Drag Illustrated Issue 141, February 2019 | Page 36
Special Section
SPENCER ALLEN KNOWS FLASHY. WITH HIS BRIGHT GREEN MOHAWK, RIDING LEATHERS AND WILD CLOWN-THEMED WRAP, THE
FLORIDIAN CAN’T BE MISSED WHEN HIS LAMINATION STATION SUZUKI HAYABUSA PULLS TO THE READY LINE FOR DRAG 965 PRO
EXTREME MOTORCYCLE. A SERIES OF NITROUS BACKFIRES OVER THE LAST TWO SEASONS HAVE ALSO ADDED TO THAT FLASHY
LOOK. BUT A NEW ALLIANCE WITH PRO EXTREME MOTORCYCLE GURU DAN WAGNER HAS ALLEN EXPECTING THOSE FINISH LINE
FLASHES TO COME FROM THE WIN LIGHT IN HIS LANE RATHER THAN FROM FIRE EXITING HIS ENGINE.
The opportunity to ride for Wagner
and his DTM Performance team is
a career-changing one for Allen,
who started riding dirt bikes at age
5 and raced motocross and road
raced in Europe during his time in
the Navy. He’s had an off-and-on
relationship with motorcycle drag
racing since the late ‘90s. He
entered the Pro Mod drag bike
scene in 2005 before the Great Re-
cession forced him into a hiatus.
“I think my last race was ADRL Drag-
stock at Rockingham in 2009,” Allen
remembers. “I had to nearly tap out
every resource I had just to get the
rig home and get everyone back to
Florida. I ended up selling off every-
thing and got out of racing again,
waited for the economy to come
back, then got back into it in 2015.”
Allen has been steadily stepping up
his game since his return to PDRA
Pro Extreme Motorcycle. He imme-
36 PDRA660.com
diately went to Wagner to provide
the horsepower for his new ride.
“We started out with a 4-valve
head motor to get back into it since
I hadn’t been on a bike since 2009,”
Allen says. “Between 2009 and
2015, things had changed a lot.
Instead of running a small motor,
a 1460cc non-stroker motor, ev-
eryone was running 1700cc-plus
stroker motors. The fastest I went
on my old Pro Mod bike was 4.26,
which wouldn’t hardly even get
you in the field in 2015. I had to
baby-step back into it.”
Allen attended 3-4 PDRA races per
season from 2015 through 2017,
gradually dipping back into a deep
pool that included three-time PXM
world champion Eric McKinney and
teammate Ashley Owens, as well as
Wagner’s riders, Terry Schweigert
and Burke Forster, and T.T. Jones
and Chris Garner-Jones.
“We’ve been constantly trying new
things over the past couple years,”
Allen points out. “That’s probably
why I finished 10th in points in 2017.
It was getting back into it, learning
all the changes and we were con-
stantly looking at building a motor
program that was different than
everybody else.”
That desire to take the path less
traveled cost Allen in the form of
nitrous backfires and the parts and
pieces that had to be fixed or re-
placed when the wrong combina-
tion of fuel and nitrous met up.
“I called 2017 my ‘year of fire’ – I
think I was on fire 14 or 15 times,”
Allen says. “I had probably the worst
fire I’ve ever had at Valdosta. I had
a mechanical malfunction at the
starting line that fired three cylin-
ders at the same time. They were
all full of fuel and nitrous. I had just
put a brand-new carbon fiber body
on it, destroyed that. It was one
huge ball of fire. It’s disheartening
when you have a fire like that.”
Allen regrouped for the 2018 season
and went back to a tried-and-true
setup that “paid dividends”, but
electronic gremlins were preventing
the new setup from translating into
win lights. His luck changed at the
Fall Nationals at South Carolina’s
Darlington Dragway, though, as
Allen raced past Ricardo Knights,
Garner-Jones and Ehren Litten to
advance to his first-ever PXM final
round. He fell to championship
runner-up Brunson Grothus, but
the performance was a gigantic
step in the right direction.
“Every round up to that point was
awesome,” Allen says. “I kept
running personal bests and I treed
everybody, every single round, even
in the final against Brunson. I got
down to the end of the track, and