Drag Illustrated Issue 118, February 2017 | Page 42

Alexis Q & A DeJoria N By Nate Van Wagnen Concussions are common in high-impact sports like football, but we rarely hear about them in drag racing. What did your recovery process require? The offseason was really about getting strong again and resting, of course. As soon as my head was right I was able to get back in the gym and start getting strong again. It was really tough missing Sunday in Ve- gas after Saturday night’s qualifying session accident, and then of course missing the Finals was even tougher. But recovering from a concussion is something that you can’t really gauge. With concussions on that level, you just really don’t know when it’s going to get better. Every morning you wake up, you’re like, ‘OK, is today going to be the day? No, not today. 42 | D r a g I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com Hopefully tomorrow will be better.’ It took almost two months for me to feel back to normal again. It was kind of a blessing that it happened when it did versus earlier on in the season because I probably would have had to miss a lot more races. Your longtime crew chief, Tommy DeLago, is back for 2017, and Nicky Boninfante has joined the Patrón team as co-crew chief after leading the 2015 world championship-winning DHL Funny Car team for the last few seasons. What did they do to upgrade your car over the winter? We worked on some stuff in the offseason, my team and I, just trying to Issue 118 HRA Funny Car driver Alexis DeJoria has proven to be a true diehard drag racer throughout her career. De- spite having access to a budget that would easily allow her to buy a ride in a top-tier nitro car from the get-go, De- Joria worked her way up through the sportsman ranks in Super Comp and Top Alcohol Funny Car, insisting to find success in those categories before stepping up to fuel Funny Car in 2011. Since making her Funny Car debut with Kalitta Motorsports six years ago, DeJoria has enjoyed four event wins, including the prestigious US Nationals in 2014 and the Las Vegas spring race last year. The 2016 season wasn’t too kind to DeJoria after the Vegas win, though. She suffered an accident at the Toyota NHRA Sonoma Nationals that violently sent her Tequila Patrón Toyota Camry into the retaining wall shortly after stepping on the throttle. The impact resulted in a high-ener- gy fracture of the left pelvis, forcing DeJoria to opt out of the Seattle and Brainerd races. She was back in the seat for the US Nationals and contin- ued to race through qualifying at the Las Vegas fall race. DeJoria endured another violent impact with the wall during the third qualifying session, though her Tommy DeLago-led team was able to mount the back-up body and make the fourth qualifying run. Once the adrenaline wore off, though, concussion-like symptoms hit her. Doctors confirmed DeJoria’s suspicion, diagnosing her with a full-blown concussion, leading her to skip Sunday eliminations at Vegas and assign Jeff Arend as her fill-in driver for the NHRA World Finals at Pomona. Drag Illustrated caught up with DeJoria at the 48th annual NHRA Gatornationals in Gainesville, Florida, this March to talk about the stren- uous recovery process, the efforts of her Tequila Patrón team, and what it was like to hop back into a 10,000-horsepower Funny Car after repeated injuries.