Vengeance is defined as punishment inflicted or retribution exacted for an injury or wrong.
While the Bartone Bros. Racing team wasn’t physically harmed after their 2023 season, losing the NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Car world championship evoked a strong desire for retribution. In the following season, they inscribed “2024 Vengeance Tour” on the wicker bill of their Funny Car, known as the “Pirate Ship,” serving as a constant reminder of their mission.
Determined to reclaim their status after the 2023 season’s setback, Bartone Bros. Racing came out swinging and embarked on their 2024 Vengeance Tour with Sean Bellemeur at the helm and legendary crew chief Steve Boggs leading the ship. This relentless drive propelled them to a series of record-setting victories, punctuated by wins at the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals in Las Vegas and zMAX Dragway, sweeping the four events held at Summit Motorsports Park, and the prestigious 70th annual Toyota NHRA U.S. Nationals.
Their dominance continued in Dallas, tallying the JEGS Allstars and national event wins, culminated in securing the NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series Top Alcohol Funny Car championship and also taking the crown in the NHRA North Central Region as TAFC champions, marking a perfect season that has only been achieved three times in the TAFC class.
The “Killer Bs,” as they’re often referred to, are comprised of team owner and former drag racer Tony Bartone, four-time NHRA TAFC world champion Sean Bellemeur, and renowned tuner Steve Boggs. Team members Troy Green, Nick Stoms, Justin Taylor, Garrett Bateman, Seth Shebester, Matt Krebs, and Lauren McMaster support them, consistently rowing in the same direction.
The team posted a total of 850 points in TAFC, capping off the 2024 season with their seventh national win at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip, picking up the Ford Performance NHRA Nationals victory, which was delayed from The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway two weeks prior.
Now, the Bartone Bros. Racing team is taking on a new venture in 2025 – a nitro-injected Funny Car. Bellemeur’s and Boggs’ interviews were conducted before the 2025 Mission Foods NHRA Drag Racing Season got underway (and the “Baby Gators,” where they won the TAFC Wally). However, the team had experimented with the new combination at Gainesville Raceway during a pre-season test session, and, what lit the internet ablaze, unleashed an astounding 5.288-second blast at 283.49 mph.
Full of passion and personality in their voices, Bellemeur and Boggs sat down with Drag Illustrated for an in-depth conversation about their 2024 season, what the future holds for them and alcohol drag racing, and what makes the “Killer B’s” hum.
Let’s start off talking about last season. You called it “The Vengeance Tour.” Where did all of that stem from?
Bellemeur: The foundation and motivation for 2024 started with a loss in Dallas, Texas, in 2023. It’s widely documented, the rivalry we’ve had over the years with the Gordon family, mostly before last year, Doug Gordon and myself, even dating back to my days of driving my dad’s alcohol Funny Car out west. We’ve just always thrown blows, and it’s always been a lot of fun.
So, in 2023, we were immersed in yet another very tough battle for a world championship. Talk about a day of highs and lows. About one hour before I got beat on a hole shot to lose the world championship, we had won the JEGS Allstars. It was one of those things where that round, I wasn’t late, but I got my butt kicked, and the numbers didn’t fall into place. Personally, I was embarrassed as hell. I’ve lost before. I’ve lost on hole shots. I’ve lost on red lights. I’ve lost a lot of different ways. But that one, with what was at stake – the team stepped up and I didn’t, and I took that extremely personally.
Following up from that, I had a conversation with Tony Bartone – it was more of a pep talk than a conversation. He’s an incredible motivator; he’s a hell of a leader. In fact, I think that is proven by his successes in life both on and off the racetrack. We won every race after [Dallas]. Now too little, too late to win the championship in 2023, but we had won all three races left, and so over the winter time between ’23 and ‘24 Tony came up with the term ‘The 2024 Vengeance Tour’ and all he said to his employees and his team was, look up vengeance in the dictionary and it’ll make sense.
That was our motivation leading forward, and so it was printed largely on the back of the car so each of us could be reminded of it. For myself, it stemmed back to that round in Dallas that night, and I didn’t want to feel like that again. We were out to absolutely dominate 2024. That was the goal.
Boggs: We had some bad luck in 2023, and so we ended up number two in the points, which we had won three of the prior six world championships. Doug Gordon had won the other three, so we were even at that point.
