Drag Illustrated Issue 148, September 2019 | Page 79
STOCKLIN THRIVES
IN THE DATA-DRIVEN
DETAILS, AND IT’S
MADE A MAJOR
DIFFERENCE FOR
TEAMS HE’S WORKED
WITH IN A NUMBER
OF CLASSES.
spending money on his own car, he could make
money telling someone else how to run their car.
“I didn’t realize it when I was racing my car
that it wasn’t so much the sitting in the car and
letting loose of the clutch pedal or the button
that was invigorating for me. It was the winning,”
Stocklin says. “So, I could either go and win or
be competitive or compete, spending all of my
own discretionary income, and sweating and
working until 2 a.m. every night messing with
it. Or I could go and race with somebody else
and make money.
“So, then instead of racing negatively finan-
cially affecting my life, it is now positively finan-
cially affecting my life. Even when I was racing
my stuff I was very log-bookie, very spread-
sheety. But when you’re not crawling your sweaty
self in and out of the car, the attention to detail
of what the car is doing, by removing yourself
from sitting in the car you can become much
more analytical.”
W
hile analytics have be-
come the popular trend
in other professional
sports over the last
handful of years, the
idea of analytics is at
its most natural in motorsports – and especially
drag racing.
There’s numbered segments every trip down
the track, all coming together based on an infinite
number of variables and an infinite amount of
possibilities from those variables. There’s ad-
September 2019
justments to every piece of the car – all causing a
different reaction to the performance or another
part – and adjustments to the weather, the track,
the opponent, the time of year and that is just
scratching the surface.
But Stocklin tracks every part of it – in extreme,
painstaking detail – and that’s what has separated
him from almost everyone else in the sport.
From Frankie Taylor to Doug Riesterer to Jack-
son, Stocklin has worked with talented drivers
with an aggressive mindset. It’s the #SENDIT
mindset exemplified, but Stocklin has provided
the perfect balance with each.
Taylor won an ADRL Pro Extreme world cham-
pionship with Stocklin’s help, Riesterer had tre-
mendous success and Jackson has won multiple
championships with Stocklin tuning his car dat-
ing back to the ADRL title in Pro Nitrous in 2013.
“Me and Billy clicked right away,” Jackson says.
“My approach of being overly aggressive and al-
ways going for the kill with his realistic, thought-
out process of long-term success meld perfectly
in the middle. Him and me together are a pretty
unstoppable combination. In whatever we decide
to race, we will win with me and him together.”
Stocklin is calculated to their aggressive, and
it’s worked brilliantly. For Stocklin, it’s the chal-
lenge he loves – and he has the logbooks to prove
it. Each one is scrupulously filled with notes that
only make sense to him. But it took Stocklin time
to understand how best to utilize the data. His
mind was racing, but it was about making it all
translate to performance and success.
“Like, I knew how to analyze the data. But
when I started racing Outlaw 10.5 I got hooked up
with a guy named Scott Herzog and, him and his
brother, Brian, we raced side-by-side for years,”
Stocklin says. “Scott taught me how to win. Like
he knew when do you go for qualifying, when
you lay up in qualifying, when do you lean on the
motor, when do you not lean on the motor, and
when you do these different things.”
It’s now all recorded information, as Stocklin
takes a pad and pencil up to the starting line,
making note of all his particular details, plugging
them in and making adjustments from run to
run based on what he sees, what Jackson feels,
and, perhaps most importantly, what the data
tells him.
“I look for patterns, and statistics and things,”
Stocklin says. “I keep track of a lot of data, a lot
of variables on the car, and so basically, I try to
systematically look through the different results.
You know, I like to go through and organize the
runs and evaluate lots of the different things that
we monitor.
“Sometimes the things jump out, you know,
there’s clear patterns. If you don’t get passionate
about what you think the car wants, and you just
try to rely on what your data and time slips show
you, it becomes fairly straightforward. I think a
lot of guys, they get very caught up in, ‘we need
to be at this launch RPM here,’ or ‘we need to be
this much wheel speed,’ or ‘we need to do this,’
or ‘we’re fighting for more of that.’ And a lot of
times, the data is showing you something differ-
ent. So, I try to be as un-egotistical as possible.
The data is king.”
And Stocklin has plenty of data. Like mounds
of it. The computer is filled with it. There’s half a
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