PHOTO: NHRA / NATIONAL DRAGSTER |
went to a company picnic at Fel-Pro, which is in Skokie, Illinois, in my little dually and trailer, unloaded my dragster and we started it, revved the motor up – all that kind of stuff. From there I met a man( Peter Lehman) whose father was the president of Fel-Pro. He actually came out to a race in Cordova that weekend, just for a little while. Fast forward to the end of the year, I got a call from Raymond asking,“ Do you remember that kid you met whose dad is my boss?” I’ m like,“ Not really, but kinda.”“ Well, Peter wants to come to Darlington with you at the end of the season. He’ s writing a nonfiction story for a college class he’ s taking at Northwestern University.” So I called Peter, first time I’ d talked to him on the phone, and said,“ You probably want to fly into Charlotte and I’ ll pick you up.” He said,“ Nope, I want to experience the whole process. I want to experience everything you go through.”
I picked him up after I got off work on the night shift at the Kroger food warehouse. It was my wife, my friend and his dually that I had borrowed since mine had been broken into that week, and Peter and me. I drove the entire way to Darlington, South Carolina – a pretty long ride from the Memphis area. We get there and he’ s making little notes the whole time. Basically he was not having a clue what was going on. He was not a race car kind of person at all. He basically asked,
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Keep on Rollin’
Since making his Top Fuel debut in 1998, Clay Millican and his various team owners and supporters have worked hard to keep the former Kroger warehouse forklift operator on the nitro scene. He’ s worked through sponsorship woes and team changes to find himself at the helm of Doug Stringer’ s championship-contending Parts Plus / Great Clips Top Fuel dragster.
“ Why do you do this? You obviously spend every dollar you have to go racing. Why?” My answer was,“ Because I want to drive a Top Fuel car.”
Right time, right place; whatever you want to call it, I won my first national event that weekend with Peter there. I joke with him all the time that I hooked him. He also experienced what Top Fuel cars were that weekend. We became very good friends. Then he wrote for another class a business plan for how to go racing. Well, he put this plan into effect and signed a one-race sponsorship with the Chicago White Sox, and off to Florida I went with Peter and his family and my wife. We went and I got my license through Paul Smith. Literally in less than a week I was at Route 66 Raceway. I was the very first Top Fuel
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car to ever pull into the racetrack there at an NHRA national event. I did my infamous“ reverse burnout” on that first run and was ready to go home to Drummonds( Tennessee), go back to Kroger and never be thought of again. But it’ s obviously turned out very well.
You’ re well-known for your success in the IHRA, but most people don’ t realize you started your Top Fuel career at an NHRA race. What was the reasoning for focusing on IHRA competition after that first start in the NHRA?
That was something that Peter wanted to do. At that point, IHRA had a great program. They still weren’ t as big as NHRA, obviously, but they had a very competitive Top Fuel field. The reason Peter wanted to do that was they ran 10-12 races in a season. With the budget we had, that was the place to go for a couple reasons. One, we had enough budget to run those races competitively. Two, it was a training ground for a very, very inexperienced group of people, including myself. The only experience we really had was Mike Kloeber. I was a racer. I knew how to stage and all that kind of stuff, but I knew nothing about Top Fuel cars. Everybody who worked on the car was just friends of mine. We did it for essentially nothing, but that was what we had to do.
Peter chose to do the IHRA series the first year basically to teach us what we needed to do, how
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May 2017 |
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