Gray Keeping Promise To Shake Up The Funny Car Status Quo

As with comedy and real estate dealings, timing is everything. Same for drag racing. And Funny Car driver Johnny Gray has his timing right this season.

He went to Indianapolis last Labor Day weekend for the Mac Tools U.S. Nationals, the cutoff for making the Countdown to the Championship field of 10,  with his fingers crossed, hoping Bob Tasca III would stumble. Tasca didn’t, and Gray was 11th.
However, Gray was determined to make his mark in the Countdown. He was going to show them all that he might not be in the Countdown but he wasn’t down for the count. And he wasn’t quiet about it, either.

He warned fellow Funny Car drivers, “Some of the cars who crucified us early in the season, when we didn’t have a good car, will pay in those last six races. We’ve got a good race car now, and it’s going to get better.”

It did, that NTB/Service Central Dodge Charger. Although Gray hadn’t driven a Funny Car for five years when he joined Don Schumacher Racing at the beginning of last season, he showed he hadn’t forgotten a thing.

The timing didn’t help him improve from 11th place. But he backed up his not-so-veiled threats that he would spoil some plans of the top-10 drivers and serve notice that he would be a serious player in 2012.

Gray posed a major problem for Countdown contenders. In the six playoff races, he reached at least the semifinal round five times. He earned a berth in three straight final rounds (at Reading, Pa., Phoenix, and Las Vegas). At Dallas, he qualified second, and the next week he started No. 1 at Reading.

Curiously, he finished above .500 in elimination-round victories for a 26-18 effort in 2011. That was better than three of the Countdown-qualified drivers. Tasca ended up seventh in the standings but had a 19-22 record. John Force was ninth and Tim Wilkerson 10th, and both had 14-21 marks.

With his career-first Funny Car victory last August at Brainerd, Minn.., Gray had more Wally statues than No. 7 Tasca, and he matched four other top-10 drivers (No. 3 Cruz Pedregon, No. 8 Jeff Arend, Force, and Wilkerson). Even champion Matt Hagan won only two races (while the John Force Racing contingent grabbed 11 of the 22 trophies).

So with his runner-up finish in March at Gainesville, Fla., and his victory last Sunday at Englishtown, N.J., which moved him up two spots in the standings, Gray is fourth as the Full Throttle Drag Racing Series heads to Bristol, Tenn., for the Thunder Valley Nationals at Bristol Dragway.

That means he’s way ahead of where he was this time last season. Although the Englishtown race was No. 8 on the tour last season and was Race No. 9 this year, Gray was in ninth place coming out of Englishtown and going to Bristol last season.

That doesn’t really surprise him. He had vowed to be in the mix.

“We came into the season thinking that there wouldn’t be any doubt we’ll be in the top 10,” Gray said. “My team is good enough to give me a car to run out the championship.”

Crew chief Rob Wendland and assistant Rip Reynolds have Gray’s Dodge humming, and Gray credited his crew and the whole DSR organization: “It’s a team effort anytime you win one of these things. Anybody tells you they can win one of these things by themselves is either stupid or a liar.”

He said the team “lost its way a little bit” earlier in the season and that DSR crew chiefs Rahn Tobler and Mike Green helped his crew find the problems in the set-up and get the program back on the right path.

“Now she’s just a pooch,” Gray said of his car. “You take her up there [to the starting line] and she goes right down the racetrack.”

And this dog bites.

“We’re one of the back-markers that maybe don’t get all the recognition that the Cappses and Beckmans get, but our car is fast,” he said. As for flying under the radar, he said, “That’s the way I like it. So we’ll be there to reckon with.”

It’s all about timing — and for Johnny Gray, it’s about time.