ADRL Champ Mick Snyder Is Right Where He Belongs

For Mick Snyder, drag racing always has been more about comfort than status.
 
He showed early on that he had all the tools to be a huge hit in the NHRA spotlight. He is a three-time NHRA Division 3 Top Alcohol Funny Car champion and one-time Driver of the Year. He has driven everything (and worked on just about every kind of car) from a Jr. Dragster to Super Comp, Pro Outlaw, Top Alcohol Dragster, Alcohol Funny Car, and Pro Modified.

 He’s intelligent and creative, putting his degree in marketing and business from Purdue University to use in designing his car paint scheme, team logo, and hero cards. He’s handsome, witty, and totally down to earth, padding around in flip-flops and shorts even in the staging lanes. And he’s a dedicated family man, racing with parents Larry and Bev and sister Shanna for 21 years now and pulling in wife Lindsey as daughter Madi, 6, and sons Briar, 3, and Camryn, 17 months, play around the shop in DeMotte, Ind.
 
But Snyder never felt a desperate sense so many racers do to show off on the sport’s grandest stage. As a twentysomething, he said, “Up there, it’s too corporate,” he said. “You have to put on your nice pants and pay attention.”
 
Snyder wears the big-boy pants in the ADRL Pro Extreme class right now, and the competition is playing plenty of attention — to him.
 
How he got from the NHRA sportsman elite to the 2012 ADRL championship is a story of being in his comfort zone — first with the sanctioning body that best fits his schedule and lifestyle but also with the car owner and teammate he relates to easily. Skip and Barb Bakos’ Powersource Transportation has sponsored Snyder for seven seasons now, so Snyder is surrounded by people with whom he feels most comfortable.
 
He’s teammate to two-time ADRL Pro Extreme champion Jason Scruggs, the farmer from Saltillo, Miss., who’s out with his corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat crops when he isn’t at the racetrack. Snyder is immersed in automotive hardware from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the family’s engine-building and fabrication shop that’s a distributor for “Lencodrive transmissions, MSD stuff, and basically everything you’d ever need to put a converter into a blown application.”
 

DeMotte is a small town, holding its own with two stop lights, a few fast-food icons, some car dealerships and more than its share of churches, as suburban Chicago continues to sprawl toward it, down Interstate 65.
 
So in a sense, while Scruggs and Snyder seem to come from different universes, they really are amazingly alike — including their laid-back personalities. They became linked in the ADRL via a telephone call, when Scruggs called the Snyders for a Lencodrive transmission. At the time, they knew he was trying to sell some inventory.

“Our engine, our transmission, all our stuff, it’s Scruggs’ car. I’m borrowing it. Honest, I haven’t stolen his car. It just lives up here and we can do whatever we want to it,” Snyder said with a laugh. “He doesn’t care. It was just laying there in the rafters kind of deal. He just had it stuffed in the corner.”

 
Mick and Larry Snyder, growing a bit restless after six years of running the NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car class, had seen a photo of an ADRL race at Rockingham around that time, in 2009 or so, and were fascinated by this relatively new league for doorslammer cars.

Our engine, our transmission, all our stuff, it’s Scruggs’ car. I’m borrowing it. Honest, I haven’t stolen his car. It just lives up here and we can do whatever we want to it.

“There were packed stands, and we said, ‘Yeah — we want to go do that! It looks like that’d be more fun than what we’re doing,’ ” Mick Snyder said. “We wanted to find somewhere we could cut back races a little bit. It was still in the younger years of the ADRL.”
 
Larry Snyder had helped Scruggs — who races with his dad, Mitchell — test once, but Mick and Jason knew only “of” each other. In typical racing fashion, they were known by the equipment they keep. “We never had met face to face. He used to have the blown small block in the ‘Vette, and we had a blown small block in our dragster back in the late ’90s.”
 
Larry Snyder told Scruggs he wanted to “borrow” one of his cars. After huddling with his dad, Scruggs called back and said, “All right. You can borrow it.” Said Mick, “From there it kind of progressed.”
 
Maybe he should have said “regressed.”

 
Snyder’s first pass in that split-window ‘Vette ended against the wall — with a crumpled car but a refreshing insight into his new business partners.
 
“So when I wrecked this car, we’re down on the top end, looking at it. Jason comes down and says — changing his voice to mimic Scruggs’ animated Mississippi drawl — ‘Had a 9.60 60-foot.’ “
 
What a time to be focusing on incrementals, Snyder thought, blurting out, “What?!”
 
“Had a 9.60 60-foot,” Scruggs said, smiling.
 
“Yeah, but look at the car,” Snyder said.
 
“Yeah, but had a 9.60 60-foot,” Scruggs said again.
 
Scruggs’ dad, Mitchell, then asked if Snyder was all right. He said yes but nodded again to his bashed-up borrowed car. Mitchell Scruggs said, “Aw, that’s just tubing. We don’t care about tubing. We can get more tubing.”