Tony came up with this idea, and so we just said, “Let’s go get them.” Everybody stuck together, and it worked out to our advantage. Last year, we did fairly well at the beginning of the year, then at the end of the year, we came on real strong again and ended up winning it in Charlotte. Actually, they didn’t even know we had won it in Charlotte. Then we went to Dallas, and [NHRA] realized that we had won it in Charlotte.
Even though you were celebrated and officially crowned in Dallas at the FallNationals, did it make the whole experience somewhat poetic after the devastating loss you experienced in 2023?
Bellemeur: Dallas holds a really special place in my heart, both good and bad. I ran my family’s junior dragster at the national championships there in 1996. That’s the first time I had been to the Texas Motorplex. I was overwhelmed by the facility just because of what it stood for, even back then.
My first-ever win in a national event came at Dallas in 2015 as a one-race deal for Tony. As special as every national event is, Billy Meyer and his team there go above and beyond. [The FallNationals] is just something special – everybody goes to it. So, for it to be poetically finished off in Dallas, that was sort of the closing of the book for me personally, on my own internal battle with the loss of 2023. Then to go and sweep Dallas and win the JEGS Allstars, win the race, win the world championship – I felt like that was our way as a team, the entire family that is Bartone Brothers Racing, that was our way to get closure on the heartbreak of the year before.
When you started winning in 2024, did you think about the possibility of winning your fourth championship, or did you just keep your head down and stay focused?
Bellemeur: We let NHRA count the points. That’s not our job; that’s theirs. I’m so blessed to be with a group of individuals who are used to winning. They know what it takes to win, the focus, and the daily goals that it takes to be successful. We remind each other in the pits, at dinner and breakfast, and even away from the racetrack that our job is to turn on win lights.
We have a saying here, and that is, if we win everything, then nobody else can win anything. If we win everything, they’re going to hand us a big trophy at the end of the year. It’s an important way to look at it because when you start getting out of your routine and when you start thinking about things other than the task at hand, that’s when mistakes get made. That’s when you start making yourself vulnerable to the competition.
My guys don’t tell me about them because I asked them not to, but maybe some of my guys have a better idea of points when it starts coming down the stretch there. But in the end, we all remind each other that our job right now is to turn on a win light, and if we would turn on this win light, our job in an hour and a half is to turn on another win light. Then we just kind of let the points fall.
Can you explain your performance increase from 2023 to 2024 without giving away any secrets?
Boggs: I can tell you I know what I changed. In 2023, we did good at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year, but in the middle of the year, when the tracks would get hot, I had the car too hopped up, I’m going to say, for the first 60 feet. We were either heroes or zeros.
So when we got in the middle of the year and we got in the heat, I tried to fix it a little bit in ’23. In ’24, we started out, and we got a couple hot conditions. I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to slow this car down in the 60 foot, and we had enough power after 60 foot.
I said, ‘When the tracks are killer, I look like a hero. ’ Then I said, ‘When these tracks get hot, I think I’m backing off, but I’m not backing off enough.’ I fixed one thing. You can fix it with gear ratio. You can fix it with ignition timing. You can fix it with clutch. You can fix it with a fuel system. I’m not going to mention which one of them, but I took one of those categories, and I said, ‘I am going to soften this car up,’ and there were times where we could have run maybe one-hundredth or two quicker. But first of all, the win light is not at the 60-foot – it’s at the finish line. They don’t give you the trophy for the quickest 60-foot.
Sometimes you just got to say to yourself, you’re trying to be too aggressive all the time, back off. I backed it down, and we ran maybe a hundredth to a hundredth and a half slower in 60 foot, but it almost went down the track every time when there wasn’t some other malfunction.
How did winning your fourth championship compare to the first or any of the others?
Bellemeur: I would put it number one, and the reason for that, gosh, what a special thing to get to say… “compare it to your other championships”. I’m a kid who just got to dream of driving a Funny Car, let alone have the kind of success we’ve had. It’s been nothing short of a dream come true.
When I joined the team full-time in 2018, they had a reputable team. I was just kind of the new guy to step in and drive, and we did very, very well. But it was one of those things where it was just like, okay, this is the way we’re going to run the car in 2018. We did, and we won the championship.
In 2019, we had a couple of personnel changes, and we still kind of had that role. It’s kind of funny – I feel like 2024 was an A++, and 2019 was just an A. All my life, I would’ve killed to have had an A season. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but in ’19, we were good enough to win the championship, but we were not perfect.
