Drag Illustrated Issue 149, October 2019 | Page 101
WORLD SERIES OF PRO MOD 2019
Stevens Jr. was scheduled to be Win-
ters’ second-round opponent after
running a 6.059, but the New Jersey
native hurt some pushrods in the
first-round victory. Winters allowed
ample time for Stevens and his team
to make repairs, and even searched
through their pushrod inventory
when Stevens came by the Winters
pit area seeking spares. The search
proved futile and Winters rolled to
the starting line unopposed.
“We know we even tried to help
them get back up there and we were
wanting to run him,” Winters says.
“But when we finally got down to
the bottom of the staging lanes and
knew they weren’t going to make it,
we thought, ‘Well, at least we gave
them a fair shake and enough time
to get here.’ It was unfortunate, but
good for us.”
Winters made a solid launch and
shut off early to avoid any serious
damage that might prevent him
from coming back for the semifi-
nals, where he was set to receive a
competition single pass because of
the way the 11-car ladder shook out.
He rolled to the starting line, staged,
broke the beams and shut the
car off, again conserving parts
and time to prepare for the fi-
nal round.
“We had a planned shut-off,
and people can say what they
want, but I had a hundred thou-
sand reasons to do what we did,
so we did it and we felt good
about it,” Winters says. “We just
didn’t want to hurt anything.
When you’ve got that much
money on the line, there’s no
reason to go out there and try
to make a hero pass and not be
able to come back for the final.”
Winters was going to need a
hero pass for the final round.
He would line up with Scott Ok-
sas, who cut mid-.030 reaction
times and ran in the mid-5.80s
in the previous two rounds.
Oksas backed off slightly in
the final, while Winters gave
it everything he had. The two
drivers left the line with identical
.053 reaction times and Winters’
roots-blown Chevelly pulled ahead
for an early lead, but Oksas’ turbo-
charged Mustang drove around him
to get the win with a 5.822 at 247.38
to Winters’ 6.027 at 234.57.
“I knew he was running in the
mid-.80s and I knew we couldn’t
run in the .80s, so I knew I would
have to get him off the starting
line,” Winters says. “Matter of fact,
I double-bulbed him just to see if
he could get that thing spooled up
in time and he did. We left the line
dead even. When we took off, I shot
out and I didn’t see him out of my
driver’s-side window until around
the eighth-mile mark. After that
point, I knew it was over with un-
less something happened to him.”
Despite leaving Bandimere
Speedway empty-handed, Winters
is still happy about his team’s de-
cision to make the trip and even
happier about the group’s ability
to reach the final round.
“Obviously, we would’ve been
happier if we’d taken home the
hundred thousand, but we enjoyed
it and it was a great experience,”
Winters says. “Like Wes [Buck]
says, we get treated like royalty up
there and it’s a nice facility. The
ability to take the bikes and spend a
little time riding around just made
it that much more enjoyable. It was
a great opportunity and we were
more than happy to be runner-up.”
– NATE VAN WAGNEN
DI DI
DI
DI DI DI DI
DI DI DI
RICK HORD
■
A trip to Denver can prove
to be cathartic for a number of
reasons. For Rick Hord, he was able
to remove a season’s worth of strug-
gles in just a few days. After strug-
gling through a completely frustrat-
ing 2019 NHRA Pro Mod season,
Hord might have regained his racing
mojo on Thunder Mountain.
Hord ripped off a series of strong
runs in testing and then advanced to
the semifinals in his turbocharged
Maximum Effort IV Corvette be-
fore losing to eventual winner Scott
Oksas. In the process, Hord looked
every bit as dangerous as he did to
close out 2018.
“In the time we’ve been away,
we’ve made changes,” Hord said.
“We didn’t have a power problem.
We know we’ve got
power. I got a little
lost and we needed to
find our way back on
track. We’re commit-
ted to what we’re do-
ing and we made three
good runs (in testing)
that were all straight.
I didn’t even have to
turn the steering wheel,
and that just felt real-
ly good. I feel like that
was a sign.”
Those good signs
continued throughout
the weekend, but it took
some work to get there.
They made a number
of major changes, and
even spent most of the
summer away from the track. It
took some soul-searching, but Hord
proved in Denver he’s still plenty
capable of running with the best
in Pro Mod.
“Drag racing is a roller-coaster
sport and in Pro Mod, there’s so
many things that can jump up and
happen, and you cannot anticipate
them all,” Hord said. “When you’re
having failure and then you have
another failure, there’s the men-
tal aspect.
“You start questioning a lot of
things and you start overthinking
a lot of things. But when we left the
track during testing it was the first
time we left the track feeling good
in months.”
It had Hord thinking big and
he followed through. The veteran
ran a 5.925 at 233.20 in his sec-
ond-round win against Clint Sat-
terfield, which proved to be his
highlight on race day.
He ran into trouble almost im-
mediately against Oksas, but the
positives far outweighed anything
else for Hord. He knew all along he
wasn’t far off from turning things
around. It just took a return trip to
Denver and Thunder Mountain to
find it all.
“I loved it out here and I had a
great time,” Hord said. “We come
here and the staff does a good job.
You know you can go out there and
count on it repeating. I was excit-
ed to see how it would go, and I’m
pleased with what we were able to
do.” – JOSH HACHAT
DI DI DI
DI DI DI DI
DI DI DI
October 2019
DragIllustrated.com
| D r a g I l l u s t r a t e d | 101