Nitro Dogs Racing

Tim Wilkerson may not have won the POWERade world championship, but if there were a people’s champ, he’d surely wear the crown.

Tim Wilkerson came into the 2008 NHRA season with five victories and left the season with 11. He entered the campaign having just come off a 15th-place finish in 2007 but finished the 2008 season in second place after a storybook run. To all who were witnessing this remarkable “arrival,” the Levi, Ray & Shoup driver seemed fully capable of turning everything around, including the startling ability to erase the memory of seven DNQs from the year before by recording absolutely none in 2008. He also improved his round record from a pedestrian 14-16 in 2007 to an astounding 42-18 this year, a mark no other Funny Car driver could match. In the end, though, it was the final day and the ever-so-close but narrowly missed chance at a championship that far too many people remember.

Having spent most of the season leading the Funny Car points chase, Wilkerson entered the Countdown to the Championship knowing full well what the rules were and how they worked. By virtue of his first-place standing after the regular season, he began the Countdown at the top, but his lead was cut to 30 POWERade points, and the nine other drivers on his tail had once again picked up the scent. It was not going to be easy, especially for a driver who had never finished higher than seventh in the standings and had no experience with the breathtaking pressure of a real championship run, but as Wilkerson saw it, nothing is ever easy in one of the world’s most challenging sports, and there’s no reason to look back with any regrets.

“It’s all hard, every day against every team,” Wilkerson said. “You don’t get any free passes, and no one takes it easy on you. We’ve seen the hardest of the hard times, just trying to qualify, or sometimes even trying to break a streak of multiple DNQs, but we came into the year thinking we were better. It turns out, we were better, and we had a great year. I’m not going to waste a minute of my time wishing anything different. It would’ve been a dream come true to win it, but we didn’t, so now the dream is still there.

“But like I said, it’s a dogfight out there every week. If you want to know how tough it is, just look at our first two races this year, where we had a fast car and qualified at the top in both Pomona and

Phoenix, but we lost in the first round at each race. It almost didn’t matter where you qualified this year because all 16 cars in the field could win.”

Wilkerson and his team won six times in 2008, captured four No. 1 qualifying spots, and led the points battle for 15 races.

Wilkerson headed to

Gainesville, the third race on the trail, with every possible qualifying point in the bank, thanks to the pair of No. 1 spots, but his 0-2 record left him far down the overall list. A semifinal finish in Gainesville got him on a roll, and his first win of the year soon followed in

Las Vegas. Two races later, in front of a throng of Levi, Ray & Shoup supporters in

Madison, he won again. By the season’s final race, six new Wally trophies were on the mantel, but Wilkerson had slipped one round behind the red-hot Cruz Pedregon, and the 10-month battle was coming to a head. No one was more disappointed, and certainly no one felt more reponsible than Wilkerson after his first-round foul knocked him out of contention. Through 24 races and 10 long months, it had all come down to the last day, and this time the underdog missed the bone.”Was it the lowest point in the year? I guess you have to say that Sunday in

Pomona was the lowest point, but only because we had been so high for so long,” the LRS driver said. “We were living in rare air all season, breaking new ground just about every week, so losing in the first round, and losing like that, felt pretty awful. Looking back over my career, a first-round loss has always been disappointing, at anytime and especially with a red-light, but it was just the circumstances that made it worse this time. But let’s face it, you have to have done an awful lot of things right for a long time to even be a part of a lap that means as much as that one did. Whatever sport you’re talking about, you can’t lose in the final game of the playoffs without playing great to get there, and you can’t forget that you played great to be in that spot.

“I’m just taking the time to remember why it was so important, not how it ended up. It was that important because so many people pitched in and made it the season it was. From the crew guys to my family, from Dick Levi to all the people at Levi, Ray & Shoup, who followed us and supported us all year, this was a group effort. As a group, we had a heck of a year, and I bet a lot of other teams would trade places with us if they could. You can’t dwell on that one last lap; you have to remember it all, and it was a great experience. It didn’t end up like we wanted, but it sure gave us all a taste for it, and we want to try it again.”

