JOHN DEFLORIAN | PART 2
OHN DEFLORIAN sold the Corvette
J and made the decision to build a Pro Stock entry if only for the sake of continuity and data collection if he was going to tune both cars. At the end of the 2011 season, John returned to the business of building a new race car for himself. With the money from the sale of the Corvette, he was able to build a stateof-the art new 2012 Camaro. He only had twelve weeks to construct the car so, this time, Jerry Haas allowed John to work on the car during the day in between customer jobs. However, when John’ s daily ten-hour shift was over, he could clock out and continue working on his new ride deep into the night. He made the first ADRL event of 2012 with twenty hours to spare. It may sound glorious but, in fact, it was beyond brutal.
An interesting aspect of John’ s return to Pro Stock was the fact he wasn’ t coming back after a layoff of twenty years. As if he didn’ t have enough racing experience driving a variety of cars, it was common practice for Jerry Haas or John DeFlorian to take a customer’ s finished machine on the brief thirty-minute tow to Gateway International Raceway and“ shake down” the car for customers before they took delivery. These“ tests” happened during the track’ s regular test-and-tune night or in private weekday sessions. Haas had free rein of the track and used it weekly. Considering JHRC has constructed nearly one thousand cars in its existence, it is one of drag racing’ s most obscure statistics that Jerry Haas and John Deflorian have likely driven more different drag racing vehicles then any humans on earth. Each of them has wheeled nearly one hundred Pro Stocks( of all varieties and sanctions), Pro Modifieds( of all inductions), Top Sportsman, Competition, Super Comp and Super Gas Eliminator machines.
However, it was John’ s“ real life” which directed his decisions. Deep down, he knew Bealko’ s offer was the only way he could stay involved in the sport as a racer and, for those who dream, remaining in grasp of those goals is an obsession from which there is no escape.
He competed with the two-car operation for five years. In his foray into“ Mountain Motor” racing, the landscape changed. While the category began in the 1975 in United Drag Racers Association competition as Unlimited Pro Stock Eliminator, it was quickly adopted by the International Hot Rod Association in 1977 as their Pro Stock Eliminator. In 2009, the American Drag Racing Association added their version known as Extreme Pro Stock Eliminator. Initially, The Bealkos competed in the IHRA but, at the end of 2009, a spat between management and the racers caused the IHRA president to brazenly drop the category altogether. Therefore, the team raced almost exclusively in the expanding ADRL series.
John debuted his new Camaro in 2012 with the new-style Chevy painted … yes, painted … by
DEFLORIAN GETS BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS- INCLUDING CREW MEMBER JEFF GRABER’ S GRABER CONCRETE AND KEVIN BEALKO’ S BLACK DIAMOND MOTORSPORTS.
Jeff Hoskins to match the Bealkos’ Pontiac. Both cars carried the Bealkos’“ Black Diamond” coal mining graphics and later gained additional sponsorship from AMSOIL lubricants. DeFlorian proved he still knew how to build and drive a car. In the ADRL’ s eighth-mile competition, John was low qualifier at his second and third events and then ran the quickest and fastest elapsed times in“ big motor” Pro Stock history in front of his hometown fans at Gateway International Raceway at 4.019 / 179.95. Fourteen days later, DeFlorian won his first sixteen-car Pro Stock National event at ADRL Martin, Michigan.
In 2013, an amazing incident changed the future of Mountain Motor Pro Stock Eliminator. As in NHRA Pro Stock, costs were constantly escalating and just the battle for more cubic inches in an unrestricted category painted a grim future for the class. Exotic valvetrains, new transmissions and suspension products already had the price of new, race-ready Mountain Motor Pro Stockers pushing $ 175,000 with engines alone selling for $ 80,000 from any of the top powerplant suppliers.
Most spectators know the major difference between 500 cubic-inch and“ Mountain Motor”
Pro Stockers is engine displacement. Historically, the performance difference between the two different is between a quarter and a third of a second. The big-inch machines are also, on average, fifteen mph faster. There is very little appreciable difference in the cost of the completed cars and engines. There is, however, one massive distinction between the two approaches to the same problem.
In Mountain Motor Pro Stock racing, the quickest and fastest engine combination is always for sale. In NHRA competition, the quickest, fastest or winningest engine,( the“ number one” combination), is the sport’ s most closely guarded secret. The advantage may be in the cylinder heads, the camshaft profile or the intake manifold but nobody will ever be able to buy a copy at any price. The builders of those engines also race in the category and those secrets determine their fortunes. Those same builders often sell, lease or rent Pro Stock engines to other Pro Stock teams for use but those engines will never be copies of the current dominant powerhouse. This fact explains the reason the NHRA has crowned only seventy-three different Pro Stock Eliminator National Event winners over the past fifty-five years.
150 | Drag Illustrated | DragIllustrated. com Issue 198