NHRA Gainesville Nationals - March 8-11

by Steve Jones
The Parts Plus Top Fuel team began the day at the NHRA Arizona Nationals at Firebird International Raceway in Phoenix this afternoon, capturing a win in Round 1 of the Finals. Driver Clay Millican drove Parts Plus Top Fuel car to a 3.861 second, 314.31 MPH run.
Following the run Clay said, “We may not be the quickest, but we go down the race track and that what wins rounds.” Team Owner Mark Pickens concurred with him, adding, “The car continues to make it down the race track, which is key. We’ve been fighting dropped cylinder problem at the top end of the track, but I feel we are only a fraction away from seeing what the Parts Plus dragster can really do.”
The crew is now getting the car ready for Round 2 of the Finals, which begins at 1:00 PM (MST).

by Brad Littlefield
The so-called “off-season” is anything but at the MPE Motorsports shop in the Memphis, Tenn., suburb of Munford. Just a week after the season finale in Pomona, the crew was scrambling to ship off every part that needs to be recertified while it readied its dragster for off-season testing, a concept that driver Clay Millican is becoming reacquainted with.

Millican, 45, is occupied with “glamorous” driver chores, such as hauling out the trash and cleaning the floors and sinks, while he contemplates his second full season of racing in the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series for the first time since 2007.

“Parts Plus will be on for the whole season,” said Millican. “It’s a pretty exciting thing to be back full time. We have some folks we’re interviewing for full-time positions. It’s really, really cool. It’s not like we haven’t done this before, but it’s been a couple of years since I got to race all of the races. I’m happy. “It creates a lot of excitement and a lot of work. We spent the last couple of races getting a new car sorted out. We’re moving forward with getting a few parts and pieces that other teams have and we have needed. It’s wide open already.”

Wide open seems to be the default setting for the energetic and talkative Millican. His colorful personality has shined through not only on ESPN2 broadcasts but also on TV shows he has hosted, such as Pinks: All Out, Drag Race High, and Burnout; however, the full-scale assault his team has planned for 2012 gives him more reason to keep the pedal down. The former forklift operator pursued his nitro-clouded dreams from the bracket racing ranks all the way up to the big show, and he’s ready to adjust from surviving to thriving in the take-noprisoners world of Top Fuel.

From forklift to cockpit
“My brain was always on cars and making them go fast,” recalled Millican. “Truth be told, I wasn’t a very good bracket racer because I never wanted to leave my car alone; I always wanted to go faster and faster.”

Millican’s car-crazy upbringing was nurtured by his father, who was a gearhead and took Millican to all types of racing events near their hometown of Drummonds, Tenn. Naturally, Millican started bracket racing as soon as he turned 16. The need for speed has even carried on a generation with his youngest son, Dalton, 19, having recently won the 2011 AMA ATV Motocross championship.

Millican used persistence and his ability to relate to others to be able to expand his racing schedule early in his career. He talked to Raymond King while King was gaining influence at TCI Transmissions and worked out a deal where they would cover travel expenses by having him haul their display trailer to events with his dragster inside. TCI was later purchased by Fel-Pro, and he worked out the same deal with them.

King convinced Millican to display his dragster at a Fel-Pro company function, which is where he met Peter Lehman. Lehman’s parents owned Fel-Pro at the time, and Lehman kept in contact with Millican and thought of him when it came time to write a nonfiction paper for his creative writing class at Northwestern University. Lehman caught a flight to Memphis and hopped in a duallie with Millican to get the full racing experience while Millican competed in Darlington, S.C. The dichotomy of the two individuals who were traveling down the interstate was not lost on Millican.

“Peter was a guy who went to boarding schools and was in college, and I’m a guy who barely graduated high school,” said Millican. “He would ask every now and then, ‘Why do you do this to yourself, spending your money and driving all night to go to a race after working a forklift all week?’ I told him, ‘I want to drive a Top Fuel car.’We made our trip, and as it worked out, I won my first [IHRA] national event that weekend. Peter and I were on the phone constantly after that.”

