Drag Illustrated Issue 122, June 2017 | Page 34

Dirt Top Sportsman’s Jeff Brooks Adds to History of Englishtown Success By Nate Van Wagnen In addition to his crew, brother Jamie and father James, Brooks thanked transmission builder Bernard Weaver, longtime supporters Kaeser Compressors and Sonny Leonard of Sonny’s Racing Engines. “Our biggest thing right now is we switched to Big Stuff 3 fuel injection that Sonny put on the motor for us. We did that three years ago and it’s been amazing. We had a learning curve when we first switched to it, but our consis- tency has improved since then. When we get to the track we have loads of data that we can load into the car. It’s worked out real well for us. I will never, ever own another carburetor,” Brooks laughed. DI DI DI DI DI DI DI DI DI DI Mike Recchia - PDRA Pro Extreme 25+ Years of Champions LIGHTEN Up! with the New Magnesium BRT 7 . 5 lbs lighter ‘17 East Coast Nationals Winner & long time BRT customer Order your new unit or convert your existing unit to Mag Don’t waste your time or money testing other company’s gimmick of the week. We Invented, Patented & Perfected the Converter Drive. Available in Lockup or Non Lockup with proven fluid manipulation features that no others can touch. Built by Championship winning racers for racers. Trust the first name in Converter Driven Performance, Trust Bruno’s! FOR MORE INFO CALL 630.458.0043 OR LOG ONTO www.brunosAutomotive.com 34 | D r a g I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com Like Us on Facebook Issue 122 J eff Brooks doesn’t know what it is about New Jersey’s historic Old Bridge Township Raceway Park, but it’s a track where he’s enjoyed considerable success ever since he won an NHRA divisional race there in Super Gas in the late 1990s. He’s also earned a runner-up finish in Super Gas and a win in Top Sportsman at the NHRA Summernationals in the past before winning this year’s Sum- mernationals in his ’51 Henry J Top Sportsman entry. “The track’s been good to me,” Brooks said. “It was a tricky racetrack this past year with the heat. I didn’t get down the track on Thursday’s qualifying pass. We basically came to the conclusion that it was going to be a slick racetrack all weekend. We set the car up a lot calmer and we just hit the right combination. We’ve been doing this for a long time so we have enough data with this car and the track to make consistent runs.” Racing out of the sixth spot, Brooks drove his Dan Page-built Kaeser Compressors entry to round wins over Eric Cabral, Luc Angers, Bob Cornine and Ronnie Proctor before running 6.84 on a 6.79 dial-in to defeat Ron Riegel in the final round. It was Brooks’ second win in three weeks. “We’re having a great year. We won the NHRA divisional race at Norwalk a couple weeks be- fore Englishtown. There were 53 cars trying for 32 spots. The bump was a 6.89, which I think ended up being the quickest field in NHRA Top Sportsman history. We didn’t do so well at the Maple Grove divisional, but then we went to Eng- lishtown and won there. Any time you can win two out of three events in a row is pretty good,” Br ooks added.