Daniel Wilkerson’s Wild Ride From Accountant To Funny Car Driver

There’s no accounting for Daniel Wilkerson anymore.

The popular NHRA next-gen racer was once an accountant by day and a drag-racing mechanic on father Tim Wilkerson’s Funny Car team whenever he had a spare moment or on weekends. But now he’s exclusively a Funny Car driver and a top-10 championship contender.

Wilkerson earned a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Illinois–Springfield, and that was his 9-to-5 gig for a decade while he was working in drag racing.

“I was an accountant for 10 years. All that time, when I was racing with Brian Stewart and Blake Alexander and the first year I went with Chad [Green], it was my real job. I used to say my real job was I was an accountant. I didn’t hate it when I left. I still got to work with all kinds of people I liked. So as long as I got to work with people, I don’t really care. It’s all good. I’m just a people person,” he said.

Today, Wilkerson said, “If the Uber driver asks me what I do for a living, I tell him I get paid to work on the race car and then they let me drive it. I work on the race car every day. That’s all I do.”

With fan-favorite Funny Car driver father Tim Wilkerson as his role model, Dan Wilkerson pretty much wanted to do nothing but that. He did work at his dad’s gas stations until Tim sold them around 2000, but the younger Wilkerson worked at his dad’s service center in Springfield for many years.

“In fourth grade, I told everyone I wanted to own a gas station and race a race car, and my guidance counselor told me I needed to pick something more realistic. So I thought it was hilarious that here we are. I don’t own a gas station, so I guess maybe she was right, but I did get part of it,” the 37-year-old Wilkerson said. “I don’t own a gas station,” he said, “but I drive a race car.”

And that, he said, “is frickin’ cool. I’ve never done drugs, but this is more addicting than anything I can imagine.”

It’s that passion — that delight in simply getting to try to tame an almost-tameless 12,000-horsepower Funny Car — that sparkles all around Wilkerson and makes him a key asset in the sport’s evolving effort to reach a younger demographic. But his candidly comical interviews and genuine reactions in the wake of calamity are uncontrived. They’re just pure Daniel Wilkerson.

“That’s just the product of who I am. It’s not like I do that so people notice. It’s just who I am. So people all the time are like, ‘You give crazy interviews.’ I’m like, ‘Well, I mean, I just talk. It’s not like I plan to be a nut job. It just happens that way because I am a nut job. All you get is what I got.

“So at first, I’ll get out [of the car at the top end of the track] kind of calm. Then I ramp up because I work very, very hard to be calm when I’m staging, because I’m not a calm person. So it takes a lot of effort for me to get calm,” Wilkerson said. “Sometimes it takes me a second to get back to myself, but I do get there eventually. What you see on camera is how I act at the shop, on the drive home, and on the return road. That’s just how I am.”

What is endearing to most drag racing fans could make others question his skill or intelligence. But the racer who tuned Chad Green before getting the chance to race for his dad’s operation said he isn’t concerned about whether it diminishes his proficiency as a driver or a mechanic.

“No, not really. You have people think what they think. It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I have seen that, though. People do say that: ‘Wow, what a goofball. I can’t believe that thing even starts.’ I just do my deal.”

Licensed since 2007, his “deal” involves driving now, but after a brief stint in his dad’s iconic Levi, Ray & Shoup car about 15 years ago, he turned to tuning before taking a chance to work again with his dad as a full-time driver with Tim as his crew chief.

The tug-of-war between tuning and driving probably will be with him forever. “I think I like both of them. It’s probably like trying to pick your favorite kid. They both have aspects I love, you know what I mean? I’m like 50-50, honestly. I love doing both,” Dan Wilkerson said.

“I did enjoy tuning. I could have done that forever. But first off, to get the opportunity to work with my father, I didn’t think I was ever going to get that again. So it was great to be able to actually drive for Tim. That was something I never really thought was going to happen. And Funny Cars are really f—ing cool to get to drive. I didn’t know if I was ever going to get that shot again,” he said.

