As Drag Illustrated celebrates its 20th anniversary and approaches the milestone 200th issue in 2026, we’re diving into the archives and republishing some of favorite features from 190-plus issues of the magazine. This cover story by Ian Tocher on John DeFlorian, who recently earned the 2025 JHG NHRA Mountain Motor Pro Stock world championship, is from DI #76 in April/May of 2013.
John DeFlorian Jr. rolled into Gateway Motorsports Park last summer, his home away from home just across the mighty Mississippi from St. Louis, knowing it could be a special weekend.
New to the American Drag Racing League’s Extreme Pro Stock (XPS) class after years of on-again-off-again campaigning in Pro Nitrous, DeFlorian had qualified number one at the previous two events in Bristol, Tennessee, and Reading, Pennsylvania. Though no one doubted his performances, DeFlorian definitely wanted to prove he could do it again; that they were no flukes; that he and his team commanded the respect accorded to frontrunners of the naturally aspirated, mountain-motor class.
Of course DeFlorian would never put it that way. His friendly and humble—though somewhat excitable—personality would never allow for that; but his competitive fires were burning bright and an analytical mind honed over 35 years of racing had been working overtime in the weeks leading up to the race.
There were other factors at hand, too. The ADRL race was Gateway’s comeback event under new ownership after being unceremoniously shuttered a year earlier. DeFlorian had been racing at the track since 1977 when he was just 16-years old, beginning as a bracket racer and advancing through the ranks to nitrous Pro Mod, all the while serving as foreman at the Jerry Haas Race Cars (JHRC) shop in Fenton, Missouri, making him a familiar figure on the St. Louis drag racing scene. And racing so close to his Arnold, Missouri, home guaranteed that come race day DeFlorian’s pit would be teeming with a virtual parade of friends, family members and eager well wishers who simply remembered him from back in the day.
Beyond all that, though, DeFlorian was excited because of the weather. He’d been keeping an eye on local atmospheric conditions and liked what he saw.
“I watched the weather for almost a month and we were in this pattern of highs and lows; real hot weather, then dips down and it would get real cool,” he recalls. DeFlorian describes going to a car dealership near the track to put his race car on display about a week before the event and even before noon, temperatures had soared to nearly 100 degrees.
“My crew guy David (Koch) and I were there, just dying, because we had to unload the car by ourselves and we were sweating like dogs and that’s when somebody asked me if I hated it being this hot, this early. And I said no, actually I’m pretty excited.
“They looked at me as if I was out of my mind, but I said, ‘Yeah, I’m excited because if this works out the way it looks, by next weekend we’ll have some good weather for going fast.’ I was thinking good weather might be 80, 85 degrees, which would have been good—never dreaming that we were going to see what we actually had.”
Thursday, the day before qualifying began for the 2012 Gateway Drags IV, DeFlorian and his teammates arrived at the track in a driving rainstorm. When the rain finally stopped the temperature dropped, sending crewmembers and fans alike scrambling to find their hoodies and sweatshirts. DeFlorian didn’t care. He had been watching the barometer the last couple of weeks and knew it had shown consistently high pressure and he expected the same even after the bad weather front rolled through.
That night, still under a misty, drizzly rain, DeFlorian was out at 10:30 walking the race track. He often does that on race weekends in order to get a close-up look at the racing surface and try to develop a feel for where he might need to be on the track to make good runs. “I was out there with a buddy of mine and said to him that just based on the weather, it’s going to be fast, really fast. We just kind of knew at that point.”
Ambient conditions for Friday’s opening qualifying session confirmed DeFlorian’s expectations: mid-60s on the thermometer, 29.47 inches on the barometer and by sheer luck of the draw he made his first pass in the preferred left lane, covering the Gateway eighth mile in a record-setting 4.035 seconds at an also-unprecedented 179.28 miles per hour.
DeFlorian and his guys were stoked. If anyone didn’t realize it before, they knew it now; this team was for real.
It would get better, too; though DeFlorian says he “screwed up driving” in his second pass that day, missing a shift point by a hundred RPM or so and delivering “only” a 4.07 at 177.84 that actually backed up his previous run within the required one percent for the official class speed record. But he wanted the elapsed time mark, too—plus the 50-point bonus it promised.
