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Mike Salinas wins the Top Fuel class for the fourth time this season in his dragster at the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio on June 26.
Mike Salinas became a regular in the Camping World NHRA Drag Racing Series in 2018.
If he wins in Denver this weekend or at Sonoma a week later, Mike Salinas will celebrate by treating himself to vanilla bean ice cream.
Five-time Pro Stock Motorcycle champion Matt Smith is looking for title number six and will be at Sonoma Raceway on July 22-24 after racing at Bandimere Speedway.
At an age when most race car drivers have retired from the sport to count their championship trophies, Mike Salinas is having a banner year that could lead to his first Top Fuel championship in the Camping World NHRA Drag Racing Series.
As the series heads to Bandimere Speedway in Denver this weekend to begin the second half of its season with the grueling three-week Western Swing, the 61-year-old driver from San Jose has already claimed four overall final round wins, more than his total wins in nearly the previous 10 years of racing.
Salinas, who welcomed his first grandchild into the family a week ago, admits he got a late start in racing even though he watched his dad race at local dragstrips, such as Fremont Raceway, when he was a kid. His first years in NHRA were part-time as he continued to run a metal recycling business, Scrappers Recycling, that he began at age 15 and has grown into a business empire that includes six other enterprises.
“I love to work,” Salinas admitted in a recent interview. “But I had an office manager who drag raced and who told me I should take some time off and do something fun.”
After watching her race, Salinas earned his Top Fuel license in 2009 and slowly built a race team that is now a full-time operation based in Indianapolis.
Over the last few years, Salinas hired two of the best crew chiefs in the business, Alan Johnson and Brian Huston. The pair organized his Scrappers Racing team and their work led to a third-place finish in the final Top Fuel standings last year. Ironically, the team is having more success this year after both crew chiefs left for other teams.
Salinas is quick to credit both crew chiefs for the expertise and the organization they brought to his team and explained that it takes many years of work to have the banner year he is enjoying.
“I learned that crew chiefs are important, but the crew they leave behind is even more important,” he said.
Salinas said a good team in drag racing is no different than a good team in any other sport. Every member of the crew has a role to play and they all communicate to work as a team to keep the focus on winning, no different than the Golden State Warriors running a fast break.
Pistons and rods are replaced faster than your local corner gas station can do an oil change, while another crew member is changing a clutch that, at 2,200 degrees, is as hot as a volcanic rock.
“You can see it when they tear the car down between rounds,” Salinas said. “They have discipline and they are meticulous and nobody talks because they know what to do. They don’t make mistakes and that’s why the car is so consistent and why we are winning.”
Salinas emphasized that teamwork is as much about chemistry as it is mechanical skill.
“These guys have been together for seven years,” he said. “Some of them live together, we all work together, and we hang out together.”
Salinas believes that team-building is critical. To celebrate a win earlier this year in Bristol, Tenn., Salinas bought each crew member a new Harley Davidson motorcycle. As a team, they will ride to a big motorcycle gathering in Sturgis, S.D. after the race in Seattle and then fly to Indianapolis, where one of the crew will be getting married.
The team also involves everyone in making decisions about setting up the Top Fuel machine that Salinas drives, making new crew chief Rob Flynn more of an orchestra conductor than a dictator.
“Everybody’s eyes are better than one set of eyes, so everybody sees the spreadsheets, including the clutch specialist, the tire specialist, and the right-side and left-side cylinder head specialists,” said Salinas, in a sport that compiles as much data as a rocket launch each time the car makes a run.
Salinas said the crew’s performance gives him confidence as a driver, knowing he doesn’t have to worry about mistakes that can lead to catastrophic breakdowns.
“I drive the car exactly the same in every run,” he said.
That is easier said than done, however. A Top Fuel dragster produces 11,000 horsepower and accelerates to 334 miles an hour in about 3.5 seconds while travelling 1,000 feet, before also needing to stop. Both the go and the stop produce more g-forces than a space shuttle and more than 100 times what the average person feels in an airliner on take-off, while cockpit temperatures can reach 160 degrees.
So while the crew prepares the car in the team’s Indianapolis shop, Salinas preps himself for the physical stresses of essentially driving a fighter jet on the ground with a workout at 5:30 every morning that includes 400 sit-ups, 400 push-ups, 50 or more pull-ups, plus some ab work and stretching, before heading to the office for his workday.
