Dirt
veteran Jason Line. “I think it’s going
to get better. I feel like after talk-ing to
NHRA, they have some good things in
store for us. I feel like they see val-ue in
the class. Being stable and having plenty
of participation, that’s a good start.”
Adds Freeman: “I think you’re going
to continue to see the trend go in that
direc-tion.”
Along with the reduced schedule, en-
gine availability from KB Racing and
Elite Motorsports is at an all-time high.
Drivers can lease a high-quality engine
pro-gram from other standout teams
and immediately have a competitive car.
The talent pool has multiplied rapidly,
all without hours and hours of work and
mas-sive prices.
“With KB and Elite Motorsports
opening up their doors, the horsepower
disparity became less of an issue,” Kram-
er believes. “I’ll be honest with you, it
became much cheaper for me to lease
motors than it was for me to develop motors that
were 80 horsepower down. I was not going to
set any ET records with the stuff I was running
myself. It was very difficult to maintain motiva-
tion to continue to come out when you’re at that
point. It wasn’t going in a direction where we
could continue to improve.
“With that said, KB and Elite opened their doors
where someone like myself could come in and lease
the power, we can set up the car like we want to
but we run the car with their horsepower. We can
feel like we accomplish some-thing if we do that.
We go out there and we do the car tuning and
set-up, and we can win rounds, qualify No. 1 and
win races, and that makes us want to pro-gress.”
And as far as having that horsepower without
spending nearly as much as in the past, the op-
portunities to race in the class are better than
they have been in a long time.
“There’s people who have the money to do it
and it’s never been to where you could do it at the
cost you could do it today,” Freeman says. “The
group at KB and myself have done a bang-up job
of making it available.”
Of course, there is still work to be done.
It’s a class almost solely filled with Camaros.
Freeman brought out a Mustang body in Chicago,
Cristian Cuadra followed suit in Denver in his
Pro Stock debut, but both are Mustangs in body
only. That type of diversity needs to improve in
order to restore confidence and renew the fans’
interest, but those are steps everyone in Pro Stock
has realized.
In the meantime, those in the class are excited
to see the class pushing forward – and are deter-
mined to see it continue to do so.
“We’re seeing other cars, we’re seeing people
we’ve never seen before and that’s what this class
needs, 100 percent,” Freeman says. “It’s a great
deal right now.”
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I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
Issue 147
NHRA PRO STOCK