In 2021 – COVID – that was a weird season. Not to take anything away from any champions that won during those COVID years, but I just kind of feel like there’s an asterisk next to them, and that’s just my personal opinion.
2024 was the best team I had ever had, the best equipment we’d ever had; the car was absolutely flawless. We worked through a couple of mechanical issues toward the middle and end of 2023. We knew going in that we had something special in 2024.
Then, there was that same old chip on our shoulder. That deal in Dallas, I’m telling you, was a monumentous event in the book that is Bartone Bros. Racing. It’s that all the equipment had to be ready, the tune-up had to be ready, the team had to be ready, Steve and I had to be ready, and we were all ready. And that’s why I think 2024 was so special. It was by far my proudest season. I felt like it was the season that I consistently drove the best throughout the year, and Steve made the car fast everywhere we went, which is nothing new to him, but we were consistently fast. Nobody wanted to race us.
The other side of that was I had a new rival in Maddi Gordon, and with her being the new kid, I wanted to show her a thing or two. They’re coming hard, and she’s talented, and the car is there, but I wanted to prove that I wasn’t done yet. So all of that together, 2024 was a special, special season. The team itself made it even more special, the personnel, and it just all fell into place. It was one of those years that had a big bow wrapped around it.
Boggs: Well, when you’re 81 years old, you know you don’t have many left. But when you think you should’ve won some of the others years but didn’t because of this or that, this was just icing on the cake. It was just a special year to win the championship. Everybody did a good job – everybody contributed. Nothing is one person. I have people ask me, ‘How do you win a championship?’ I said, ‘Let me tell you, first of all, you got to have a good driver, a good crew chief and a good crew and the good owner.’ Now, if you leave home without one of them, you sometimes shouldn’t even leave home because you’ve left one-fourth of your combination, and so I look at it like it’s a team effort. Nobody does anything on their own. Sean will be the first one to tell you – it’s not just his driving. It’s just not my tuning. It’s just not Tony owning the team, and it’s not just the crew. It’s all of us. Everybody is 100%, and I’ll even call it 110%, dedicated to doing the best we can do.
How do you guys celebrate your wins?
Bellemuer: One thing that we really enjoy doing, and it speaks to the character that is Tony and the team – we’ll go do our winner circle pictures. Obviously, it is very, very tough to win an NHRA National event. Those Wallies don’t come easy, and there are a lot of people who spend a lot of money trying to get that same trophy we’re fighting for. So when celebration is in order, when we get back to the pit area, we have a surround sound system stereo in the trailer, and we fire up Frank Sinatra’s “New York,” we stop and toast, and we listen to Frank Sinatra. Just in the classiness that is Tony Bartone and being from Long Island, it just kind of seems fitting. We take about a five-minute break. We pour our favorite beverage. We toast to Frank Sinatra and the job well done by all, and then it’s about our business, on to the next one.
You have such a tight-knit group of guys—the “Killer B’s”—give us some insight into that and how you guys overcome adversity.
Bellemeur: I consider the men and women involved with Bartone Bros. Racing family. That’s something that’s very important to me. It’s just a pleasure to get to work with every individual on that team, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
I’ve been a part of race teams over the years, and I can tell you which ones are successful and which ones are not. My father taught me that. My father raced for years and years, along with my mom, and the race teams that he had over those years, every one of them was successful with the right people in place. In 2007, I drove for Bob DeVour and Ron Meer, and DeVour taught me more as a driver and how to be a champion, I think, than any other single person, other than maybe my dad. DeVour has a saying, and that saying is harmony brings speed. That has stuck with me since 2007.
In ’07, I got my real first shot at a championship alcohol Funny Car ride. I needed to be a student in ‘07 because I was in my mid-20s, and in your mid-20s you think you have everything figured out and Bob took the time to basically straighten me up and say ‘listen kid you’re gonna need to do some growing here as a human being if you plan on being a champion.’ So, with that said, the group of individuals that Tony has put together are some that I have raced with for many, many years on other race teams. Some that I tried to bring with me to Bartone, some that I’ve known since we were kids, some that we have just kind of corralled into our family along the way. But the point is that every single person on this team, whether it’s someone that I’ve been with for 20-plus years or two, they are a true diehard racer. They are racers to every end of the earth, and if Boggs says, ‘Hey, we need to stay here until four in the morning,’ we stay there until four in the morning. It doesn’t matter; no questions are asked. We just corral together and do it, and that is such a wonderful feeling. It’s so much fun to race that way.
