Virtually ‘Only’ Dodge Boy Emerging From Struggles As Independent

Pro Stock racer Allen Johnson was referring to himself a decade ago as “the other Dodge Boy.”

The automaker had Darrell Alderman and Scott Geoffrion as its headliners who dominated in the early 1990s. But Johnson can drop “the other.” He’s it. Loyal throughout his entire NHRA career to the Dodge/Mopar brand despite no hard dollars from its Auburn Hill, Mich., headquarters, Johnson is the make’s top representative in the class.

First-year full-timer Alan Prusiensky and sporadic competitors Deric Kramer and Tom Huggins drive Darts, but the field is crammed with Chevy Camaros. And according to Bill Harry, head of marketing for Mopar, Dodge isn’t interested in investing more resources in the NHRA Pro Stock class. It has thrown its energy and resources into sportsman racing and at the pro level supports Don Schumacher Racing’s nitro-fueled teams.

“Amateur sportsman racers fuel our brand’s involvement in NHRA competition,” Harry told Dragzine. “In 2017, we’re backing up those words with new initiatives that prove our commitment to our most dedicated and passionate brand ambassadors. This enhanced commitment, combined with our championship-winning relationship with Don Schumacher Racing in Funny Car and Top Fuel, demonstrates that we are focused on NHRA involvement that makes the most sense for the Mopar brand.”

Johnson said he’s satisfied with the non-monetary help he receives from Dodge and Mopar. After all, he’s used to going it alone with dad Roy, an IHRA champion, inspiration for Allen Johnson’s championship team, and today the engine expert. Allen Johnson remembered the days after Chrysler’s 1979 bailout that jettisoned Roy Johnson’s sponsorship and his sportsman rivals “had all the money in the world, and we didn’t have any. Of course, they tried to outrun us and never could. Dad worked night and day just to stay ahead, and them boys had all the money in the world and hired [Gene] Fulton to build their motors. And we were doing everything out of our little one-car garage. They built Camaro after Camaro, trying to outrun us. I don’t think they ever did it. They came close, but they spent a lot of money.” So his situation isn’t all that different now.

“Mopar and us are on very good terms,” Allen Johnson said. “We get a lot of support from them. They support us and are very helpful when we need engineering help. Their participation in Pro Stock is, well, they’ve really pulled back a lot. They’re still 100 percent behind us and want to see us do well and give us every resource we ask for. We get all the blocks, heads, parts we need . . . engineering help, dyno times, SpinTron time, all kinds of things.”

(A dyno – dynamometer – measures force, torque, or power. A SpinTron calculates valve train motion and simulates valve-train stress.)

The EFI isn’t, and wasn’t, our problem. It was the RPM limit that hurt the Dodges so much. – Allen Johnson

Even so, Johnson – the 2012 series champion who will make his 500th start at the Reading Countdown race – has struggled for nearly two seasons, ever since he was the last Pro Stock racer to win an event in the carburetor/hood-scoop era, at the 2015 Finals, at Pomona, California. He has won just once, at the 2016 Denver race he dominated until this July. (This time, a tire issue bit him. “We had bad luck on Saturday, the last run. I guess we picked up some piece of metal and split the tire. It was flat when we came in on Sunday morning. We didn’t have another set of tires with a lot of runs on it, and Sunday we had to run fresh tires. And that slowed us down,” he said.)

He has an idea of why he’s frustrated: “The EFI isn’t, and wasn’t, our problem. It was the RPM limit that hurt the Dodges so much. The Hemis don’t have a lot of torque down low, and when they lowered the RPM limit, that made the motor pull back through and the gear changes a lot lower. That’s what hurt us.”

Is that something he can fix, or is he stuck in limbo? It depends on a total cylinder-head redesign, he said.

“Without a brand-new cylinder-head design,” Johnson said, “I don’t know if we’ll ever totally catch ’em [the front-running drivers]. We’ve made great strides here in the last 60 days, and we’re really close – a lot closer than we have been. But I don’t know if we’ll ever totally get there without a major redesign.” He said he means mostly a cylinder-head reconfiguration but also a little bit of an engine re-engineering: “a little of both.”