As Friday evening’s session loomed DeFlorian liked what his weather station and experience were saying—not to mention he couldn’t wait to get back in that left lane. And the wait paid off, as he blasted to a 4.018-seconds pass at 179.92 mph, setting an ET record that remains in place nearly a year later.
“When I left the starting line, it felt like somebody kicked me in the ass,” he recalls. “It left so hard, harder than I ever left before; I knew it in the seat and I was like, ‘Wow, that was awesome!’
“The shift light’s on and I’m consciously thinking in the car that was quick, and before I knew it I hardly got it shifted and the lights back on! Second and then third; holy smoke, I put it in fourth gear because it’s coming so fast and I put it in fifth, and I’m thinking that’s got to be a good run. I was thinking another .03, maybe even an .02 if we’re lucky. It felt so good and so quick on the shifts, everything was right; I could just feel it in the car.
“So I put the clutch in, shut it off, and take a quick look at the scoreboard,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it said 4.01; I was in the car, talking to myself—I do that a lot anyway—and I’m just screaming. I’m pretty sure when I got to the end of the track that the track guys and safety crew were thinking there’s something wrong with that guy because he’s screaming like he’s on fire.”
In truth, it was simply the day that John DeFlorian Jr. became an Extreme Pro Stock driver and put his Pro Nitrous past to rest.
DeFlorian loved nitrous racing. He’d done it for years on his own dime, eventually graduating to ADRL competition in 2006 with a sharp-looking ’06 Corvette—a Haas car, of course—and despite sometimes sporadic attendance he represented himself well over the next couple of ADRL seasons, usually qualifying and going a round or two here and there, though never really posing a true threat to the Jenkins and Castellanas and Halseys of the Pro Nitrous world. Still, as a longtime competitor and hands-on fabricator with one of the nation’s premier chassis builders, no one doubted DeFlorian’s knowledge or talents; nor his dedication to the sport.
But dedication doesn’t pay for diesel fuel or race car parts. Though he had the car, DeFlorian was financially forced to team up with other racers just to put an engine under the hood; first with Thomas and Rebecca Myers in 2008, then with Michael Bankston and his Bankston Boyz team the following year.
“With Thomas and Rebecca, they allowed me to run one of their motors so they could try and sell it, which is ultimately what happened, but because of that I was able to be at the race track and Mike (Bankston) saw that I was making a real commitment, almost at all costs, just to be there. He later told me that had made a big impression on him and was a big factor in making him decide to go ahead and work with me,” DeFlorian says.
Throughout 2009, DeFlorian raced as a teammate to his good friend and Bankston’s other driver, Tim Savell, and later alongside Stan Allen, too, enjoying his greatest success in the class to that point with several top-half-of-the-field qualifying runs and late-round appearances in eliminations. A win seemed just around the corner for DeFlorian at the time, and it was all going pretty much according to plan until race day in July 2010 at Heartland Park-Topeka. DeFlorian’s time in Pro Nitrous ran out in 4.92 seconds.
“Unfortunately the motor broke pretty bad in the first round there and Mike’s business was in a bit of a downturn then, so he decided he just couldn’t afford to keep three cars going and ended up selling that motor, which kind of drew that deal to an end,” DeFlorian says. “No hard feelings, that’s just the way it goes sometimes.”
Sidelined, a half year later DeFlorian did something he never thought he would; he sold the Corvette.
“A guy I knew in Michigan called and asked if I would consider selling him the car,” he explains. “I told him no, but he called again a little while later and by then I still didn’t have any new prospects so I said that maybe I would and the next thing I know he’s down at our shop with his trailer and I’m pushing the car into it all the while thinking, what the heck am I doing?
“It was a pretty sobering moment really, because for the first time in my life since I was a teenager I was without a race car. It was a weird feeling because I realized then that maybe I was done; maybe I was never going to race again, or at least not at a professional level, so it was kind of a hard thing to deal with.”
