Pro Line “dreamers” Eric Dillard and Steve Petty have a new obsession: to dominate the eighth-mile Pro Extreme ranks. And, Dillard says, “Were right around the corner.”

Eric Dillard is only 31 years old, but already the creative envelope-edge-pusher has discovered a few unsettling truths.

The co-owner of Pro Line Racing, architect of performance milestones and victories worldwide in a broad spectrum of drag-racing sanctions, found out Jan. 8 that Don Garlits was right. The drag-racing legend said the sport has two kinds of racers: ones who have crashed and ones who are going to crash.

This epiphany came to Dillard while he was caught in a violent whorl of asphalt chunks, rubber shards, implosion-grade dust, and flames. A mere second before that, his pass down that Florida dragstrip was flawless.

He was testing Willard Kinzer’s Pro Radial Mustang, proud that, at least for the first 1,000 feet, it was what he called the “straightest run you could possibly make. Everything was perfect.

“To go from being perfect to completely out of control at 230 miles an hour…I didn’t even have time to process what was happening,” Dillard said. “It blew the tire up. It filled the car full of asphalt and smoke, because when it blew the tire up, there was some tire left on the rim. But the tire blew the rear windshield out. So all that asphalt and smoke and dust was coming into the car. I couldn’t see anything. I had no idea where I was. I was just along for the ride. Once the smoke cleared and things started to slow down a little bit, at that point I think I went through the traps backwards at 180 [mph] – 6.30 [seconds of top-end mayhem], 180, something like that. The wheelie bars were up on the wall. The car was about to flip over the wall. It was on fire. It was bad. It was about the worst wreck you could possibly have without flipping over.”

The experience was something foreign to Dillard. He hadn’t had a racing mishap since 2006, when the steering mechanism on a client’s brand-new car he was testing at Phenix Drag Strip at Phenix City, Ala., caused a metal-mashing wall-banger and a second scare on the next run.

“I went years and years and years and years without ever having an accident. And with Willard’s, it was a huge wake-up call,” he said.

“After I walked away from that, it really made me realize that I always push cars to the limit and I always push them to that absolute point that something could go wrong,” he said. “Then it finally threw its ugly face up at me and showed me that ‘Hey, it’s not always going to be perfect.’ ”

Dillard and Steve Petty, his mechanical maharishi, always are incited by the inaccessible, tempted by that next target.

“Me and Steve always seem to be the ones pushing the cars to that new record or that new boundary. It’s not something that I’m going to give up,” Dillard said. “But there’s certain things that, now that I have kids and now that I saw the reality of what can happen, I definitely think about it more now when I get into a car. I used to not process it that much and just think, ‘Well, I’ve always been OK and I know when to quit, so I’m good.’ But I just learned it’s not always going to be me who makes that decision. It could be the car. I never really thought about that side of it as much, because I always thought I had control.”

Discovery No. 2: He doesn’t always have control. If this had been Discovery No. 1, he could have skipped to Discovery No. 3, which is that “The thing you can’t have is the one you want.”

What he wants these days is to craft a competitive eighth-mile Pro Extreme turbo car . . . prompting Discovery No. 4.

“It’s definitely been one of the hardest things we’ve ever tried to accomplish, trying to make a turbo car run in Pro Extreme,” Dillard said. “But it’s where a lot of our passion is right now. We’ve just got our head around it right now, because it’s such a hard fight that we enjoy fighting and because we are seeing progress.”

Three years into this new frontier, Dillard said, he’s hoping to smash through “this little window that we’re kind of stuck in right now, between a low 3.60 [-second elapsed time] and a high 3.50.” In Qatar this past winter, he ran in the 3.59-second range twice, then three times in the U.S., at the PDRA race at Rockingham, N.C. “So we’ve run a .50 only five times. But we’ve run a .60-flat to a .64 almost 75 times. So that’s the little window we’re in.”

 

Dillard divides his attention between José Gonzalez’s “El General” Camaro and Kuwaiti Sheikh Duaij Fahad Al-Sabah’s new Q80 Racing Jerry Bickel-built, Pro Line Racing 481X-powered Camaro.