“Before, when I was doing a race a year [in the seat], I was always happy working on the thing. I could have never driven again – right up until I got to drive once. And it’s like, ‘Damn it. I forgot how awesome that is.’ Just about the time I thought I was over driving, Tim gave me a little taste, gave me another hit, and I was sucked in again. And I say every run, dude, every run, I come back and thank [the crew] for the safe ride. And I’m like, ‘Dude, that car does not get old every single time. It does something a little different, or it just gives you the thrill. Dude, it’s just a badass car.’”

His passes haven’t always been safe. In 2009 at Memphis, as a 21-year-old driver with only about 15–20 laps under his belt, Daniel Wilkerson escaped unhurt from a spectacular accident that destroyed the family-owned Mustang when the rear wheels came off. But Dan Wilkerson said he’s the same racer then and now. He doesn’t view himself as two different Daniels.

“That Daniel knew what he was doing, too. Just had a catastrophe, I suppose, is the best word for it,” Wilkerson said. “But I would say I’m growing a little bit. You grow with laps. So to say I’m the same driver isn’t probably exactly accurate, but just only slightly more seasoned [now], I’d say.”

From that incident, he learned how quickly things happen and how fast your brain needs to react. He learned that sometimes the driver can’t will the car to behave the way he wants it to. And he learned how to communicate to his crew, family, and fans that he’s all right following a mishap.

In that Memphis sequence, he said, “I was so convinced I was going to fix it. I was like, ‘Oh, it’ll come back around. It’ll come back around. It’ll come back around. Oh, s—, it’s not going to come around.’ I think your brain works so fast. Or maybe in the catastrophe, everything slows down. It’s insane how many thoughts you can think in three seconds, because, like I said, I was positive I had it all gathered up. It was going to swing back around, but she sure didn’t.”

“The worst part about all that is that I knew I was OK, but it’s hard to convey back,” he said. His wife Brianna, his fiancée at the time, was in the tow truck and got the positive news through the crew member who shouted three times on the radio, “You OK?” and finally got the answer on attempt No. 3. But they heard from Daniel “even before my poor mother.” He said Krista Wilkerson “wanted to sprint down the racetrack.”

Then, recalling when his dad got into his own leaked fuel or oil at Topeka in 2016 and crashed, Dan Wilkerson said, “My mom and I were walking back to the pit, and I said, ‘That’s the scariest s— I’ve ever seen in my entire life.’ And she said, ‘You weren’t standing behind yours.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ She pulled my heartstrings in. So now I always go there right away, make sure everyone knows I’m fine. When you’re trying to get the thing stopped, you’re like, ‘All right, well, I’m good. I’ve just got to get this piece of s— slowed down so I don’t hurt somebody else or get into the sand and hurt myself after the fact.’ But everyone else is still on pins and needles.”

“I don’t know if it’s a product of working at the shop with everybody. I know the commitment this takes, and then some jerk ruins it in half a tenth of a second. I never felt that way working on anybody else’s car. So I don’t know why I do that to myself, because I worked for a lot of different drivers, and everyone messes up. And I always told the other parts of the team, ‘Hey, man, I’ve been there. You’d be shocked how easy it is to do that. It’s not an easy thing to drive.’ So I was always that voice for a driver,” Wilkerson said. “Now that I’m a driver, I don’t give myself any slack. But it may just be the fact that we’ve all committed our lives to this race car, and I feel like I let everybody down. It just bugs me.”

He rode out two brutal engine explosions last September at Indianapolis and one calamitous one at Sonoma this July, and he was as gutted as his detonated car.

“I feel like they [the crew members] deserve that [my best performance]. I feel like these guys — 10 of us — gave up pretty good portions of our lives. We’re missing cheerleading, football games, girlfriends, wives — leaving all that at home. And to just be the one that wrecks, it wrecks me. I don’t like it.”

But Daniel Wilkerson likes working with Tim Wilkerson.

“I hung out with him for a long time, worked at the shop, so I picked up a lot of his tendencies. He probably hopes that I pick up more of his seriousness working with him, but I do have a tendency to goof around a little bit more than him,” Dan said.

“I would love to do exactly what we’re doing . . . as long as Tim can do it,” he said.

And that accounts for Daniel Wilkerson’s joy of drag racing.