Lindberg Earns Head’s Respect In First Nitro Funny Car Season

As Jim Head, one of the few to win in both the NHRA’s Top Fuel and Funny Car classes, contemplated stepping from the cockpit about five years ago, he had a cryptic way of saying so.

He wanted to field the Funny Car – own it and tune it but not drive it: “I don’t want to drive my car. I’m too old. I want to run my car. The driver is just a monkey. Anybody can drive these [cars].” You get in, you hit the gas, you hold your breath. It can be taught.”

Then along came Jonnie Lindberg, the Swedish sensation who earned back-to-back NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car championships in 2015 and 2016 and shattered performance records along the way. And he’s nobody’s monkey.

The two of them gravitated toward each other via some mechanical magnet.

Head certainly took note of Lindberg’s record-shattering victory at Charlotte back in March 2015, when he set both ends of the national record and recorded the three quickest elapsed times (5.361, 5.381, 5.406) and four fastest speeds (272.01, 270.64, 270.10, 269.94) in Top Alcohol Funny Car history.

What surely intrigued him was Lindberg’s thinking that day: “It was a good run. It was as good as it can be. The engine looked brand new on it. The heads, the rockers, everything works good. I didn’t hurt a thing this weekend, so it was perfect.  . . . The track was cold and really good in the morning, so I just went for it then. I knew I can run a high-5.30. I put a pretty aggressive tune-up in it and ran a .38. After that, I backed it down again because I wanted to win the race. I didn’t want to run that .36 and then not go down the track again.  . . . This was a perfect weekend. It can’t be much better than this. To top this off, I probably need to go for the championship. That’s the plan now. I don’t have all the funding in place to go for the whole championship, but I’ll work hard to figure it out. I can’t stop now.”

What impressed Head most, maybe transported him fondly back a few decades, was Lindberg’s love and skill for tuning his car. When he hired Lindberg this past off-season to replace son Chad Head in the seat, Jim Head called Lindberg “a one-man band, someone who drives his own truck and puts his own awning up. That’s how I started. I did it for a lot of years. I can relate to someone who has gone through all that.

I’ve always been a driver-mechanic, and he’s a driver-mechanic. So that’s a good match. – Jim Head

“He’s a mechanic, and he’s a crew chief in his own right with his alcohol car. So there’s nothing lost in translation as far as the feel of the car and all that kind of stuff. I’ve always been a driver-mechanic, and he’s a driver-mechanic. So that’s a good match,” Head said. “He’s the quickest and fastest alcohol tuner out there right now, and I’m really proud of him for doing what he’s doing there. We’re a good team. I’m really proud of him and pleased to have him part of Head Racing.”

When Lindberg told him, “I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty,” Head had found his match. They might look like the odd couple: Head a rugged, silver-haired, clenched-jawed sage with a hauler-full of drag-racing accomplishments and tales and Lindberg a dark-haired Leonardo DiCaprio look-alike with the smile of an ultra-confident, almost ruthless racer and arms full of tattoos. Lindberg turned 28 years old the day the U.S. Nationals opened. He was born in 1989, five years after Head won his first Funny Car trophy – at the U.S. Nationals.

But Head and Lindberg are so much alike. The Swede has experience with his father’s construction company that does excavation and lays foundations, similar to the work Head’s firm does. Neither wastes a lot of words, yet neither is shy with an opinion. Neither has an abundance of sponsorship money.

Both are hard workers. In addition to operating a Funny Car team, Head owns a Columbus, Ohio, construction business that specializes in airport runway paving. Lindberg owns and tunes his own Top Alcohol car that brother Johan has driven this year to two victories in as many final rounds (at the Charlotte Four-Wide Nationals and at Brainerd, Minn.). He has tuned Jay Payne’s TAFC all season, guiding him to a final round at Houston and a victory at Seattle in which he ran the table with the best reaction time, quickest elapsed time and fastest speed and won by nearly 60 feet. Lindberg also drove Payne’s Camaro to the final round at Pomona this February, when Payne was recuperating from shoulder surgery. In Head’s Toyota, Lindberg advanced to the final rounds at Gainesville, Fla., in March, Las Vegas in April, and St. Louis in early October.

Moreover, Lindberg tunes Pro Mod cars for two European racers, Åke Persson and Jan Ericsson.

Both Head and Lindberg are hands-on and resourceful. If Head needs a part that doesn’t exist as he envisions it, he designs it, not averse to building his innovation with common items one could find at a drug store. Lindberg’s ingenuity shows under the body of his alcohol car. He said, “I have some stuff on my car that nobody out there has. I always think that way.”