“It gets confusing on that,” Dillard said with an understanding chuckle. “On El General’s car it’s just me or José. On the Q80 car, there’s been a lot of us in it. Turky al Zafiri is that car’s driver, as long as his schedule allows him to be here. A lot of it just comes down on the Q80 car and José’s car to scheduling. Is Duaij busy? And can Turky come? No? OK, can José come? No? OK, then I’ll drive it. On José’s car . . . Can José come? No, but José still wants us to go out and run the car and develop the combination. So he’ll let me go and race it. I’m last-string if nobody can make it. The cool thing is the customers are supportive enough even if they can’t make it, they still let us go out and run the car and race it but more or less test it, because they want to see this combination all the way through.”

The Q80 car operates out of the “El General” rig. So it’s an international tech-and-test triangle involving Dillard’s Georgia-headquartered Pro Line Racing and the teams with owners from Kuwait and the Dominican Republic.

Dillard said he expects the freshest “El General” car to debut in PDRA action either at the May 28-30 Mid-America Open at Gateway Motorsports Park or the June 25-27 Summer Drags at Martin, Mich.’s U.S. 131 Motorsports Park. And he said he’s hoping to see the same elapsed-time-lowering results the newest Q80 entry produced.

That Q80 car represented a leap in engineering progress.

“At this time in 2013, we barely had gone to 3.70. We’d been 3.77. We actually had been that fast in 2012. So from 2012 to 2013, we only picked up one number. We went from a .78 to a .77. José’s first car we built, which is still the car we race today, just wasn’t built as a Pro Extreme car. It was heavy. It was an NHRA-style car,” Dillard said of the 100-pound-overweight “El General” slug.

Right out of the box, the sleek new Q80 car, by contrast, ran a 3.67 – “a tenth [of a second] faster because we had a clean sheet of paper and we could develop that new car that we had seen all the things we struggled with on José’s,” he said.

In Qatar, each week, he said, “The car picked up two numbers: a .66 the first week, ran .64 the second week, ran .62 the third week, and the fourth week we got that elusive 3.59. We went from struggling to go in the .70s to going a 3.59 five weeks later. That was a huge accomplishment.”

Gonzalez recognized that and commissioned his own new car that could be on track this month at St. Louis.

“Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve been 100 pounds overweight over the minimum. At Rockingham, we were 2,385 pounds. The rule is 2,275. We’re already at a disadvantage, trying to race a turbo car. And we’re carrying 110 pounds. There’s other people out there with blower cars that are carrying the same weight that run way better numbers than we do. But a blower car is proven. They know the combination. They know how to make them run,” Dillard said. “So we’re really excited about José’s car, because we’re 100-percent confident it’s going to be minimum weight for the class. We’re hoping we can go out and test a little bit before the first race and kind of make ‘er do a high 3.50 – that’s kind of the norm for us – and then start working from there.”

That’s his new obsession.

“We’re 100-percent focused on NHRA. We’re 100-percent focused on Outlaw Drag Radial, Outlaw 10.5.  I’m not going to say we’ve gotten lackadaisical in those classes. We haven’t. We’re pushing just as hard in those as we are in Pro Extreme,” he said. “We can go win a radial race. We can go win an NHRA race. That’s not to say we’re going to win every one. We know we have the equipment to go out and win. We’ve done it. In Pro Extreme, we hope to qualify.”

That’s a weird place for Dillard psychologically.

“It is,” he said, “and for some reason, we love it – love it! That challenge just literally drives us. It’s been a lot of fun, and I hope the customers keep supporting us. I hope they’re happy with what we’re doing and we can keep pushing. Steve and I – and maybe we’re being overly optimistic – both feel like we’re right around the corner. We feel like by the end of this year we are going to have competitive Pro Extreme cars. We feel like we’re close.”

He can’t give up.

“Steve and I don’t have that attitude. That’s why we’ve always worked so well together. We’re dreamers. We are overly optimistic. We just never take no for an answer. We always keep pushing harder and harder until we figure it out.

“We’re so passionate about what we do. It’s not the money that drives us,” he said. “We’ll give up anything to get to that next step. The challenge is so great to us, and we just enjoy it so much. I try to manage it the best I can and make the best decisions, but sometimes it’s hard because we just want to go out there and run good. So we’ll bend over backwards to do what we’ve got to do to make that next step.”

Discovery No. 5: It just might work.