Dom Lagana may contest a part-time schedule in the NHRA Top Fuel class, but he definitely has full-time support when he does compete, as he will this weekend in the 34th annual Dodge NHRA Nationals at Maple Grove Raceway.

Running as part of Tommy Thompson Motorsports alongside teammate Scott Palmer, Lagana not only has a great new sponsor in Magic Dry 100% Organic Multi-Purpose Absorbent, but he also benefits from a great tuning alliance with the CAPCO race team of points leader Steve Torrence and his father Billy, who recently won in Brainerd.

“We have everything we need and we stay really involved even when we’re not running my car,” Lagana said. “I went on the Western swing to help out on Steve Torrence’s car and then I also worked on Billy Torrence’s car at Brainerd and Indy which was pretty cool because we won Brainerd and went to the semifinals in Indy so it’s been a very busy summer.

“We also had a few match races with our family car in August and we were able to try out a few things in our clutch department to get the car more consistent than we were at Epping, our last NHRA race, so we’re pretty confident we can run well in Reading.”

I feel like we made some good strides and progress this year with the car. We also have Scott’s [Palmer] data to base our tune-up off of as well so I think we’ll have a pretty good handle on things.

A Northeast native who hails from Scarsdale, New York, Lagana knows weather can play a huge role at Maple Grove, which is set in a bucolic area of Pennsylvania known much more for its Amish residents than 10,000-horsepower, nitro-burning dragsters.

“We’re going to have to play the weather game this weekend, even more than normal, because we don’t usually run in Reading this early in the fall,” Lagana said. “We’ll probably stick to the usual program where we start the weekend out trying to get some basic data and just go forward from there.

“If it stays cool and we don’t get rain, we could see some awesome track conditions and go really fast. For now, we need to be prepared for whatever happens.”

This will be the sixth national event on the year for Lagana but his first with Magic Dry 100% Organic Multi-Purpose Absorbent as his title sponsor. Magic Dry is a sister product to CatSpot Organic Cat Litter, Lagana’s sponsor to this point. Both products are owned by boat racer Tommy Thompson.

“We would love to upset some of the full-time teams and get some attention for Magic Dry,” Lagana said. “It’s an incredible product that people are going to love.

“We ran pretty well the other night at a match race in Michigan and learned a few things there so it was good,” Lagana said. “I feel like we made some good strides and progress this year with the car. We also have Scott’s data to base our tune-up off of as well so I think we’ll have a pretty good handle on things.”