Nitro Rebel
PHOTOS: CHRIS GRAVES
Since his Top Fuel debut
in 2002, Scott Palmer has
been earning respect from
fans and competitors
due to his persistance
and devotion to the “cool
factor” of nitro racing. A
major program overhal
last season has the
Missouri native winning
rounds and running
career-best numbers.
August 2016
it and Lagana just says, ‘Oh, well, I
know you’re not going to stop doing
it, so no use discussing it.’ We used to
do it twice per warmup. So, we made
a deal with him to do it once instead
of twice. We compromised.
Speaking of things we do because we
think it’s cool – I wasn’t big on lowering the wheelie bar to get wheel speed
because, hell, I want the wheels up in
the air. It looks cool. Like Larry Dixon
and Don Prudhomme’s car back in the
day, I mean, holy shit! That thing was
the coolest car ever. It just carried the
front wheels out there and looked so
awesome. Our motor is 37 out, and
everybody else’s is 40, and when Murf
McKinney built it he asked me, ‘Where
do you want the motor?’ I said, wherever it was on Prudhomme’s car when
Dick LaHaie was tuning it and it was doing those
badass wheels-up launches. We’ve had two new
cars since then and they were built the same way
and for that very reason. That’s not a good reason,
but it’s my reason. We have ended up using the
wheelie bar a little bit. In Sonoma, on Saturday,
we ran 3.92 and had it backed all the way down
and it still carried the front wheels pretty good.
And then another deal we have is for every
round we win; we whack the throttle another
time. So the fans, like in Sonoma, they’re at the
back of our pits and they’re out of their minds –
just going insane. It was a mosh pit
back there because we were going
to the second round and they knew
we were going to whack it twice. If
we would have won second round,
we’ d have whacked it three times
going into the semis – just like the
Laganas did in Las Vegas back in
’09 or ’10 when they went to the
final. We were pitted by Torrence,
so as soon as we backed it out to
warm it up, I looked over there and
there they were – Bobby Lagana is
just over there looking. He knew
what was coming. He knows I’ve got to do it twice.
But, yeah, it’s just cool. I do it for the fans. I was a
fan. I went to races to hear that. And now you can
just watch it happen – whenever the fans watch
a warm-up and they shut the motor off, they just
walk off. Our pit area during the warm-up looks
like John Force’s pit. It’s insane. I’ll never quit
doing that. I’ll quit racing before I quit doing that.
We’re seeing low car counts at a growing
number of races this year. As a longtime competitor and fan of Top Fuel racing, what is
your biggest concern with the current state of
nitro racing?
I don’t really have a concern. I think they’re
working on the purse and trying to find ways
to get more teams out here. The problem right
now is it’s just so expensive to get into it – the
initial startup cost is insane. I’ve been lucky that
I’ve had breaks along the way that helped us get
started back in the early 2000s. I’ve just kind of
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