Pro Stock favorite Shane Tucker will return to the states to compete this weekend at the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals. Tucker currently plans on attending 14 races in 2017 and running their own engine program all season.

“I’m really excited about running our own stuff this year,” Tucker said. “It’s been a long time coming to run our own program. My dad has always built our engines back in Australia and to run our own stuff this year will be really rewarding. I hope we can get some good results; it’ll be that much sweeter when we do.”

Tucker has already been behind the wheel in 2017 when he competed at Willowbank Raceway in Queensland, Australia two weeks ago for the Santo’s Super Thunder Event. He raced Jason Hedges’ Pro Stock Pontiac GXP and went to the third round of competition before being plagued by mechanical issues.

“It was nice to get some seat time,” Tucker added. “The cars are quite a bit different to drive because one is a small block and the other is a big block but seat time is always good.”

This weekend marks two years of working on and dynoing their own engines in their Statesville, North Carolina shop and the Auzmet Architectural team feels it is time to bring out their own horsepower.

“Our whole idea and end goal going into this was running our own program but it’s just taken longer than expected,” he said. “We get to call the shots on the tuning side of things now. The Elite group definitely gave us opportunities to make calls when we rented from them last season but our goal has always been to run our own stuff. We think the time is right to do that and we’ll see how it goes.”