We do a lot of things away from the racetrack together, and we make a point of that. We’ll fly into races a day earlier or stay a day late to go to amusement parks, or go fishing, or do something together. We all consider each other family. We have a text group that we text every single day to everybody.
What’s it like working with the legendary tuner Steve Boggs and Tony Bartone, who is a character himself?
Bellemeur: The biggest thing for me personally, being a fan of the sport and being a fan of alcohol Funny Cars, was kind of grounding myself to the fact that I actually get to work alongside these two legends of our sport. I had to snap out of being starstruck a little bit. I’ve always been on the aggressive side as a driver. I feel like one of my favorite things about an alcohol Funny Car is the fact that you can get away with a lot in that driver’s seat. There is no finesse to driving a funny car. I love the fact that it is a blue-collar, roll up your sleeves, and drive the car. Steve Boggs is very much the same way when it comes to tuning. We are going to see what this car and this track on this day will take, and I’m not going to go one inch short of that. So, with my personality and Steve’s, we sort of challenge each other, and what that does is makes us rise to the occasion mentality, and it just works. He challenges me; I challenge him. We joke around a lot together; we respect one another. That’s a word that I think is understated a lot in the racing industry: respect. Every single one of my teammates, whether it’s from the highest of Tony Bartone to the newest team member, we respect each other not only as human beings, but as teammates, and that works really, really well.
With Steve, he likes to be challenged, and so for him to have a driver that is up for the challenge, that’s important to me. I try to mentally put myself in that position for him to be available to him that way. If he thinks a track is in a position to be absolutely the kitchen sink thrown at it, I wanna be ready for that. If he needs that driver to tiptoe down a racetrack because it’s 140 degrees, I wanna be that driver for him. My team deserves that because they’re gonna give me the best, and I want to be able to have that feedback for him and my team so that way we can be successful, if not this run, the next run. There’s a lot of communication that goes into that. It’s imperative that a driver and a tuner can communicate with each other. can tell you so much.
Let me tell you something – that onboard computer doesn’t feel going down the track. So knowing what Steve has in his back pocket for a certain run is important for him and me to be able to communicate both prior to and after each run.
Following that thought, Steve, what is it like working with Sean and Tony?
Boggs: It’s a real piece of cake. They make your job easy. All the guys make it a piece of cake. We all get along good, and if we’re having a problem, we’re kind of laughlinly say, ‘Come on guys, get our head out of our ass here and get to work.’
Sean will come back sometimes and say, ‘Man that was a crap job driving,’ and I’ll come back once in a while and say, ‘Man that was a crap job tuning.’ But you know what? It takes a whole season to win a championship, not one or two runs. We have confidence in each other, and there isn’t any bickering. When that car is not going down the track, I don’t have one guy come in [the trailer], including the owner, and say, ‘So I think you should do this or I think you should do that.’ They stay away from me. They know I’ll fix it. And then I don’t get too involved in what their jobs are.
I have things that I want done certain ways, like with the clutch and the transmission and how they put stuff together. I may give them suggestions that this is better I think than that way. But they’re all experienced, and I just name the job, and they go do it. Then I explain to them how I want the clutch. I do the fuel system. I do the electronics. Sean does the driving.
Sean is humble as there is. I mean, there’s no doubt. I’ve seen them all – the Pat Austins, Frank Manzos, Bob Newberry’s, and you can name another ten, but there’s no doubt the best driver, personally, I’ve ever been around in racing is Sean.
When Tony had to get out of the car, he said, ‘Who are we gonna get to drive this car?’ I said, ‘You don’t worry about it. I know somebody. Well, I’d watch Sean – see, I watch everybody race. I watch all the cars. I watch your drivers. I watch your crews. So I watched Sean. When he went to work for us, he had been to seven national event finals and never won one, but he had the killer instinct. So one day I told him after I watched Sean drive one of our competitors’ Funny Cars, ‘Hey, you ever want to drive a Funny Car for us? Let me know.’ Because I’m thinking down the road.
Years ago, Tony and I used to have a good theory. When he hired me, he said, ‘You tune it, and I’ll drive it.’ Back when we had roots blowers, I used to say sometimes, I could turn the injector around backwards instead of the butterflies being out in the front, they would be in the back and he’d be looking at them and he’d get in the car and say, ‘Trying something new, huh?’ He wouldn’t say, ‘What the hell are you doing, you dummy?’
