NHRA Pro Stock racer Alex Laughlin has had a tough few weeks, but he said his Gas Monkey Energy Drink/Elite Motorsports team is “heading in the right direction.”

Most recently, he was involved in an ugly war of words with Tanner Gray that escalated into a fist-flying fracas in the pits April 23 at the Houston race and, frankly, didn’t help either of them in the court of public opinion. That came on the heels of Laughlin’s “Mega Race” loss to Justin Shearer (aka Big Chief) in an über-hyped Discovery Channel episode of “Street Outlaws” that aired March 27.

Unfortunately, it all overshadowed the fact Laughlin was making his 2017 Pro Stock debut in his Chevy Camaro, after spotting the rest of the field four events, and was the same weekend continuing to pursue a national championship in the Top Alcohol Dragster class.

Laughlin moved his Gray Motorsports affiliation to Elite Motorsports earlier this year – the root of the squabble at Houston between the teams – but Laughlin said his lengthy test session at the Elite team’s local dragstrip at Noble, Okla., has pushed him closer to his immediate performance goals in the Pro Stock class.

“We got the car up there [to Oklahoma] right away, put a motor in and went to work,” he said. “All of the crew chiefs and all of the crew guys jumped in and helped. I have a [Jerry] Haas car, and obviously with Rick Jones at Elite, they are used to his race cars, so they’ve started making changes to get my car to behave more like his stuff.

“We made a bunch of hits but only to the eighth-mile,” Laughlin said. “So basically, you get to fifth gear and push in the clutch. The Houston race was my first time all the way down a track since last November, and we definitely got more data each pass.

“We are still making adjustments so they can tune it better. Erica [teammate Enders] suggested we reposition the clutch pedal and make some other changes to help with my launches. I’ll be surprised if I don’t have a step-up in reaction times right away. We have great power. We just haven’t put the perfect combination together yet. We just need a few hundredths more performance than we had in Houston and we’ll be in the fight,” Laughlin said. “We’re catching up fast. My muscle memory is coming back and my concentration was there. We actually made our best pass in round one Sunday, and even though we didn’t win, we closed the gap even more. So we know we’re heading in the right direction. I can’t wait to get back after it in Charlotte.”

The Mello Yello Drag Racing Series reconvenes this weekend at zMAX Dragway for the unique Four-Wide Nationals, and Laughlin presumably is hoping tempers cool down so he can focus on winning his first round of the season in Pro Stock and is second in Anthony Dicero’s A/Fuel dragster.

But he still wants a rematch with Shearer, who led from wire to wire in the first two passes in a best-of-three showdown between the two Discovery Channel headliner teams. The cable TV network produces shows featuring both Shearer’s “Street Outlaws” and Laughlin boss Richard Rawlings’ Gas Monkey Garage’s “Fast N Loud.” But “Street Outlaws” orchestrated this hyped meeting that ultimately aggravated both sides.

Shearer, miffed that Rawlings wasn’t going to drive the car, groused that “this race isn’t the race we agreed to, and it’s not even close to fair.” Laughlin, perturbed that Gas Monkey Garage was framed as a shady outfit and armed with counterclaims that Street Outlaws rigged the outcome, said he’s hard to rattle but eager to race Shearer again – in more acceptable conditions.

“The network doesn’t understand that you don’t just put an engine in a car and then you have a fast race car. There’s testing. There’s a lot of other variables that go into making a car go down a dragstrip correctly. We only got to make two half-track passes, testing, before we actually had to run the race. So that was one problem,” Laughlin said.

“The other problem was that they had told us that it was a no-prep race. So we built our car – we put a tire on the car for no-prep, and we put a torque converter in the car for no-prep. And when we got out there, the track was the stickiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve never been on a track that was prepped quite like that,” he said. “And with that loose converter and the real sticky tire that we had, we couldn’t apply the power to the starting line that we typically would if we knew that it was a prepped track. So the more power that we would apply to the car, it just kept driving through the torque converter.”

Laughlin said, “The first time, Chief, he did get me off the starting line a little bit. We were both disgustingly late. His light was like a .090. Mine was like .120. We were both just terrible. But it looked a lot worse, because when I let off the transbrake, my car had absolutely no power. He really pulled on me off the starting line. But once the converter could lock up, the car would actually run well.

“Then the second pass, he staged his car so deep – and they did not show this on the TV show – that he turned out the pre-stage bulb. I’ve raced against other professionals – that’s not something that you’re used to seeing. Everybody I’ve ever raced has full control of their car and the four stage bulbs are on,” Laughlin said.