DeFlorian, 52, remembers dejectedly telling fiancée LiAnn Byington that he’d probably have to satisfy his racing itch vicariously from then on, helping customers get their cars down the race track. That wasn’t going to be good enough, however, for Kevin Bealko, whom DeFlorian had met and befriended in 2009, when the coal mining executive from Bridgeport, West Virginia, was having his Top Sportsman car’s chassis upgraded at JHRC for the leap up to XPS competition.
“From the day we met John in Haas’ shop, we just kind of clicked,” Bealko recalls. “I remember thinking here was a guy who was very sharp and knew the racing business and what he wanted to do in it, so when I learned he wasn’t racing anymore it just didn’t seem right to me.”
After making several ADRL appearances in 2009 and 2010 with his ex-Dave Connolly ’05 Cobalt, Bealko contracted Haas to build a new Pontiac GXP for the 2011 season, which he continues to compete with in XPS. Again, DeFlorian was heavily involved in the car’s construction, as was his veteran crew chief, Dan Hellmer, who also works at JHRC.
The relationship with Haas had provided Bealko, who races with his brothers Rob, Larry and Ben on the Black Diamond Motorsports team, a perfect up-close opportunity to see DeFlorian and Hellmer work together both at the shop and at the track in Pro Nitrous during the first few races of the 2010 season. The brothers agreed they liked the way DeFlorian also demonstrated a family-first attitude and all supported Bealko’s notion in mid-2011 to add him as a full-fledged member to their team.
For DeFlorian it seemed beyond generous when Bealko suggested they build a new car together, which DeFlorian would own, while Black Diamond provided the drivetrain. “He even gave me the option of staying in Pro Nitrous or coming over and becoming a Pro Stock racer with him. I mean, who does that?” DeFlorian asks, a tinge of marvel still in his voice even today.
“It’s simple; if it weren’t for Kevin and his wife, Karen, I’d be parked,” he states. “Let’s be honest, it looked pretty bleak as far as me being able to go out and race again. I was really in doubt.”
Though admittedly difficult to turn away from nitrous racing, after speaking with Byington and Hellmer, who both encouraged him to give XPS a try, DeFlorian says he reached the decision he thought would bring the most benefit to the most people involved.
“I agonized over leaving Pro Nitrous because it really felt like I had unfinished business over there,” he admits. “We had some pretty decent success, made it to a couple of semi-finals, but not at the level we could have if given the right financial resources. But after talking with LiAnn and Dan and thinking about it a lot, I thought the time was right to try something new. And I’m so thankful I did. I’ve told those guys numerous times that I was glad they pushed this deal toward doing it as Pro Stock, because that was the best thing we could have done.”
Essentially, DeFlorian owns the car, his race rig, and brings his own crew to the track, while Bealko provides an 825-cubic-inch Sonny’s Chevy hemi engine backed up by a Lenco transmission outfitted with a Ram clutch and Liberty shifter. It’s very similar to the combination Bealko’s GXP carries, though he’s made the switch to EFI this year.
Bealko insists he didn’t hold a strong preference for which class DeFlorian entered, but admits his brothers and crew members were hopeful it would be Extreme Pro Stock in order for them to gain additional data at each event.
“Of course we’re all pretty happy that John elected to go in the direction he did,” Bealko says. “He already knew all the Pro Stock racers from building so many of their cars with Haas, and Dan is just excellent when it comes to setting up cars, so it was good to get all that knowledge and experience to help us expand our own performance with the GXP.”
DeFlorian made his Extreme Pro Stock debut with his new car, one of the first of the new-generation Camaros created for the class, at the 2012 ADRL season opener in Houston, four months after beginning construction the previous November. “It’s pretty much a standard Haas car that I actually built at the shop during the day,” he says. “It was kind of an unusual situation to be able to do that, on shop time; the other car I always had to work on at night and on weekends.”
The Camaro performed solidly from the start, with DeFlorian qualifying 13th his first time out at the Houston event and it improved from there. The number-one starts at Bristol and Reading followed and though he wasn’t able to back up his record-setting performance at St. Louis with the event title, that career-first ADRL win came just two races later at Martin, Michigan.