How do you stay positive in the pits, and how do you set the tone as the team leader?
Boggs: I think it comes from all of us. You got Sean, you got me, you got Tony, the top guys on the crew, and we’re hard to get down. If it’s my fault, I’m the first one to say I screwed up, and Sean, he’ll come back for a look at the computer and he’ll say, ‘No sense looking at the computer’ – now this only happens about once or twice a year – but one run he said, ‘boy, I screwed that one up.’ The guys, if they make a mistake, they admit it – look, let’s not be chasing something for two weeks here when I know I messed this up. We got confidence in each other and that we’re gonna come out on the good side of it, and Tony does too.
I wouldn’t say it’s just me. It’s the whole team together – we just gel. When things get tough, we just get tougher.
Now, looking ahead to 2025, new car, new setup with the injected nitro Funny Car – how and when did all of this come about?
Bellemeur: It was a no-brainer for Steve Boggs. Steve’s history goes back, obviously, decades in the sport, and one of the things that he has been successful in in many different cars over many different decades is the injected nitro combination. He and his brother ran a car back in the 80s and 90s injected on nitro, and Steve won world championships with other teams in alcohol dragster with injected nitro combinations. Steve’s cars held the world record for quite some time in alcohol dragster running on injected nitros. So he had joked about if NHRA ever let this combination in to alcohol Funny Car, we’ve got to build one right away because as he puts it, ‘I’ve got stuff from 25 years ago I’ve wanted to try.’ So when NHRA allowed injected nitro combination in, instantly he went to Tony and said, ‘We need to build one of these.’ It was a frustrating build. Murf McKinney provided an immaculate race car, as he always does, but some of the parts vendors were slow. They were two-thirds of the way into getting some of our equipment, and actually, one of the parts vendors passed away, which was a terrible tragedy, but we got set back from that. It seemed like every time it was one step forward, two steps back.
At 80-plus years old, seeing Steve still excited about a new project was really cool. We wanted to get the thing done so he could get to work on it. Finally, in mid-last year, we got it most of the way done. We got to the shop in New York and fired it up and ran on nitro. It was a really cool feeling. Steve has a lot of experience with injected nitro. Our bottom-end mechanic, Garrett Bateman, obviously drives an injected nitro car out here on the West Coast, so he’s heavily involved in this. Once we got over the frustration of actually getting the darn thing built, it was one of those things where Steve kept a real close eye on a couple of the competitors that are out there currently running it and made some adjustments to our car based off of what he thought that it would need and based off of the performance of the cars that are currently running.
There’s no mistaking his talent and his success over the years, so the fact that he has new ideas and a combination that is new to a class in NHRA drag racing is really exciting to be a part of. I’m excited to learn from the best that probably ever did it. It’s a neat project that’s in its infancy, and we’ll just kind of see where it goes.
Where and when did the idea for the injected nitro Funny Car start for you, Steve?
Boggs: I’ve been with Tony since 1992, and then somewhere around 2000, he took off and drove a fuel Funny Car for a couple different people. We were good friends and stayed in contact – we knew what each other was doing. We talked all the time.
I was tuning Rick Jackson’s car, Morgan Lucas’ A/Fuel car, and the year Mitch Myer set the national record and won the 2004 championship. So that’s when I wanted to build this injected [Funny Car].
Tony used to say they change the rules once in a while. So we haven’t had a rule change in over 20 years, I said, I know it. He said, Man, you’re the first one to figure out a rule change, and they’ve all caught up.
Do you think this also plays into the state of the Top Alcohol Funny Car class?
Boggs: Around 2001, and I can’t give you the exact year, right in there somewhere, the car count was down. Well, the car count’s always down, but it was down more than normal back then. So, NHRA decided to bring IHRA roots-blowers alcohol funny cars because they had, I don’t know, 15 or 16 of them, to race with us. It was a disaster, and they changed the rules, but they never changed them back.
Well we had 225 over on the screw blower and that obviously ran faster than what they had. So they slowed our blowers down to 192, which took roughly seven to eight pounds of boost away from us and probably somewhere in the 300 horsepower range away from us, so those cars could run with us. Well, let me tell you how good that worked out for them. It wasn’t a year and a half that they had, excuse my French, shit canned that whole thing. So we needed something that we can work on. You can only buy the best parts, change the tune-up, and run them up and down the track so much.
So it sounds like you needed a challenge?