A few years later, Lehman drew up a business plan for running a Top Fuel team for another school project. This led to Millican getting his Top Fuel license in May 1998 in one of Paul Smith’s cars and making his debut at the inaugural event at Route 66 Raceway with the Chicago White Sox sponsoring a (Left) Clay Millican and the Parts Plus team are set to run the full 2012 NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series. (Right) Team owner Mark Pickens is a racer in his own right. He drove his ’07 Pontiac GTO to a national event win in Top Sportsman in Atlanta this season. (Above) Justin Crosslin, left, and Mike Domagala have embraced their first opportunities to call the shots in 12 races since being appointed to the crew chief positions. primary sponsor Parts Plus got its feet wet in NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing. car they rented from Donnie Holbrook with Bruce Litton’s team running the car. His was the first car to go down the dragstrip, although his mettle was tested at the onset.

“I did my infamous backwards burnout,” said Millican. “I was ready to head back to Drummonds, Tenn., and never be seen again. It was one of the most embarrassing things in my life. Here I was at this magnificent, new facility, and I pulled up on the throttle while I was backing up and pulled the heim joint underneath. It revved up and did a backwards burnout with Richard Hartman hanging on the roll cage. Luckily, the reverser broke right away. I ended up making my first four-second run that weekend. I didn’t qualify, but running four seconds was pretty cool.”

Millican’s wife, Donna, convinced him to make the gutsy decision to quit his job at Kroger to pursue a career in fuel racing around that time. Her steady employment helped them and their kids, Cale and Dalton, stay afloat while Millican and Lehman pursued opportunities to race. Millican was able to drive Nick Boninfante Sr.’s Nitro Fish dragster at a few events in 1999 before a sponsorship deal came through that allowed Lehman to purchase all of Tommy Johnson Jr.’s racing equipment. They rallied up some friends to volunteer on the crew, hired Mike Kloeber to run the show, and away they went.

“We were big-time racing, and none of us had any idea what we were doing other than Mike,” said Millican. “We won a couple of races and almost won the IHRA championship. Over the winter, our sponsor did what a lot of other dotcom companies did at the time: They went from dot-com to dot-bomb.”

Better fortunes lay ahead because Lehman and Millican struck a deal with Werner Enterprises that would become a long relationship. The marketing plan called for them to run the full IHRA series, so their participation at NHRA events was always on a part-time basis, but Millican went on to have the most successful tenure in the history of IHRA’s Top Fuel class with six consecutive championships and 51 national event wins.

Millican provided enough at his NHRA appearances to validate his success elsewhere. In 2004, he reached the final round at three consecutive events when the tour swept through Houston, Bristol, and Atlanta.

“We were disappointed if we didn’t at least get to the semi’s at NHRA national events,” said Millican. “We had a bad, tough crew. Things were rolling right along.”

End of an era
Millican will be entering his 15th season of Professional drag racing under his fourth different team owner. When Lehman decided to exit motorsports at the end of the 2004 season in order to pursue the world of big business, Millican found a buyer for the fully sponsored operation in “Captain Chaos” Kenny Koretsky. Two years and two more IHRA championships into the deal, Koretsky accepted an offer that put the team under the Torco Racing Fuels umbrella.

The first tour of Millican's six IHRA Top Fuel championship occurred with a Werner Enterprises-sponsored dragster owner by Peter Lehman and tuned by Mike Kloeber.

Millican ran his first full NHRA season with signage from the rock band Ratt. The team’s consistency fell off, and longtime tuner Kloeber was replaced midseason with Johnny West. With plans for a second car in place for the following season, it all dissolved in the off-season with a phone call that Torco was ceasing its racing sponsorships and operations for the coming season.

At a crossroads after years of stability even amid different team owners, Millican placed a call to friend Mark Pickens, who had been an associate and sometimes full-event sponsor with his fuel-injection company, Motorvation.

“Mark Pickens is someone who I met at the back of the trailer while I was packing chutes,” said Millican. “We kind of hit it off. We were both from the Memphis area. I had started a project to get a skate park built in Munford, and he guided me in how to go about it and do the fundraising.” Pickens, a businessman who is involved in ventures such as Armstrong Relocation, is also a Top Sportsman racer and won his first national event in Atlanta this season. His wife, Lauren, is also involved with the team, in addition to the Hope4Sudan project she started to build compounds with deep water wells, schools, medical clinics, and churches in war-torn southern Sudan.

Building anew
When Pickens picked up the team, much of the crew put hard hats on to complete turning the Munford property from an abandoned indoor amusement park into a race-ready facility. Lance Larsen took over as crew chief, and the team ran eight races in 2008, mostly at the end of the season.