“A Top fuel car is very violent, but I have to relax and be calm in the car,” said Salinas, who stands a bit over 5 feet tall and weighs 147 pounds.
“Since I’ve been working out, I feel good and my mind is sharp,” he said.
He is being chased in the standings by Steve Torrence of Texas, who has 55 career victories and has had a stranglehold on the Top Fuel title the last four years, and Brittany Force, who has three wins in 2022.
As for his chances to win the NHRA title, Salinas said simply “We have a lot of races left and we will take it one run at a time.”
And if he wins in Denver this weekend or Sonoma a week later, he will continue his personal way of celebrating. Salinas, who doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke, will treat himself to ice cream — preferably vanilla bean — before going on to the next race, taking it one run at a time.
The Camping World Drag Racing Series travels to Bandimere Speedway near Denver this weekend to begin the second half of the season with one of the toughest segments of the 22-race schedule, the Western Swing.
On three consecutive weekends, the teams will travel from Denver to Sonoma Raceway for the Denso Sonoma Nationals on July 22-24 and, for the first time since 2019, the Swing will head north to Pacific Raceway near Seattle.
The Western Swing is an opportunity for teams to generate momentum for a run to the Countdown to the Championship, but the pace is intense and the challenges couldn’t be more diverse from week to week.
“This swing is the grueling stretch, like a marathon, where we go from one climate to another and then to a third kind of weather and we hope we weather the storm,” said Top Fuel driver Antron Brown, the last racer to sweep the Western Swing.
“The air at 8-10,000 feet (elevation) is so thin that the car doesn’t want to make horsepower and there is so little downforce,” said Brown. “We have to push the car so hard (at Bandimere) but tune it so that we can get out of there without mass destruction and the bomb going off.”
By contrast, the dense air and cool temperatures at Sonoma are ideal for making maximum horsepower that puts a great strain on parts, while the environment in Seattle is somewhere in between those two extremes.
Beyond climate, the pace of racing on three consecutive weekends is exhausting for crews who don’t have the opportunity to head back to their shops and instead have to prepare cars on the road.
By the end of the Western Swing, “the crews are exhausted, and if you get through Seattle with your best parts intact, you’re ahead of the competition,” said five-time Pro Stock champion Greg Anderson.
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In a wild game that rocked Fitzgerald Field in downtown Benicia Friday night, the St. Helena Little League Junior All-Stars answered a late five-run rally by Sonoma with one of their own to win the losers bracket final of the District 53 Tournament for 13-year-olds, 11-8, and advance to Sunday's first championship game against archrival American Canyon.
The American Canyon Little League Junior All-Stars defeated St. Helena 14-4 to win its first District 53 title in the 13-year-old division since 2017 on Sunday at Benicia's Fitzgerald Field.
Brent Randol writes about people and topics related to outdoors in the Napa Valley.
St. Helena Little League's 13-year-old Junior All-Stars rallied past Sonoma 11-8 in Friday night's District 53 Tournament losers bracket final, before falling 14-4 to American Canyon in Sunday's championship game.
The Napa Valley 1839 FC men's soccer team fell in the semifinals of the National Premier Soccer League Golden Gate Conference playoffs for the second year in a row Saturday in San Francisco, 5-1 to El Farolito.
Blythe Obar’s late-night heroics ensured that Napa Valley 1839 FC wouldn’t end its inaugural Women’s Premier Soccer League campaign in disappointment as the home team salvaged a 2-2 tie against Lamorinda United at Dodd Stadium on Wednesday night.
The St. Helena Little League Major Division All-Stars came back from a two-run deficit to beat Napa National, 5-3, in the first round of the d…
Brent Randol writes about people and topics related to outdoors in the Napa Valley.
Late-night heroics by defender Paris Martins secured the Napa Valley 1839 FC men’s soccer team a National Premier Soccer League Golden Gate Conference semifinal ticket for the first time in club history with its 2-1 win over visiting FC Davis 2-1 Saturday night at Justin-Siena High School.
Mike Salinas wins the Top Fuel class for the fourth time this season in his dragster at the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio on June 26.
Mike Salinas became a regular in the Camping World NHRA Drag Racing Series in 2018.
If he wins in Denver this weekend or at Sonoma a week later, Mike Salinas will celebrate by treating himself to vanilla bean ice cream.
Five-time Pro Stock Motorcycle champion Matt Smith is looking for title number six and will be at Sonoma Raceway on July 22-24 after racing at Bandimere Speedway.
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