters, the passenger, cargo, and MedFlight airline he has owned since 2001. Students of circle-track racing would remember his 1994 USAC national Sprint Car championship.

But few might know or recall that Kalitta, a married father of two who will celebrate his 50^th birthday Aug. 20, was an outstanding race-car fabricator and one-time bottom-end specialist on his uncle’s dragster.

“Actually, when I started working for Connie in 1982, I did the bottom end on his car, from ’82 to ’89. I would fly in on the weekends. I was working with the airline stuff, getting my aviation career going,” Kalitta said.

He had grown up at race tracks in his native Michigan and throughout the Midwest.

“My dad was primarily into motorcycles and road racing, ice racing, and all kinds of different deals with motorcycles. I grew up doing that,” Kalitta said. “Then I got hooked up with Connie.

“When I started working for him, he had a guy, Don Shilling, who had midgets. He would drag that thing back from a lot of the races all wrecked. We’d spend countless hours fixing it. It was one of the things I grew up doing, fabricating and welding. So I fit right in with getting in the mix to fix some of those cars he would bring back,” Kalitta said. “So I got hooked up helping him. Eventually I had the opportunity to drive one. Don built some really nice cars. He was quite a fabricator in his day.”

And Kalitta turned out to be quite the hot shoe.

 

Kalitta Motorsports teammate J.R. Todd said, “The cool thing is I go to a lot of sprint-car races when I’m at home in Indy and it’s fun just to listen to some of the old-timers talk about the USAC days, back in the early ’90s and how much of a bad-ass Doug was. I just wish I was around to watch him back in the circle-track days. But you can definitely see it now on the drag-racing side: he’s an animal out there.

“He’s a pretty soft-spoken guy,” Todd said, “But once he’s got the helmet on and he’s inside the race car, he’s an animal, for sure.”

That aggressive part of his personality remained dormant at Uncle Connie’s race shop, where cousin Scott Kalitta, who went on to earn two Top Fuel championships, was the more boisterous one of the family and kept the environment lively.

Back then the father-son team of Connie and Scott Kalitta drove the dragsters and that two-car team seemed like an ambitious undertaking.

“To have more than two cars would have put us over the edge, really. Back in the day, we were lucky to have one. Then the second car was a stretch. Obviously now, with four cars, we’ve figured out how to run four,” Kalitta said with a grin. “We had a lot of fun doing it.

“I would leave here drenched in oil,” he said. “My cousin was always a prankster. He’d fill the cylinder up with a little extra oil so when you push the piston out, oil would go all over. He was the prankster. He led the charge, for sure. He could make you laugh.”

Talk turns to dedication of his championship, if he can hold off Antron Brown and all his other rivals. Who would it be?

“I’ve had a lot of great support over the years with everybody I’ve worked with out here. And Scott’s been one of them,” Kalitta said, declining to name anyone specific – deferring to the appropriate time if he wins that long-elusive crown after finishing second three times.

“That’ll be a good problem to have,” he said.

Does Kalitta have a space reserved for that NHRA Mello Yello championship trophy?

“Nope,” he said.  “That would be another good problem to have.”

He doesn’t have any problems with his Mac Tools Dragster, for crew chief Jim Oberhofer and assistant tuner Troy Fasching and gang keep it in tip-top condition. But he has seen “sure things” disappear, in as few as 4.428 seconds. That’s the elapsed time Tony Schumacher ran at the 2006 NHRA Finals at Pomona, Calif., to swipe the championship – on the last pass of that final race.

The next evening at the awards ceremony, at which Schumacher picked up the hardware and paycheck for his third straight and fourth of seven Top Fuel championships, Kalitta received a warm and extended ovation for his effort. That sounds so feeble, so unappreciative – “his effort,” as if he made “a nice little try” or gamely challenged an untouchable victor. Kalitta was the one who had appeared unbeatable. He had led the Top Fuel standings for the previous 10 races of the season. He was perfect in five final rounds that year.

If it’s possible to share a race-car driver’s personal heartbreak or disappointment, the NHRA community at least empathized with the stoic Kalitta, who accepted the well-wishes with grace and restraint. He had never complained, had a tantrum, or mouthed off about his sudden and stark result. He just might have been the sentimental favorite that evening in Los Angeles, far from home, out of his fashion element in a tuxedo, and certainly not overjoyed that he was accepting the grand honor of being second – because he understands that in drag racing as in life, no one hands out statues and checks for finishing second.

“It just motivates you,” Kalitta said. “You’ve got to lose a close one to hopefully end up getting the prize. It’s definitely on our bucket list of things to do. We gave it all we had. The competition out here is tough, and that’s what makes NHRA drag racing what it is: a lot of close racing and it comes down to the end of the day. There’s only one guy who can win.”

And oh, how he wants to be the guy.

Will this outstanding season be Doug Kalitta’s year?

“I sure hope so,” he said. “We’re going to give it all we’ve got. I just can’t say enough about Jim O and the job he’s doing . . . and Troy and my whole team. They’re focused and incredibly organized. There’s nothing that fazes these guys.

“But if you have a lot of problems,” he said, “we have team assistance with the other crew guys. So we’ve got everybody working together. Connie’s put together a great effort here.”

Todd, who became part of the Kalitta Motorsports family in April as driver of the Optima Batteries Dragster, said of Doug Kalitta, “He’s always been one of the best drivers out here. The only thing that’s lacking is that championship.

“So hopefully they can get it done this year. I’d say they’re on the right track, the way that thing’s been running,” Todd said. “I’d like nothing more than to see him get it done, because I know that he’s more than deserving.”

Todd described his colleague as “just an all-around great guy and easy to talk to. We talk about driving, reactions times, whatever. We bounce things off each other: ‘Have you tried this? Are we doing this?’ We both want to be at the top of our game out here.”

Then, with a nod to the previous two Top Fuel champions, he said, “That’s what it takes to win races and beat those guys like Antron [Brown] and [Shawn] Langdon. These guys are the best leavers. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be right there with ’em. So we’re always talking about what we can do or should do to try to make ourselves better.”

Striving to be better evidently is a family trait son Mitchell and daughter Avery possess, he said, have that Kalitta-brand competitive disposition.

“They’re both heavily into soccer. They do very well at that and at school. My daughter is a couple of years younger than my son, and she works real hard at trying to keep up with everything he has accomplished and does. So there’s a competitive spirit there with them, as well,” he said.

He called wife Josie “pretty low-key, but she’s certainly got a competitive side to her, too. She’s a good card player.” And she can play a slick game of euchre. So he can hone his competitiveness at home at Ann Arbor, Mich.

Kalitta, tracing his path to drag racing through circle-track achievement, said, “My whole life is whatever the opportunity is.”

Right now he has maybe his best opportunity to earn another championship.