Millican was on the tour in 2009 and qualified for the Countdown to the Championship while securing a top 10 finish for the first time in his career. A final-round finish in Topeka was his best showing. The team didn’t finish out the season, though, because it needed to concentrate on securing primary sponsorship.

“Mark and Lauren took a big gamble in buying the race team,” said Millican. “We were pretty successful in 2009 in getting to a final round in Topeka and making the Countdown. Mark and Lauren wanted to keep going, but we needed to find sponsorship instead of running it all out of their pockets. In 2010, when we were not racing, Mark and Lauren kept our core group of guys employed. We did a lot of work on Top Sportsman cars or whatever projects Mark had going.”

The only racing Millican did in 2010 was during the fall at the Reading and Las Vegas events. He qualified well at both with new tuners Justin Crosslin and Mike Domagala at the helm.

Crosslin, 27, is a homegrown talent who began racing with Millican when he was 17 and worked from the bottom to the top. He is paired with Domagala, 40, who learned under such tuners as Tim Richards, Lee Beard, and Brian Corradi and whose only previous crew chief experience was one race with the Abu Dhabi team in the Middle East.

The team was able to expand its schedule to 10 races in 2011 with Parts Plus coming on board as a major sponsor. The relationship began with historic dirt track Riverside Int’l Speedway owner Clayton Allen, who owns the team’s building, introducing them to Parts Plus’ Steve Tucker.

“We came to them with a business plan, and they decided to dip their toe in the water with the 10 races we did over the last year,” said Millican. “I think it’s great that we were able to work something out with a local company. It worked for them with their warehouse people, store people, and vendors who are participating in the program. Steve Tucker, Mike Lambert, and all of the guys at Parts Plus bought into this program and NHRA Drag Racing. That says good things about our sport for them to become involved at a time when other companies are getting out of motorsports altogether.”

Full speed ahead
There wasn’t much rest for the Parts Plus team between the Reading event and when it traveled west to end the season in Las Vegas and Pomona. Brad Hadman flew in to front- and back-half the chassis the team had been running and its brand-new spare pipe on its in-house chassis jig. Crosslin and Domagala had this procedure on their wish list for some time in order to change the engine location and other factors to make the car more competitive, and Pickens green- lighted the process when plans for 2012 became solidified. “We know we had a consistent 3.85 car,” said Millican.

“That was good, and Justin and Mike did a good job running that combination. Now, it’s time to step it up. We’re updating to a later version of cylinder heads. There are things other teams have done that we’d probably been lacking on. “We have two brand-new cars, lots of short blocks, and the parts and pieces that all the big boys have. We’re excited to go down to Florida and learn how to run those low 3.80s and high 3.70s. That’s what it’s going to take to win. Our job is to go out there and turn the win light on.” Turning the win light on is something that Millican has become accustomed to during his career, and he is eager to do so four times on the NHRA stage for the first time. After four career runner-ups and years of pounding the pavement to get back to his current position, a national event win can’t come soon enough.“It’s time,” said Millican. “The question I get all the time is, ‘When are you going to win one of these?’	Millican will be seeking his first national event win in 2012 after four previous final- round appearances that resulted in runner-ups.	There are a lot of smart answers I want to give, but the truth is that we’ve been really close to winning a bunch of times but haven’t. When the time’s right, we’ll win. There are a bunch of guys here who’ve won a lot of races. I want to get that first one out of the way. I truly believe we can do it. One need not mistake the smile and polite gestures Millican displays on the outside for a lack of competitive fire. Even if he’s not one to throw his helmet, he wants to win as bad as anybody. “I am glad to be there, but I’m not at all happy to lose whether it’s in the first round or the final,” said Millican. “I probably hide it pretty well. I’m not a helmet-throwin’, car-kickin’ type of person. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to. I’m pretty competitive, but I keep a smile on no matter what’s going on inside of me. This is a group of winners here. I have no doubt that we’re going to go out and win races. I think it’s going to be this year. That’s all I’m working on every day.”

Millican made his debut at the inaugural Chicago event in 1998 with a ride that he and Lehman leased from Donnie Holbrook.

Full Throttle TV sat down with NHRA Top Fuel Driver Clay Millican