Boggs: Yes, and the guys, too. I have experience with injected nitro.
I like it because it’s a challenge. I mean, it’s got down to the blown alcohol car, and what am I going to do to it? NHRA has let it almost get boring, and they wonder why the car count is going away. They won’t run us in front of a crowd.
This ties into my next question – where do you see the future of alcohol drag racing going, and what do you think of the state of the classes now?
They don’t run us in front of the crowd. We got the second-quickest and fastest category at a national event. We got the quickest and fastest cars that run a quarter mile, and they don’t do anything with us.
I’m not saying that I don’t like the alcohol car. I’m not saying that at all, but they haven’t done anything to make it exciting for us. Change the rules, make them faster. Give us more blower. Give us this; give us something to make these cars go.
I thought this [injected nitro Funny Car] might not be too hard to get running. I had no idea the sixth time we step on the throttle, it’s going to go 5.28 at 283. The car ran a little better than I expected and I’ve made some changes to some of the engine things that I’ve known over years that I thought was a problem and I’ve had years to sit and think about it, and I got lucky and I think that’s one reason it runs as good as it does.
Now, with this new combination added to your stable, what’s the goal for the 2025 season?
Bellemeur: The goal is simple: win. Tony Bartone puts in the effort, building an infrastructure and putting a race team of this caliber together to do one simple thing, and that is win drag races, win championships. What we are doing is attempting to put ourselves in the best possible position to win – with which combination that’s going to be at the end of the year, I honestly can’t tell you. What I do know is that this injected nitro combination is very fast. I think you know that. We kind of blew up the internet by testing, and what we do know is that we have two very fast race cars, one with a blower on it, one without.
For me personally, it’s hard to justify getting out of a car that I’ve driven for 20-plus years, that I feel I can do about anything I want in to a combination in a car that I know nothing about. That’s just me. That’s the selfishness in me, I suppose. What I do know is that the decision that we make to whichever combination we run, it will be the one that gives us the best chance to win.
Now, as vague as that sounds, I feel that NHRA is going to keep a really close eye on these injected nitro cars, especially as more come into the class. Will the rules be the same at the end of the season as they are right now? Draw your own conclusion. I think everybody in the back of their mind is going to probably say no, they probably won’t be. The NHRA has a rule in place that only lets you switch combinations so many times before being penalized, so what we have to do is be careful about if we switch when we do it and what is going to give us the best opportunity to win because in the end that’s Tony Bartone’s goal. That’s our goal as a race team. As unknown as this whole thing is right now, it’s unknown to us, too. We’re venturing into uncharted territory. I don’t know another race team out there that has both combinations sitting in their shop that they could potentially win with.
Staying along the lines of this, what’s your take on the state of the Alcohol Funny Car class, and where do you see the future of it going, especially with the introduction of this new combination?
Bellemeur: It’s no secret that Top Alcohol Funny Car needs something. The car counts have been dwindling. What I feel has been spectacular is the level of competition. Just because the entries are down doesn’t mean it’s any easier. So that doesn’t help the qualifying sheet when there are only 12 cars on it.
We’ve lost some cars to [Funny Car] Chaos. We’ve lost some cars to nostalgia racing and the Mid-West Drag Racing Series. However, I’ve been in this industry long enough to see drag racing as kind of a circle of life type industry. The popularity of something goes away, and they go do something else, and a lot of times people will come back, whether it’s the same people that left in the first place or a new genre of racer coming in. A perfect example of that is Pro Stock. Five years ago, you couldn’t get a full Pro Stock field; now they’re everywhere.
I know of a couple teams that are actually running quarter-mile NHRA alcohol funny car drag racing for the first time in years. They left, and now they’re back, so that’s gonna help. We’ve been working with NHRA over the last couple of years to make Top Alcohol Funny Car more visible and make it a popular class to run in. I think we’re starting to see some results of that.
I am hearing of more injected nitro Funny Cars being built and, let’s face it, when something happens that is good, people want to follow it. So whether it’s Bartone Brothers Racing or Randy Meyer or Mick Steele, somebody goes out with one of these injected cars and shows its potential, really shows its potential, I think people are going to gravitate toward that. There just hasn’t been a huge exposure of them yet, and that’s to the fault of nobody, but like our car, it’s taken two years to build this car. So there is a little bit of a growing pain when you’re in the infancy of something. So I believe that once we start seeing more of them built, you’ll see the popularity grow, and much like the injected nitro combination dragster, it’s going to be cheaper to run. Well, you know what? Everybody likes cheaper. That’s a good thing. If that truly is the case, that will start to expose itself as more and more cars are being built as well.