“You know, (current back-to-back XPS champion) Cary Goforth told me last year that he felt like the hardest win to get was the first one, but once you got past that hump they’re still difficult and hard to come by, but they somehow seem to become more obtainable,” DeFlorian says. “I guess it’s the confidence you get with that first win where you feel like, okay, we can do this and we can win these races. That’s how we felt after finally getting that win up in Martin.”
Of course there were a few hiccups along the way, too; a couple of first-round exits and a DNQ at Richmond come to mind, but DeFlorian is quick to suggest driver error in his XPS rookie campaign played no insignificant role in whatever setbacks his team may have endured. However, if this season’s start is at all indicative of how it may finish, driver error may not even come into consideration.
At the ADRL’s Dragpalooza IX in Rockingham, North Carolina, the series’ first race of the year, DeFlorian posted no worse than a .033 reaction time through four rounds of racing on his way to the event win. And it was much the same just a couple of weeks later in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in the debut event for the upstart X-treme Drag Racing League, DeFlorian repeated his race-winning ways.
“To be honest, to win the first race of the season exceeded my expectations,” DeFlorian admits. “We go to the races with the intention of winning; otherwise there’s no reason to go, but to actually get a win is extremely difficult to achieve because these races are tough. You cannot go in with that expectation because you win and lose races by thousandths of a second. That could be a car performance issue; it could be a driver performance issue; it could be just plain bad luck.
“So getting that first win was really special. And then to come back around and get a second win was just beyond my wildest dreams. I really never dreamed of winning back to back. The confidence level for the whole team just skyrocketed.”
This represents just one more benefit to going the Extreme Pro Stock route for DeFlorian. He realizes had he remained in Pro Nitrous, the level of camaraderie and cooperation between his and Bealko’s crew members might never be so strong.
“With all of us working on both cars, the cars being very similar, almost identical, there are a lot of rewards. Not the least of which being that when we do get to the winner’s circle, I want everybody up there with me and in the pictures. I want everybody to be a part of that and celebrate, because it’s a lot of hard work on everybody’s part to make that happen,” he stresses.
“These guys work very hard, it doesn’t matter which car they work on. They deserve that right. They deserve that opportunity to be up there and have the pictures and the accolades that go along with it. The drivers, to be honest, get all the attention and the glory. The guys behind the scene don’t. People don’t know who they are for the most part. They don’t get the fans wanting their autographs. But those guys in the pits, they make it happen for the drivers. The drivers wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing without them. So I am adamant about everybody being up there.”
“This is a team,” he emphasizes. “One team, two cars; that’s our mission statement going into this race season, that’s what this is.”
To that end, DeFlorian has made it one of his goals in 2013 to put Bealko into a winner’s circle of his own, or at least into a final round where the Black Diamond teammates can settle the race between themselves. “First we have to get his car performing at the level of the Camaro in order for us to qualify one and two,” he says. “That way we don’t have to worry about running each other until we make it to the final.”
The ADRL event at Rockingham also delivered another milestone performance for DeFlorian when he became the first mountain-motor Pro Stock driver to power through the 180-mph barrier over an eighth mile. He’d nearly turned the trick during the heroics at Gateway last summer and almost again with an oh-so-close 179.95-mph pass in qualifying number one at the ADRL season ender at Dallas in October, so the potential definitely remained.
After waiting patiently through the off season and heading into Rockingham, knowing its reputation as a fast track, DeFlorian says he was again glued to the weather reports—and liked what he saw. He also knew, though, that there were other XPS teams equally intent on being the first to 180 and he’d need a little luck to beat them to it.
He got it when ADRL President Kenny Nowling pulled his car number in a random drawing to determine lanes and run order for the first round of qualifying at “The Rock.” DeFlorian would run in the second pair alongside Trevor Eman after Lester Cooper and Scott Hintz opened the session. With none of those three likely to be contenders for the prize, it essentially became DeFlorian’s to win or lose.
“It couldn’t have worked out any better. I’ll tell you the truth, when we were standing there in the drivers’ meeting I was holding my breath when he (Nowling) made the draw and called my name,” DeFlorian says. “For once I was actually happy to go early because usually you like to be at least a few cars back in the pack to get a judgment of what the track’s doing.”