By the end of the regular season, Head had called their association “a marriage made in Heaven.”

Lindberg said of Head, “That’s why we like each other, I guess. We think the same.”

On the other hand, they don’t always.

Take their Countdown strategies. Head said he didn’t have one. But the six-race playoff was on Lindberg’s mind.

Drag-racing conspiracy theorists questioned whether Head’s plan was to miss the season’s first two events (farthest from his home, in Southern California and Arizona), then bypass Topeka and Epping to save money, then rely on Lindberg’s natural talent to glean enough points to qualify among the elite 10 drivers to compete for the title. Head dismissed that notion.

“If I wanted to get into the Countdown, I wouldn’t have missed four races. I have no interest in the Countdown.”

He said he knew that not only hurt Lindberg’s chances for another NHRA championship but also for consideration for rookie-of-the-year recognition.

“Yes. Absolutely. It hurts him a lot, and I feel bad about it,” Head said. “But I still have no interest in the Countdown. We’ll try to race more races next year, maybe.”

It’s what I do full-time now, racing. I need to make a living somehow. So I travel around the world and tune cars and drive cars. It’s pretty cool. – Jonnie Lindberg

Lindberg said, “I wish I could do all of them. Then I’d be in the Countdown. I only needed to go to two races more to get in the Countdown. We missed four races this year. If I had gone to Epping and Topeka, then I would be in the Countdown in the 10th spot right now. I only missed it by 63 points.” He was 10th in the standings until the completion of the Epping race in June.

He said he considered his own plan: “I wish I could grab some other car and do two races, qualify to get points. I talked to the Laganas about bringing their Funny Car out. I didn’t have the funding to do that. We didn’t have time to put the car together. No crew, no money, not enough time . . . so we skipped it. It’s the first year [in the class], so maybe I take it a little slow.”

That might be the only thing Lindberg takes slowly. He was the first Top Alcohol Funny Car racer to dip into the 5.3-second range and top the 270-mph barrier. Two and half years later, his 5.361-second E.T. is still the class record. He licensed at Las Vegas in Tim Wilkerson’s Mustang with a couple of 3.9-second passes at better than 320 mph.

And he can switch gears mentally probably faster than anyone. Following his portion of the pre-U.S. Nationals test session that Thursday, he zipped to the airport and flew to Sweden for his Pro Mod gigs there. By Monday he was back at his Brownsburg business, JLR, already war-gaming his U.S. Nationals assignments. He tuned both of his cars to top-half starts in TAFC, Johan Lindberg in the No. 1 slot and Payne in seventh place. He drove Head’s car to a No. 7 seeding.

He shrugs off his ability to manage a schedule like that with ease.

“I don’t know – you don’t think . . . you just do it, I guess,” Lindberg said. “It’s what I do full-time now, racing. I need to make a living somehow. So I travel around the world and tune cars and drive cars. It’s pretty cool. I like to be busy. When I tune Payne’s car, I make a run in the fuel car, and then I just pack the ‘chutes and put fuel in it, and then I run to the starting line to watch Jay in his car. I still want to be involved with the tuning part of it . . . because I enjoy that as much as driving.”

Lindberg didn’t say so, but he hinted that he doesn’t think of himself as a Jim Head protégé, per se. He regards himself as a team owner who took the opportunity to step up to the pro ranks.

“I have a pretty good handle on my alcohol situation. I just do it as I’ve always done it with the alcohol stuff. I know alcohol,” he said with assurance. “I have my own race team, and I build my own race cars.”

Replacing Head’s son, Chad Head, in the seat was a bit awkward, but Lindberg handled that with courtesy.

“Jim called me, but before I said yes, I called Chad to ask him if it was OK if I drove the car. I knew Chad before I got this opportunity. He said, ‘Yeah yeah, go ahead. I’m going to focus more on the [Head Inc.] business.’ So I got his blessing to do it. I think I did the right thing to call him before I said yes,” Lindberg said. “It was a little weird. I didn’t know what to say, but, of course, I wanted to drive the car.”

So much for the “Two Heads are better than one” theory. But this so-called marriage made in Heaven still is in its honeymoon.

About the author

Susan Wade

Celebrating her 45th year in sports journalism, Susan Wade has emerged as one of the leading drag-racing writers with 20 seasons at the racetrack. She was the first non-NASCAR recipient of the prestigious Russ Catlin Award and has covered the sport for the Chicago Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger, St. Petersburg Times, and Seattle Times. Growing up in Indianapolis, motorsports is part of her DNA. She contributes to Power Automedia as a freelancer writer.
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