I’m more excited about the future of Alcohol Funny Car than I think some of the other people out there. I think there are a lot of good things to come. I think NHRA is working with us more than they have in years past, which is a good thing. So, if we can all point in one direction, I think the future is bright.
Continuing to give your industry perspective here, do you feel it’s easier or more difficult to come by funding nowadays to run a race car, of any sort?
Bellemeur: I think the popularity of motorsports is back in the spotlight again. Obviously, when you have an interest in something, people are going to want to fund that. My opinion is that a potential problem here is that everybody has a series. There’s NHRA; obviously, IHRA is making a splash again, and everybody’s kind of waiting to see what’s going to happen with IHRA. There’s your door car stuff; there’s this World Series of Pro Mod going on. The neat thing about that is a positive thing because there are no conflicts with that. That is a winter series that is gearing up for racing season, which has been awesome. But you’ve got PDRA, you’ve got Midwest, you’ve got your nostalgia series – the good news for the racer out there is there’s a place to go race for you. The bad news is that everybody in those series has their hand out looking for money, and all that does is take that pot of money and spread it thinner. That is a problem.
If I am trying to get money for Bartone Brothers Racing to fund an NHRA racing team, and there’s somebody from Funny Car Chaos with a car that looks exactly like mine with his handout, if I am the potential sponsor here, how do I justify going to one series over another? That’s a difficult thing to do because we’re both standing here with our handout, and this sponsor is not gonna get the same exposure in one venue versus another. So it seems to me that there’s a potential almost watering down of the sponsored dollar out there because there are so many different places it could go.
One more question about the new Funny Car – the procedure is different when driving a blown combination versus an injected nitro one. That said, when you were driving the injected car, did your routine get thrown off, did muscle memory try to take over, and were you looking to shift when you got to a certain point in the track?
Bellemeur: One-hundred percent correct. So my car chief, Troy Green, he lowers the body down. I’ve raced with Troy on various race teams for the better part of 20 years. Troy and I met in 2001, and he and I have been on race teams together forever. I brought Troy into this team. He’s the guy I wanted. He is the best of the best, and he’s also in the top two or three friends I have in my entire life. Troy was joking with me because on the blown alcohol car, he always lowers the body down, and every time I always wrap the throttle, and I wrap the throttle because it’s awesome. That’s why. A lot of people go, ‘Hey, how come you do that?’ Because it’s cool. Troy got on the radio before the first run in the injected car; he goes, ‘Don’t you hit that throttle.’ I said, ‘Oh come on, what fun are you?’ Knowing that I can’t, you don’t do that in a nitro car course.
He goes, ‘Well, let me get 100 feet out of the way before you do.’
So you bet – it threw my entire routine off. I practiced in my brain for months before that first run, and there are just certain routine things. Any driver will tell you when you do the same thing enough, you get in this certain routine, and that’s part of what makes you successful. You kind of let your muscle memory do the job for you, and boy, did that get thrown all out of whack in Gainesville. So it very much took a discipline that I’m not used to having.
It’s interesting, this new injected nitro combination. I am just learning this thing. I keep joking with Steve – I told him when the thing ran good, I said, ‘I can’t tell you how many times going down the track I went through my head and said gee, I wonder what that was.’ Because I’ve never driven an injected nitro car before, it’s like starting over for me.
My goal right now for Steve is to be a quick learner and be able to provide as much info to him as quickly as I can, because we’re kind of all learning this together, but it’s that communication that is so important.
Ok, the hard questions are out of the way, and now for some fun ones. Who did you look up to in motorsports when you were growing up?
Bellemuer: The very first one is my dad. I know that’s the answer everybody says, but I mean my dad raced. I saw my dad as that blue collar, roll up your sleeves, work on the race car every night, kind of racer. He’s the guy that didn’t have the funding to just go out and have people do it for him, so he did it with hard work, with prowess and with outsmarting his competitors and
In the Southern California drag racing scene in the 1970s, there were a lot of really good racers out here. I’ve spoken with guys like Brad Anderson, Jerry Darien, people who are very well known in our industry, and my dad sat there and traded blows with them every weekend because he just cared that much. That work ethic and that level of success that he obtained, the way he did it is, to me, a true American motorsports love story. My mom and dad raised me to be that style of racer myself.
