Frank Manzo, the retired and highly respected NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car legend, has a running joke going on in his pit.

His new job is crew chief for the NHRA Pro Modified supercharged ’69 Camaro that Khalid alBalooshi drives. The Dubai native is a former Top Fuel driver who has returned to the NHRA Pro Mod Series in which he won the 2011 NHRA Get Screened America championship before becoming Shawn Langdon’s dragster teammate at Alan Johnson Racing.

“Now he’s driving a Pro Mod, and when the Top Fuel cars run, he goes and watches them. When he was driving a Top Fuel car, he would go and watch the Pro Mods race,” Manzo said, clearly getting a chuckle from the nearly-34-year-old alBalooshi’s boyish enthusiasm.

“So I think his heart is in both of them. He loves both of them. He loves racing in general,” he said.

And Manzo’s heart still is in racing.

When a man drives a Top Alcohol Funny Car to an NHRA-record 17 national and 21 divisional Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series championships and wins 105 national and 118 divisional races, he can’t help but love the sport. Manzo has 11 U.S. Nationals victories, more than anyone in the sportsman or professional classes. He retired after the 2013 season, but he owned both ends of the national performance records until Sweden’s Jonnie Lindberg smashed both the elapsed time and speed mark this spring at Charlotte.

So he’s back at the racetrack rather than putting around at his Morganville, New Jersey, home.

“I’ll tell you what I miss,” Manzo said. “I miss letting out the clutch pedal and opening the parachutes. And this can be taken a lot of different ways. Everything before and everything after I don’t miss.“

“In other words, what I’m saying is I love NHRA. They treat me great, all the people, all the fans,” Manzo said during the recent Toyota Summernationals at Englishtown, New Jersey. “I come back to my track. It hurts – everybody wants to know when I’m going to drive again. I don’t miss the traveling, all the work for the hotel room, all that part. I really like staying home.”

He glanced toward the giant grandstands, noisy with excitement for the action from Those Who Will Carry On The Sport, and said, “I’ve been coming to Raceway Park— I started racing here in 1970. I’ve made many, many runs down the track, over 3,600 runs in my Alcohol Funny Car career. And I’m very fortunate that I never got in trouble [accidents]. I never had a bad situation.”

But Manzo never joined the beer and bawdiness brigades in the pit area.

“We got done racing, I wanted to load my stuff up and go home. I came here to race,” he said. “I didn’t really come here for the barbecues and drinking parties. If I wanted to do that, I’d just stay home. I didn’t have much to say. I really loved racing. I wanted to come here and race my car.”

Manzo and alBalooshi have something in common, and that’s why this alliance – off to a slower start than they had hoped, to be sure – should prove a smart one. AlBalooshi has come halfway around the world to race in the sport’s premier sanctioning body against the toughest of the lot. His wife and two children remain in Dubai, and he commutes several times a season home – where he usually manages to squeeze in an auto race of some kind.

Before joining the Top Fuel portion of the Al-Anabi Racing Team in 2012, alBalooshi had 158 overall victories in various classes of competition. So the perhaps unlikely New Jersey and Dubai duo seem well suited.

“I’m missing my friends in Top Fuel,” alBalooshi said, adding that he tries when he can at the races to say hello to Jason McCulloch, who works at Bob Vandergriff Racing, and his former crew members at Alan Johnson Racing.

“I’m happy to be here [back in the Pro Mod class]. I’m always happy,” he said, with the same sort of comportment as notoriously cheerful IndyCar star Helio Castroneves. “I love working with Frank.”

What might seem confusing to fans and media is the fact alBalooshi and Manzo aren’t detached exactly from their longtime Al-Anabi ties. Both Manzo and alBalooshi, although they didn’t work directly with one another before this year, drove Al-Anabi Racing-branded cars. They’re united today under another iteration of the Al-Anabi drag-racing domain.

They race for “Al-Anabi Performance,” and their boss is the same Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Thani who withdrew funding from Alan Johnson Racing on the eve of the season-opening NHRA Winternationals and left Johnson scrambling for marketing partners at the most inopportune time. It’s the same Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Thani who owned the American Drag Racing League that dissolved under a blanket of cross-complaining and mutual accusations with principal Kenny Nowling.