He said he isn’t concerned that if he and his dad were to sink their money and time into addressing that, they would catch up just in time to see the Camaro drivers take another huge leap forward.

“I think everybody is going to be maxed out shortly,” Johnson said of class performance gains. “There’s not that much more to be gained, because everybody has the same parts now, as far as the induction system and the injectors. We’re all limited to the same parts, and I think you’re going to see everyone end up running exactly the same. I think there already pretty much [is parity]. We’re within a couple hundredths now of the top car. So all the GMs will have the same stuff, and the Dodges will be right there. I think you’re already seeing the parity.”

We’re all limited to the same parts, and I think you’re going to see everyone end up running exactly the same. – Allen Johnson

Following the early-August Seattle race, Johnson said, “It felt really good to get a round win. We’re gaining on them, like I’ve said all year. I think if we keep doing what we’re doing, by Countdown to the Championship time, I think we will be right there with the top four or five cars.”

With a short field at 11 of the first 17 races, the Pro Stock class has come under fire, although the Top Fuel fields have been short five times (including at three of the first four races).

Many have called for domestic automakers to become re-involved in Pro Stock racing and trigger the brand wars that marked the early days of the class. Many have urged the NHRA to court foreign manufacturers. Johnson’s blueprint for making that happen is simply put.

“I don’t know,” he said.

And that is the $1 million question: How can the NHRA attract more interest in Pro Stock? That task is not in Johnson’s job description. He did say it would be exciting for the sanctioning body to rekindle that vibe.

However, he said he isn’t expecting the School of Automotive Machinists & Technology NHRA Factory Stock Showdown to morph into a new iteration of the Pro Stock class. The limited series pits a healthy entry list of Dodge Mopar Challenger Drag Paks, Ford Mustang Cobra Jets, and Chevrolet COPO Camaros that includes or has included drivers Bo Butner, Erica Enders, Roy Hill, Chris Holbrook, Kevin Helms, Todd Patterson, Stephen Bell, and Bruno Massel. Interest from the Big Three automakers has grown since the series began six years ago, and the schedule has expanded. But Johnson said he doubts it will disrupt the Pro Stock class as everyone knows it.

I think racing in general, motorsports in general, the sponsors’ interest, the fan’s interest, all of it’s down right now for some reason. – Allen Johnson

“I don’t think so,” he said. “That’s a Super Stock car, not a Pro Stock car. I don’t know where Pro Stock’s going to end up. I don’t know where Funny Car and Top Fuel are going to end up. They’ve got the same problem we’ve got. They’ve got four or five filler cars that don’t even make but one run every race we go to.

“I think racing in general, motorsports in general, the sponsors’ interest, the fan’s interest, all of it’s down right now for some reason. And I think NASCAR’s leading the way,” Johnson said. “NHRA’s probably held its own more than any of ’em.”

In drag racing specifically, he has resigned himself to the public’s unfair practice of singling out the Pro Stock class, when three of the four Mello Yello Series categories (Pro Stock Motorcycle excepted) have had their car-count shortfalls this season.

“That’s just the way it is,” Johnson said.

He downplayed any role he might have been playing in brainstorming and giving feedback to the NHRA in consideration of the class’ health and its trajectory.

“I guess everybody has,” he said. “When you have 12, 13, 14 cars at every race, it’s just something you’ve got to talk about. I don’t know where it needs to go to get better. I don’t know there is a place to go and get it better. It’s just evolution of something is changing. NASCAR is doing the same thing, and it was the most popular sport in America five years ago.”

One answer that’s not viable, Johnson indicated, is opening the class to foreign manufacturers.

