And now a very special email that came in from an old friend of HH, and team memebr of the winning Funny Car. Thanks very much to Dave for putting this great story together:

Monday April 17,2000

Larry, Well, I haven't slept since I saw you in victory lane on Sunday night! We drove all night to get home and back to our "normal" jobs :( I'm running on adrenaline. What a time we had! Everyone is on cloud 9.

I might get back-handed by the owner/driver for telling you this but I can take a punch so here goes :)

I should start by saying that I'm just a part time crew grunt on the team. I consider all the guys my friends, and I try to help them out when I can. The others on the team have all worked extremely hard to get that car into the winners circle. One thing is a constant on the team, we all have a really good time.

Rewind to 2 weeks ago. We're at Woodburn, re-painted body, new blower, new block, new heads, many many hours spent on the car, truck, trailer, etc. We never got a good run all weekend. Suffice it to say we were plagued by problems! The end result: 1 torched block, 1 torched head, a bad computer, a cracked, and broken body, blown burst panels, and broken blower studs. The crew was very depressed, and to think that we weren't even the ones that saw the many hundred-dollar bill's being flushed down the toilet! Dan never blinked an eye, or even considered backing down. We just plunked another bullet in the hole and kept going. With 1 week to go, we were back at Woodburn for more testing. Saturday afternoon the generator fails on the truck. No lights, no air compressor, and most important, no way to raise and lower the lift to get the car in! Once again, Dan and the team persevered and we were loaded and ready for Boise on Tuesday night 4/11 complete with a new generator fuel system :) But, should we really go to Boise? After all we never got down the track at Woodburn, why drive all the way to Boise? It was decided Boise would be basically a "test & tune" event for us.

We were all smiles in Boise. Dan ran a low 6 at 201 clicking it early on Friday. He did some tuning and we were extremely happy to sit on the pole with a 5.96 on Saturday night. What a turnaround! You would have thought we already won the event. Dan made a promise on Friday night that if we got low qualifier, we'd get dinner at the Outback. That was the best damn chicken I ever ate (I know I know, you're supposed to eat steak at the Outback, but I was trying to be good)

Ok so Sunday rolls around. RAIN! Everything was delayed. We were to get a bi-run into the second round. All goes well, the track gets dried, and Dan run's a 6.01...not earth shattering, but good enough for lane choice over Bateman. So we're getting ready for second round, the car looked ok, we had noticed specks of oil on the firewall all weekend, it was the worst on the first round pass. We cleaned it all up like we had been, serviced the car as usual. Then disaster, when we fire it for the warm up it's smoking and there's no exhaust pressure coming out of the #2 cylinder. We shut it down and pray that it's a simple pushrod problem. We pit the leakdown tester on it and...Uh oh! is it a headgasket?! It was like a 1 hour wrestling match! We had a blown headgasket, and another torched head. We all worked very hard, but Dan and Guy Mitchell were really the leaders of the thrashing. Then we're tightening down the blower, andÖíTINKí...an event occurred that will become known as the "stud incident" We broke a blower stud while re-installing the blower! All the while Chris Blair was watching over us and wanting us in the lanes pretty mught ASAP! So, we rip the blower back off, replace the broken blower stud, and get to the lanes with zero time to spare. While Chris was watching over us in the pits, he used the all powerful walkie talkie to re-arrange the run schedules to give us a little extra time. And special thanks to the other FM/FC racers, who did their part to give us as much time as possible...it was true sportsmanship at it's best!

As soon as we finally get into the lanes...more RAIN!

The rain clears and we head back to run round 2. All the while wondering if we got it right when we put the motor back together. We had all 14 hands on that motor at the same time...did all the bolts get tight? Did we leave anything inside? How did the other headgasket look? We roll out and Batemen ends up breaking on the burnout. We were going to the final with a single. With my usual lack of confidence I was praying that Dan would just idle down the track and save the motor. Nope, he hammers it and runs a 5.99! We earned that round win. We were going to the final baby! The motor looked good, we serviced the car, Dan tuned it, and we ran a great final with Russ Parker in the other lane. Dan runs 5.92 to win the race. I'll hold back a little bit here, and also just mention that Dan cut a .412 light in the final!!! If you're a FM/FC racer, keep that in mind if you're next to him on raceday...he's got it when it counts!

I'd like to mention all the crew guys names here. I can't stress enough that this victory was earned by a lot of hard work by Dan, and these guys:

Guy Mitchell (Crew Chief)
Dick Graham (Clutch)
Brett Davis (Bottom End)
Scott Davis (General helper)
Adam McGlone (General helper/Golf Cart driver)

Later,
Dave Loney quarter_miler@hotmail.com
86 Buick T-Type 10.491 @ 127.7