In today’s Funny Car landscape, it’s hard to imagine that any driver will ever again embark on the sort of dominating juggernaut that John Force put on display throughout the 1990s, when he won nine of the 10 possible crowns. Today’s class is far more evenly competitive, and the weekly challenge of simply getting qualified often seems as daunting as round-wins did a few years ago. That high-performance parity makes the points chase a huge undertaking, but confidence nearly always has to be a part of the tune-up.

“We had all kinds of reasons to not be confident after 2007, when we finished 15th and missed seven shows,” Wilkerson said. “But we knew we were finally getting a handle on it at the end of the year when we went to three semifinals in the last stretch of the season. We weren’t stumbling around like we had been earlier, so that gave us some confidence. We carried a lot of that over to this year, but losing in the first round at those first two races tested us again. You have to get that first round in the bank before you can ever win a race, and it’s not easy. Once you get through that and start knowing that you have a fast car and can do some damage, the confidence goes up.

“We all talk about how these cars can’t feel anything and shouldn’t react to things like confidence, but man, they sure act like they know what’s going on. Once you get on a little bit of a roll and start throwing some good numbers on the board, you get more willing to press it a little, and the car seems to cooperate while at the same time the guys in the other lane know you’ve been running well, and maybe they lean on it a little too hard. For whole stretches of the season, that can build up, and the rounds just start piling up. It’s pretty interesting how that works. It’s like winning is contagious, and we know from experience that losing is too. You just have to believe in what you’re doing.”

That belief was the foundation for Wilkerson’s success all season. As the owner, driver, and tuner for the LRS car, he bore an extremely large percentage of the weight, knowing his responsibilities were enormous while some other drivers simply signed autographs, packed the parachutes, and waited for the next lap. When you’re multitasking at Wilkerson’s level, you have to believe in your judgment and the people around you.

“You have to surround yourself with competent and trustworthy people, and you have to rely on them to put things together right and make sure things aren’t falling off the car,” Wilkerson said. “We have a really good team right now, and they not only have great chemistry, they do the work right too. If you look back over just about any team’s season, you’ll see rounds handed away by mechanical stuff that shouldn’t happen. We’ve all lived through it, and we’ve seen it happen to the very best. This team kept that sort of thing to the bare minimum, though, so when we lost, we usually just flat got beat. We rarely beat ourselves.”

In retrospect, it was a season of incredible highs, sustained performance, and terrific accomplishment, but the period on the end of the sentence left the story incomplete. Wilkerson and his team earned multiple stripes and sincere accolades for months on end and put themselves through the process of learning how to compete and win at the highest level with the most on the line. It didn’t end as they wished, but they are far better off for having been to the summit, and Wilkerson is sure the lessons learned are important.

“I guess I have an even greater appreciation for the guys who have won the championship because the demands and the changes that happen to you are real, and it’s hard to deal with it all,” he said. “As it gets down to the wire, the tension changes your sleep patterns, and you have to really work at being sharp. When you’re in the hunt, more people want more of your time, and that’s understandable because you’re part of the big story, but my time has always been pretty hard to come by anyway, so that was something I had to learn to deal with. I guess you can tell people ‘It’s just another race and we’re going about it the same way’ all you want, but I learned that the truth is it’s really different, and you have to adjust. I think we’ll all be better making the adjustments next time, if we’re lucky enough to have a next time. At least we’ve been down this path once now.

“We didn’t win the championship, and that not only hurts inside all of us, it really hurts in the bank account too, but we’re going to come out firing again in 2009, and I think we’ll be a better team because of all of this. Don’t get me wrong, there are about 16 other Funny Car teams that all think, and really believe, that they’ll come out strong and can win the championship next year. I think they’re right to think that way, too, because look at what we did. I don’t have a clue who will win this thing next year, or any year after that, but I know we’ll be doing our best to win every round we enter. If we’re as good as we can be, we’ll be right there. That’s kind of the beauty of it, really, because you just have to go out there and do it. At least now we’ve been right in it and gotten close, so I think we’ll have that in our pocket next time.”

It’s true that you have to go out there and do it, but the LRS team knows that the final missed step was only there because hundreds of others had been successfully negotiated. It is truly a long climb to the mountaintop, but Wilkerson has now blazed one trail and is already busy preparing to make another ascent.