[The Scruggs family] is such a great group to get involved with. It’s a father-son thing. Ours is a father-son deal. It’s families. At Rockingham, my three kids are playing with his three kids. It’s a cool little family deal.

 
“Uhh . . . OK . . . ” was all Snyder could utter.
 
“This was the first time I ever met them,” he said. “Later that night they were telling how they had a Stratus and how they had to make three passes before they could get down the track without hitting something or something blowing off it. Mitchell doesn’t care if you wreck it, as long as you’re going fast.”
 
Jason Scruggs’ only “complaint” about the car, which Snyder had painted orange and white, was “Car looked better when it was red.”
 
The Scruggs family, he said, “is such a great group to get involved with. It’s a father-son thing. Ours is a father-son deal. It’s families. At Rockingham, my three kids are playing with his three kids. It’s a cool little family deal. We can work on the cars while our kids are being entertained by each other’s kids. If we lived closer, it’d be even more fun.”
 
Snyder went on in 2010 to earn ADRL Rookie of the Year honors. Two years later, he proved he knows how to drive that ’63 split-window Vette (the one he nicknamed “Vivian”), edging Scruggs for the title.
 

Of course, he still makes mistakes, like his red-by-a-thousandth-of-a-second light against Joey Martin in the final at this season’s opener at Rockingham, N.C. “You’ll have those,” he shrugged.
 
But he’s right where he believes he belongs.
 
“This is a lot more laid back than what would be professional in the NHRA,” Snyder said, adding he loves this car.

 
“It’s a door car, and it’s a Pro Mod. But it has the motor of a Funny Car in it. It’s basically a Funny Car motor in a door car. It moves around like a Funny Car sometimes, but you’ve got to finesse it like a dragster. It’s kind of a nice combination of everything I drove over the years. This is the most fun car I’ve ever had,” he said.” It just moves around. It does whatever it wants to. It kind of has a mind of it’s own. It’s way too much horsepower in a shorter wheelbase car than what it should be in. So sometimes it’s out of control.”
 

He said it’s a blast rather than something scary: “To normal people it would be [scary], but racers are not normally normal.”
 
Normal is his routine and travel schedule.
 
“I did the 21 races one year with the Funny Car, but by the time you got done with all the races, you don’t really like racing anymore. It’s just too much,” Snyder said. “There was one time we had five races in six weekends. By the time you get to the last race you’re just like, ‘You know what? I don’t care about this anymore. I’m done.’ “
 
That’s why he isn’t keen to go full-bore with the new X-DRL.
 
“We’re going to do all the ADRL races and maybe pick up an X-DRL event. We’ll see how it all turns out in the end,” he said. “It’s gotten weird over the winter. Now there’s two [sanctioning bodies] and it’s turned into a make-everybody-choose. I really don’t like all that stuff. If you try to do both, that’s 18 races. That’s too many.

I did the 21 races one year with the Funny Car, but by the time you got done with all the races, you don’t really like racing anymore. It’s just too much.

“I like the ADRL. I like what Kenny’s doing with it. I’m really happy with the direction it’s going now,” he said. “At Rockingham, the stands were packed again, the way it should be. We had all kinds of fans. They said 20,000 people, and I believe them. I haven’t seen that many fans in a long time. I went through more hero cards and more T-shirts than I did in the last two years combined.”
   
As for the NHRA, he said the differences are dramatic in scope and demand. “Most of those guys are real professional racers. That’s what they do. They have crew chiefs and car owners and crews that that’s all they do,” he said. “I miss the people there, but I don’t miss the class that much. If you were going to be a professional driver over there, you’d have to do 24 weekends out of the year plus test sessions plus appearances and everything else. That’s a full-time job. That’s what they do, which fine. But that’s not going to work for me.”
 
What he’s doing is working, for sure. The trick is to keep it working. But Snyder knows it’s hard to follow a dream season like he had in 2012.

“You just hope it keeps going, I guess,” Snyder said. “I told Lindsey, ‘You don’t get seasons like this very often. You have good seasons. You have bad seasons. But you don’t have seasons like that.’ It was just that good a season. Now you hope that you can drag it along to the next season and the next one. You do what you can: keep changing everything, trying to test and make the car go fast, keep trying, really.
 
“I pay more attention now to the small details than I used to,” Snyder, who literally does with his first-ever pair of glasses this year, said. “As you get older, you kind of concentrate more on the smaller things instead of looking at the big picture. The basics you pretty much have at this point in your life. You concentrate on lights, on shift points, that kind of stuff.  Every little thing on the car has to be right to make this deal work.  My crew has been together since the Funny Car days (2003-2009). We try to take the time to get the little things right.”
 
Now the “big things” are coming his way.