On the run with Jay Payne-driver of the Valvoline Chevrolet Camaro Top Alcohol Funny Car

The Alcohol Funny Car is more work, but you get to drive more with a Funny Car than you do with a dragster. It’s fun; it’s different. With a dragster, you point it and guide it along the line. With a Funny Car, every once in a while it gets out of the groove and you have to manhandle it. You can drive a dragster farther than you can drive a Funny Car. There are certain times when you have to shut off the Funny Car because it’s not going to make it. I don’t like to shut off any run, but being in a Funny Car definitely makes it more exciting for me as the driver.

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Going fast is what drag racing is all about. We raced money brackets, then Super Stock and Comp for many years before moving to Top Alcohol Dragster in 1985. Comp is one of those classes in which an index change can mean your whole engine combination must be thrown away. In Super Stock, with breakout rules, you would run down the quarter-mile, then hit the brakes. Alcohol is a heads-up class in which you work on your car and the fastest car wins (most of the time). Alcohol is where I like to be and where I have the most fun racing.

I am locked in a tight battle right now with Jim Sickles for the Division 2 points lead. Sickles is ahead, and whenever you are ahead, you are in control of your own destiny. He has a good car and three wins this year, and those three wins came at our expense; however, we haven’t run up to our full potential.

We had a few gremlins to begin the year. We had 22 runs during which we hurt the engine. We got everything turned around, and right now, performance-wise, we are back where we were during testing at the beginning of the season. The Valvoline Chevy Camaro is beginning to run much better and more consistent. My crew and the people at Valvoline and Hoosier Tires are really making an effort to put us in a good position to win the division.

My crew is an important part of my success and my ability to remain competitive. My wife, Shelly, is a tremendous asset to our team. Shelly raced in Top Fuel for years, and that experience helps me. When we are on the starting line with the engine running and they put down the body, Shelly is in charge. She watches everything. She is very thorough, and she is really good at reading the track.

Though I live in California, home of Division 7, I race in Division 2. Before they added the Las Vegas national event, we didn’t have any national events after Pomona and Phoenix on the West Coast until June. We just got tired of zigzagging back and forth across the country for national events. In 1993, we lost the national championship in TAD to Blaine Johnson by a few points - bonus points from division races. We took a map, laid out all of the races, and planned our schedule based on geography and where the points races were in comparison to the national events. That’s how we ended up in Division 2. It used to be that we would put 50,000 miles a year on our crew cab driving back and forth across the country; now we are down to about 30,000 miles. We use the extra time to work on the car instead of hauling it all around.

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