Scott
Palmer
PHOTO: TERA WENDLAND GRAVES
WHACK IT
The process of whacking the
throttle during warm-ups is all but
obsolete in the pits of a NHRA
national event these days. Scott
Palmer, however, refuses to give up
the practice used to seat the clutch
in his Top Fuel dragster, though he
does admit that it’s an unnecessary
practice. “It’s fun, man,” he says,
“and the fans love it. They go nuts.”
to put kids in the car. I like that part of it. I like
families being able to come in and check out the
car and look in the trailer and it seems like some
of the big teams lose that when they get too big.’
What prompted you to get involved in Top
Fuel Hydro racing?
We helped a team out of San Francisco – Joe
Cassidy’s ‘Toxic Rocket’ Top Fuel Hydro. We just
went to a few races. We didn’t know anything
about boats. We just went and tri ed to help them
with their motor stuff, put some motors together,
went and ran with them and it ran pretty good
and we started getting interested. We started
going with them and then at the end of the year,
Glenn Wilson, who drives the ‘Toxic Rocket’, he
crashed the boat at the end of the year. He broke
his back and got hurt pretty bad so that boat was
out of commission. Putting together a new boat is
a yearlong process usually, so that boat was going
to be gone for the following year. [Forrest] Lucas
mentioned one time that he’d like to see us get
a boat just because he bought the series. It’s on
MAVTV, and he wanted another boat out racing.
He didn’t want to lose boats. He needed to gain
boats. Between us and one of our sponsors – not
really just a sponsor, he’s a great friend named
Kent Longley who owns Marck Recycling – he
basically said, ‘Well, yes, we should get a boat’.
So we ended up buying a boat from Dennis Gib-
August 2016
son, who passed away from a heart attack the
same winter.
We just put a boat team together. It’s just another crazy deal that we did, but it’s turned out
great. Lucas gave us the sponsor deal for the boat
with Lucas Oil Racing TV, and all of our sponsors
are friends – they all want to go boat racing and
they want to go drag racing, so we do it all together. The same team goes and does both.
You’ve been behind the wheel of tons of different race cars, but you won’t drive the boat?
We’ve got one of our crew guys who goes with
us on the boat, Scott Compton, driving for us.
We wanted to offer the driving deal to a crew guy.
Crew guys always get passed up. Teams always
just go out and get another driver. So, when I
decided that I didn’t really want to drive the boat
and none of our car crew guys wanted to drive the
boat, we asked one of the guys that helps us on
the boat. We knew he wanted to drive one, and
we knew that he’d likely otherwise never get the
chance. Honestly, we think it’s only fair that you
let one of your crew guys who work their asses off
on everything get a shot because out here in the
‘big show’ that doesn’t happen very often. Richie
Crampton is the last one probably ever that’s
gotten a shot at driving from being a crew guy.
It’s just hard for the crew guys, and you know
they all want to drive something – working for
years and never even getting to sit in the seat? I
think that’s crazy. So if I’m not going to drive it
and none of our car guys want to drive it, we’re
going to put one of our boat crew guys in it. It’s
been fun because it’s like watching someone learn
to water ski. It’s almost funny when they make
mistakes or whatever, but then they get it and
it’s cool because you watched them come up, you
watched them learn and pay their dues as a driver.
He’s a boat guy. That’s his dream. My dream is
running a fuel car. Driving a boat is really not my
dream. I love the sport and I want to be part of it,
but I don’t really want to be the driver of a boat.
I think you need to be a boat guy to drive a boat.
And I don’t want to learn. I drive Pro Mod. I drive
the fuel car, sometimes I drive Doug Doucette’s A/
Fuel car. I’ve got plenty of things to drive. I don’t
need to learn how to drive a boat.
What have you learned in your years of Top
Fuel racing that’s helped with the transition to
drag boat racing? Or are the two disciplines
too dissimilar to really compare them?
Well, the boat motor is the same. It’s the same
exact motor as we run in the dragster. We have
all the same motors and we just run on the same
setup as far as motor combination. But you have
to run it quite a bit milder in the boat. It has a
pedal clutch like an alcohol clutch in it, and it’s
activated off the throttle so you pick how far open
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