But no one, including alBalooshi’s quasi- (or not-so-quasi?) Pro Mod teammate Mike Castellana, who races the Speedtech-branded, nitrous-aided ’15 Corvette, seems to be making a big deal of the emergence of Al-Anabi Performance. That’s in spite of Al-Anabi Racing’s statement Jan. 5 that it, in the form of “The Qatar Racing Club” had “terminated funding for all motorsports activities in North America,” per a decision finalized in late December 2014.

Al Thani also owns Speedtech. But racers just want to race and not get involved in the politics of where their money comes from. So understandably, Castellana acknowledged that “we’re part of the same group . . . we all work together” but was annoyed at questions about the presence of Al-Anabi, or “AAP” still involved in NHRA drag racing.

All Castellana wanted to say was, “I want to race, win, and have a good time.”

AlBalooshi volunteered that, “When Al-Anabi Racing left Top Fuel, that was a big deal. This is only a couple hundred thousand dollars. We were trying hard to put this deal together. We need to do something. You cannot stay home.” Then, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, he said this Al-Anabi Performance team exists “to keep Frank a little bit busy.”

Manzo said of Al-Anabi Performance, “This is a whole new program, whole new company. This is a very large performance machine shop. They make blocks, heads, a lot of automotive parts in Qatar.”

As for who heads “AAP,” he said, “Sheikh Khalid, as far as I’m concerned. If that’s true or not, I don’t know.”

He said the relationship or difference between Al-Anabi Performance and Al-Anabi Racing is not something he’s privy to.

“I don’t know. I have no comment on it. I really don’t know. I do not know the whole truth, so I don’t want to speak on something that I don’t know,” Manzo said. “I still work for Sheikh Khalid. If you want to call it Al-Anabi Racing or Al-Anabi Performance – however you want to call it – this is all funded by Al-Anabi Performance.”

“I really don’t know the exact who-what-where,” he said, deftly changing the subject. “I’m here and I’m enthused about it.”

“I’ve known Khalid Balooshi as long as I’ve been working for Sheikh Khalid. I met him the first time I went over to Qatar. And Balooshi has his own nitrous Pro Mod car that he races over there [in Doha] in that series [the Arabian Drag Racing League]. I never had the opportunity to work directly with Khalid Balooshi. This is my first go-’round. And so far it’s been pretty good.”

They communicate sometimes by almost not communicating.

“I don’t have to say too much to him about anything. He knows,” Manzo said. “He’s been driving and racing for awhile, and he drives and races all types of race vehicles, from maybe a sand truck to Top Fuel. He wants to win as bad as I do. So I don’t think we have to talk about it. It’s a job, and we’re going to go get it done.”

But Manzo has his mechanical challenges.

“Right now we’re having problems with the car,” he said at Englishtown. “We’re having electrical issues. We’ve been working on it, and I hope it’s behind us.”

What’s ahead of him is being proficient in tuning a supercharged car.

The team opened the season at the Gatornationals with a back-up car, a ’68 Camaro, of Precision Turbo owner Harry Hruska . . . and a DNQ.

“At Gainesville, it just wasn’t in the cards for this blower car. We felt we were going to run the turbo car all year. And for some reason – I don’t know nothin’ about it – the plans got changed. After that, we put together this blower car,” Manzo said.

The Englishtown race was the third, after Houston and Atlanta, for the current car. And it has presented Manzo a major test.

“I have no knowledge at all on these cars. It’s something that I’m not used to,” he said. “The eighth-mile cars, when I tuned Sheikh Khalid’s car and I went to ADRL with Alex Hossler, that was a blower car with a screw compressor that I’m used to, same as an Alcohol Funny Car. But this is an NHRA blower car, something I’m not familiar with. I’m not familiar with the fuel system or the clutch. This has a clutch. It does not have a torque converter. So that’s one thing. But I don’t have any records or anything about the clutch. This is just a guess-and-go as we go.”

He said the “guessing game” is going “so far pretty good.”

AlBalooshi hasn’t made it out of the first round yet and has yet to crack the top 15. But he’ll go watch those Top Fuel dragsters run and get that yearning for the winners circle again, like he experienced four times in 77 races with Alan Johnson Racing. And Manzo will get a handle on that engine system. And for that reported $200,000, they’ll feel again like a million.