Main Girl
PHOTOS: TERA WENDLAND GRAVES, CHRIS GRAVES
Ashley Fye, long time girlfriend and now fiancé of Palmer’s, is central to virtually every aspect
of his racing operation. Serving as crew chief on the team’s Top Fuel dragster and experimental
nitro-burning Pro Mod, Fye’s input is critical to Palmer’s on-track success, but it’s her support
and encouragement away from the drag strip and on the road that Palmer appreciates the most.
“It’s especially rewarding to race with Ashley,” he says. “But I have to admit that there’s more to
it than that. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do it without her. She doesn’t get the credit she deserves.
She builds every cylinder head we run, measures and checks rods and pistons aft er every run,
builds every clutch pack for every run, makes a lot of calls on things like head gasket thickness,
overdrive on the blower, strips the superchargers, and she’s driven the damn thing. She’s a
RacePak technical representative, she can do it all. She’s a legitimate bad ass, and she’s beautiful.”
in more cars, or bring back teams who have
been on the sidelines for a few years?
NHRA has actually tried to get people out
there. Not financially, but I think they’re trying to
work with the teams. The big teams have helped
a lot with a few of the smaller independent teams
that don’t come out much, they’ve actually helped
them with their setup. They will give you advice.
They’ll help you if you want it. You can go to
Kalitta Motorsports or a Jim Head or somebody,
and they will help you. They’re definitely working
toward getting more people out there. I don’t
believe you can do anything to make the price
cheaper. I don’t think that’ll ever happen because
then the ‘big show’ is not the ‘big show’. It’s the
‘big show’ because it’s so hard to do. If they tried
to slow them down, then it would lose its luster.
I think the quarter-mile versus thousand-foot
deal has kind of at least died down a little bit
because – let’s face it – we’re not going back to
quarter-mile. I just don’t ever see that happening,
as much as people would like it to. To a point I
think thousand-foot helped the smaller guys for
a while. But now these cars are running so fast
early and the RPM in these cars is incredible. Ten
years ago, if you want 8,000 RPM at the hit, you
had a badass hotrod. There’s cars out there now
that go to 8,800 to 9,000 and they just murder it.
They just slip the clutch, and they go fast that way.
That just makes everything hard. I just can’t even
imagine the thing having 78- gallons, 80-gallons
August 2016
of fuel at 9,000 RPMs on a fuel motor. It blows
my mind. Where we run ours is about 8,300 –
and that’s high for us. You can tell it’s hard on
parts. But I don’t think you’re ever going to get
away from that because going really fast is what
makes it cool.
The big Pro teams have been vocal about how
their major corporate sponsors have responded positively to the increased exposure from
the new FOX Sports television package. How
have your sponsors or fans reacted?
People love the FOX deal or they hate the FOX
deal. But I’ll tell you…the FOX Sports deal has
helped our program. It has helped us find more
help. Whether you believe it’s good coverage or
not, I can prove to you and tell you without a
shadow of a doubt that it has worked for us. I
know I hear good and bad about it, but I can
show you where it’s helped us a lot.
You’ve had some unconventional sponsorship deals over the years, especially this year.
How did the deals with the Lucas Oil Drag Boat
Series and drag boat icon Tommy Thompson
Motorsports come about?
We run the Lucas Oil Drag Boat Series logo on
our car because Lucas helped us, and they have a
badass big team. So us running Lucas Oil logos
all over the car doesn’t really help them because
we know we’re not a top-end car - we’re not a
big-budget team. So, we run the Drag Boat series logo because we have a drag boat, and that’s
also because of Lucas – not because we have the
money, because Lucas does. So, we promote the
boat series. From that exposure, the boat racers
have noticed they have gotten more coverage
and recognition. We’ve had drag racers going
to the boat races, hanging out with us, and boat
racers are coming out to drag races. It’s been crazy.
Marty Logan, who owns House of Colour down
around Dallas, he’s got a big paint shop there and
he helps our team – our car and boat team some,
and he runs a boat, too.
Tommy Thompson, he’s like the [Don] Schumacher of boat racing. He owns six boats. Personally,
he has carried boat racing for 30-years. He’s spent
millions of dollars in boat racing. Helps everybody, and he’s helped so many people, you could
never name them all. But he came to me when we
were just friends and told me that the exposure
he gets and that boat racing gets through FOX
and from the Lucas Oil Drag Boat Series sticker
being on the car has been so good, and that it’s
nice to see excitement back geared toward boat
racing again. So, Tommy has joined our team.
He came to me and said he wanted to keep us
out there. He has stepped in and you see Tommy
Thompson Motorsports on the side of the car
and it’s a great deal for us. It’s a deal where he
basically said, ‘I want you to be able go as far as
you want to go, but I want you to be able to do
it your way. I don’t want that to change. I like it
after hours when we’re relaxing and we’re able
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