Drag Illustrated Issue 152, January 2020 | Page 33

Special Section ELITE TOP DRAGSTER KELLAN FARMER Kellan Farmer had a point to prove when he set out on his 2019 Lucas Oil Elite Top Dragster world championship hunt. Farmer, the Race Tech Race Cars shop foreman, wanted to dispel a myth that Race Tech cars wouldn’t be competitive in fast bracket racing applications. With an event win and the championship in hand, Farmer feels he proved his point. “We really got our point across, especially since it was my first season running that fast,” says Farmer, 26. “You can’t really tell me that it was driver experi- ence. I’m pretty much going to count most of my wins to that car and how consistent it was. It could just go rounds. It proved our point, and just having all our hard work pay off made it worth it.” Perhaps Farmer’s biggest challenge of the season presented itself in late summer when he suffered a high-speed wreck during an evening test session to prepare for the final few races. His nitrous-assisted Race Tech dragster was totaled, but friend and customer Phil Unruh loaned him his new twin-turbo dragster to finish the season. Farmer and his father, Russ, had to learn the new combo, while Kellan also had to mentally move past the crash. “I had just come out of wrecking a race car,” Farmer says. “I got in that thing and it was wanting to hit the wall almost every pass. It was not fun. I was not having a good time. But I wanted this championship bad. I’m telling you, it has been a dream of mine to be a champion since I was a little kid, so I wasn’t going to give it up. I was scared to death. I still had the willingness to do it, but man, was I scared.” Farmer failed to qualify at the penultimate race at Darlington, though he pulled out a semi- final finish to hold off Brian Bednar and his su- percharged entry. East Coast Nationals at her home track, GALOT, then won the Summer Nationals at South Georgia before falling to her boyfriend, Noah Johnson, in the Northern Nationals final round in Ohio. Messer was crowned the champion during the Darlington race when her closest challenger, Steven Boone, went out early. “Of course, the races before, my dad was so worried,” Messer says. “Me and him would have talks and be like, ‘Look, it’s all in God’s hands. He already has it all planned out for us.’ The best we can do is go out there and have fun.” TOP DRAGSTER 32 KIMBERLY MESSER Kimberly Messer’s Lucas Oil Top Dragster 32 world championship season speaks to not just her and her father Ricky’s talent and determination, but also to the success of the PDRA Jr. Dragster ranks to develop new talent to feed the “big car” ranks. Messer, 19, closed out her Jr. Dragster career in 2018 and went right to work in Top Dragster 32 in 2019. “Me and Dad, we’ve always been a team,” Messer says. “We’ve always had that and we knew we could do it. It wasn’t that we were doubting ourselves, but with it being my first year, we just didn’t have those [championship] intentions. We were going out there, having fun, making memories.” Despite those modest goals, Messer strung together a season that also netted her the 2019 PDRA Sportsman Rookie of the Year honors. She opened the year with a runner-up finish at the PDRA660.com 33