As it turned out, the track was just fine, as was the weather with an overcast 64 degrees, 29.82 on the barometer and corrected altitude of less than 650 feet. It all translated into a near-record 4.025-seconds pass at the desired 180.26 miles per hour. That early run proved significant, too, as Richard Penland put 180.02 up on the Rockingham scoreboard in the very next pair and Goforth ran 180.14 as the final car in the session. No one, including DeFlorian, reached the 180 mark again all weekend.
“That was a super special thing for us because we really worked hard to make that happen,” DeFlorian says. “Fortunately we were able to back the record up and it held for the weekend, too. I think it’ll be a barrier that will be hard to break again, but it’s there. All these cars are making lots of power and they can run it. It just has to be the right conditions and the right combination of car and setup and it’ll happen. But we did it first and we’re really proud of that and very thankful. Now we can set our sights on that first three-second run.”
There’s a certain swagger to John DeFlorian that wasn’t there not so long ago, certainly not in his Pro Nitrous days. It comes with knowing each time he rolls through the gates for an ADRL or X-DRL event that he has a car to beat, that he’s going to be a threat to win, maybe even set a record or two along the way. Quiet confidence might actually be a better way to describe DeFlorian’s XPS state of mind, but he’s not shy about enjoying the advantages that being among the best in class brings.
“To be honest, it makes you feel great; just knowing the other guys are gunning for you, that’s exactly what it does,” he says. “Obviously, the driver, your confidence level is extremely high. You feel like you can take on the world. But the fact is that your confidence is up and the other drivers are now aware of the consistency of your car and how fast it really is, so it causes them to get out of their comfort zones and race in a way they’re maybe not used to. It actually gives you an advantage because you know they’re going to do something they don’t normally do and a lot of times it means they’ll get too aggressive against you.
“So that’s kind of where we’re at now,” he continues. “We’re confident and the car is running well and we feel we are a legit threat to win some races, which we’ve been working hard at to become. And getting these first two wins under our belt just makes us that much more confident. But there’s a big difference between confident and cocky. We’re not cocky by any means because we know how quickly this stuff can go away.”
In other words, DeFlorian has the advantage of time and experience stacked up behind him. Not only has he been racing on his own for decades, but through his role at Haas he’s rubbed shoulders with countless racers big and small, seen their fears and follies come to life, seen fortunes spent and lives ruined. He also knows, intimately, the hard work and sacrifice it requires on practically all levels of the drag racing plain, but especially among the pros, to excel and reap the rewards of success. He knows what it takes.
“I’ve been very fortunate over my career of racing. I’ve had a lot of highs and a lot of lows, but the one thing that’s been very good for me is I went through those challenging times before I got to this level of racing and it made me humble and also very grateful when the times are good and everything is going well and you’re winning rounds and races,” DeFlorian says.
“I always tell the guys let’s hold onto this; let’s relish it because it doesn’t last; we have to enjoy this moment while it’s here because it won’t be here forever. It’ll disappear and we’ll have to go back to working hard again and hopefully it will come back, but there’s no guarantee.”
For now, though, DeFlorian declares he’s “having an absolute blast” going through what he calls “one of the best times I’ve ever had in my racing career.” Then, just as emphatically, just as sincerely, he gives all the credit to Kevin Bealko and his wife, Karen.
“They have made my dream a reality. That is the truth,” DeFlorian says. “They put me back in racing again. They are my saviors. They saved my life in this racing deal. I could never thank them enough.
“On top of it all, they’re great people and we are great friends. We became really, really close friends long before we ever discussed this whole two-car thing and that’s a special situation there because it wasn’t like this was a business of us teaming up together to go race. It was friendship, a great friendship. Kevin said, ‘You should be racing; you’re a good person and a good racer and a good driver. You need to be back in the seat so what do we need to do to make that happen?’
“Kevin gave me this opportunity to open the door and the rest is history, but there’s a lot more history to be written—and we’re going to be writing it together—as a team.”
The post DI CLASSIC: John DeFlorian’s New Life in Extreme Pro Stock first appeared on Drag Illustrated.