Many, such as Ali Afshar, the two-time champion of the abandoned NHRA Sport Compact Series, have advocated the NHRA carving a niche for them. Afshar, who has earned 14 Wally statues (and owns the Born2Race feature film franchise, in addition to working with Forrest and Charlotte Lucas as a premier content producer for their MAV TV network), grew up in the shadow of Sears Point Raceway (now Sonoma Raceway) and was drawn to the quarter-mile as a youngster. He is a multi-time Battle of the Imports, IDRC, and NOPI winner. And Afshar said the younger generation the NHRA is trying to attract is steeped in knowledge of Subarus, Toyotas, Mazdas, and other foreign makes.

Curiously, he said he regards import drag racing as “very traditional American.”

Afshar quickly said, “You’re going to go, “Imports — that’s not American! What I mean is this. . . “Why were the ’65 Chevys raced a lot? Why were the old classic Camaros, all those American hot rods? Because those were the cars young people got handed down from their parents. So you’re a kid — you’ve got some 50s-60s kind of car. You get your friends to put a Holley [carburetor] on it, put some slicks on it and go out there and try to run it over at the dragstrip, where you could afford to race for $8 or $10 back in those days. And that’s what you dealt with. So that became the hot rod.

“Fast-forward 20-30 years,” Afshar said. “Kids aren’t getting those cars now. They’re getting Hondas, Subarus, and Toyotas, hand-me-down cars from their parents or older brothers or uncles. They’re not in position to go buy a brand-new big-block something or a ZR1 Corvette. So they’re going to take that Honda, they’re going to take that Subaru, they’re going to put a turbo on it, they’re going to put a bigger turbo on it, they’re going to do something to it, and it’s all American.

“They’ve got racing in their blood, whether they’re Asian, Hispanic, white, black, whatever. They’re just going to go out there and race,” he said. “So I think it’s that tradition of American history of taking your hand-me-downs and doing the best you can with it and making it go quicker. It just so happens that these sport compacts are the hand-me-downs.”

Afshar’s argument has merit, but perhaps it won’t help pull Pro Stock from its current funk. Johnson said as much.

He agreed that the younger generation does gravitate to, or is at least open to, fixing up and racing foreign makes, “but then that doesn’t fit Pro Stock, because you don’t see a foreign car with a Hemi in it.”

Speaking of Hemis, that’s Roy Johnson’s specialty, but the J&J Racing team no longer leases to any other driver. By contrast, Gray Motorsports and Elite Motorsports, supplement their revenue by prepping or leasing engines to clients. “Nobody else drives a Dodge,” Johnson said.” He said, “We’re just Dodge, never worked on a Chevy.” The engines are significantly different, precluding the team from working on both brands.

Whatever is the fate of the Pro Stock class, and until anyone knows its near-future direction, Allen Johnson is going to keep working and whittling at the leaders’ advantages.

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.
Read My Articles

Drag Racing in your Inbox.

Build your own custom newsletter with the content you love from Dragzine, directly to your inbox, absolutely FREE!

Free WordPress Themes
Dragzine NEWSLETTER - SIGN UP FREE!

We will safeguard your e-mail and only send content you request.

Dragzine - Drag Racing Magazine

We'll send you the most interesting Dragzine articles, news, car features, and videos every week.

Dragzine - Drag Racing Magazine

Dragzine NEWSLETTER - SIGN UP FREE!

We will safeguard your e-mail and only send content you request.

Dragzine - Drag Racing Magazine

Thank you for your subscription.

Subscribe to more FREE Online Magazines!

We think you might like...


Street Muscle Magazine
Hot Rods & Muscle Cars
Diesel Army
Diesel Army
Engine Labs
Engine Tech

Dragzine - Drag Racing Magazine

Thank you for your subscription.

Subscribe to more FREE Online Magazines!

We think you might like...

  • Streetmuscle Hot Rods & Muscle Cars
  • Diesel Army Diesel Army
  • Engine Labs Engine Tech

Dragzine - Drag Racing Magazine

Dragzine

Thank you for your subscription.

Thank you for your subscription.

Dragzine - Drag Racing Magazine

Thank you for your subscription.

Thank you for your subscription.

Loading