“Whenever you see something like that happen, your automatic instinct is ‘He’s about to push through and go red – Like, what’s going to happen?’ All of this happens in a millisecond. And by the time you realize, ‘Hey – he staged. We need to go,’ the tree comes on and I was dead-late there. It definitely threw a curveball for me, because it’s not something I’m used to. I’m used to lining up against other professional drivers. The bottom line was we weren’t ready to race. The car wasn’t ready.”

Despite the drama, he said he’s ready to line up against Big Chief again.

“We definitely do want to run a rematch,” Laughlin said. “We’re going to continue to race this car, for sure. We ran 4.30-something to the eighth[-mile] at 177 miles an hour. And that car will run over 200 miles an hour. And we’ll get it in the threes, no doubt about it.”

Furthermore, Laughlin said the NHRA “is all about it. They are completely all for it. We’ll just have to see if we can get Justin to agree to run.”

That represents a huge move forward for the sanctioning body, a 180-degree spin from its position a year or two ago (and a president ago) that the “Street Outlaws” program “promotes and glorifies illegal street racing.”

Laughlin said, “I think they finally woke up and realized … the people who watch Street Outlaws are drag-racing fans but they’re not necessarily NHRA fans. So you have these two different groups of drag-racing fans that are not the same people. I think they all need to be merged, brought together.”

Maybe Laughlin and Shearer will get to race each other someday in the NHRA’s J&A Service Pro Mod Series. Both have said they’d like to become regulars in the Pro Mod class.

“I’ve always had an interest in Pro Mod. Those cars are really cool. They’re fast. They’re loud. They’re definitely a handful to drive,” Laughlin said. “We built a new car [a Dodge Challenger] for the TV show that’s ultimately a Pro Mod. It’s a steel-body Pro Mod. The thing is it’s a screw-blown Hemi — it makes over 3,000 horsepower. We could put a different blower on it and get it to be Pro Mod-legal to run in the NHRA. I just don’t know how competitive it would be with a steel body and everything on it. But it ultimately is a Pro Mod car. And we’re still going to run it throughout the season and kind of campaign it racing against some of those Street Outlaw guys.”

Laughlin said a rematch isn’t set yet.

“We’ve talked about it a few times. We actually thought we might arrange it to where we could run it at Houston [at the recently completed SpringNationals at Royal Purple Raceway], but we never really got it worked out. We may do it at Indy or something,” Laughlin said, referring to the Labor Day weekend Chevrolet Performance U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis. “Or we may just put on our own race and do it on our own terms.”

What terms Laughlin and Gray are on remains unclear. But Laughlin said Sunday, “We’ll put him in his place on the racetrack.”

Gray defeated Laughlin in the opening round at Houston by a mere .0292 of a second, and Laughlin acknowledged that “Tanner did a good job driving and won the race. This may have been our first race of the year, but I can tell you we are very excited about the deal with Elite. That run right there against Tanner said a lot, because even though we haven’t got the car completely dialed in with this new engine combination, we had a heck of a race against him. Things have a way of working out. We’ll see those guys again and try to beat them on the track. That’s where the talking should be done.”

Shane Gray, Tanner Gray’s father and fellow racer, concluded, “The whole thing was kind of blown out of proportion. The emotions got the best of them. I think the best thing both parties can do is close their mouths.”

After Johnny Gray [Tanner’s grandfather and owner of Gray Motorsports] and Shane Gray shook hands with Elite Motorsports owner Richard Freeman, Freeman also calmed the situation, sort of. He said, “We all want to win and do the best we can. We all decided we’re going to settle it out here on the racetrack and we’ll see how that works. If that doesn’t work, we’ll do it another way.”

Laughlin will have his hands full at Charlotte, racing in two classes – one against three other drivers at the same time, the other in a traditional two-lane format.

He has talked about earning his NHRA Top Fuel license, too, but said, “At this point, we’re kind of taking it one day or one week at a time. We’re running the full series in the Top Alcohol car. We’re going to run 17 or 18 races in that car. We’re actually racing for the championship in it. Pro Stock, we’re signed up for seven races for sure, but we’d like to run more. We’ve got to get a little bit of stuff together before we can do that. By the end of the season I’d probably like to run 12-15 in Pro Stock.

“I’ve even considered getting a license in [Pro Stock] Motorcycle, because I would like ultimately to be licensed and able to race in all four of the categories,” he said. “I weigh 190 pounds, so I’m at a little bit of a weight disadvantage. I think we could still make it work, though.”

It sounds daunting, but in the past month alone, Laughlin has gone through crazier circumstances.