Now, for drag racers, Darryl Gwynn was my hero. When I was a kid at Pomona Raceway, watching the drag races, and my dad was involved in race cars as well, I saw Darryl Gwynn win a race, and he had the Wally in his hand, and that’s the first Wally I’d ever seen in person. I’ll never forget it. It’s like I saw the pot of gold. Darryl Gwynn had his white fire suit on, and he was holding that Wally down by his side, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. That’s when I became obsessed with being a race car driver. He was very nice to me. We talked for a minute, and I probably asked him the questions a five or six-year-old kid asks a racecar driver, and I was a fan for life. I am a fan of Darryl Gwynn’s to this day. Any chance I actually get to see him at a race, I will remind him that he changed the way I look at drag racing forever.
Darryl Gwynn was the guy for me. I was brokenhearted when he had his accident, and I remember that day, I remember that lump in my throat when I was a young kid and my mom and dad had told me about Darryl’s crash. He was, to me, the ultimate role model for what a young race car driver should want to be.
If you could look back and give yourself one piece of advice when you started your career, what would it be?
Bellemeur: Shut up and listen to the people that know what they’re talking about.
I was very fortunate and very lucky to be involved and raised around alcohol Funny Cars. My dad was partners in alcohol Funny Cars when I was a kid, and that’s why I fell in love with them. My parents got me a Junior Dragster, and then out of Junior Dragsters, we took a little different route. We went nostalgia racing, blown alcohol dragsters, and then into nostalgia Top Fuel cars, and then got into alcohol Funny Cars. And boy, as a kid going through high school and then into my early 20s and driving some fast cars, I look back on that now and thought, boy, I sure thought I knew everything and had I just closed my mouth and listened to some of the legends of the sport that I was lucky enough to be around, I probably would have been more successful.
There’s a lot of learning to do out there. There’s a lot of experience out there and people who are willing to help. I try to speak with a lot of junior kids too, because I was that junior kid, right? And one thing that I told junior kids is don’t be afraid to take advice because there’s a lot of it out there, and people are willing to help. At 43 years old, I look back at 25-year-old me and go, geez, Sean, if you’d have just shut up and listened.
Was Alcohol Funny Car the be-all and end-all for you, and is it now?
Bellemeuer: When I was a kid, I just wanted to drive a Funny Car. I thought they were so cool, being around them, and I used to sit in the seat all the time. I used to ask him to let me drive it into the trailer at night with the body down, and I just fell in love with the fabulous floppers. So when I had that opportunity to learn the difficulty of driving one, I fell in love with driving them. I am absolutely obsessed at being a good clutch-blown transmission alcohol Funny Car driver because it’s a very difficult thing, and they throw a lot of challenges your way.
When I was 25, 26 years old, and in a pretty darn good alcohol Funny Car, I had those meetings with fuel teams, and I was very interested in going nitro racing. That didn’t work out, but the thing is, now today, I’m a paid race car driver. That is the coolest thing in the whole world to say.
At 43 years old, I have a family at home. I’ve got three daughters, a wife. I’m being paid to drive for one of the legends of the sport, to work with Steve Boggs, who could be argued as maybe the best crew chief in the history of our sport, alongside the crew that I consider my best friends. Why would I go anywhere else? I get to look out the windshield at one of my heroes, Steve Boggs, and then I drive one of the most bad-ass cars there are to drive, many say they’re more difficult to drive than a fuel car. Then, when I crawl out the roof hatch, out of breath, Tony hands me money. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that, right? Then, a lot of times, I get to go back, listen to Frank Sinatra, and throw my arms around my best friends – it does not get better to me, and at this point in my life, I will be Tony Bartone’s driver as long as he will have me.
Now, Steve, tell me, how did you get bit by the drag racing bug?
Boggs: When I was a kid. I grew up on a farm, and you can hear a lot of guys say this: they grew up on a farm.
My brother and I were gearheads. We wanted to soup up lawnmowers. My dad’s farm tractor, we had put more compression in it, a bigger carburetor on it. Then we started building race cars, and it just went from there. Back in 1965, we built an A-altered, built a chassis ourselves, and it wasn’t anything like they are now; it was just weld-on black iron tubing together. Built a whole car, put a motor in it, a transmission and a Fiat body on it and started racing. Then we built that Funny Car in 1972. We had been running that car in the UDRA (United Drag Racers Association) out of the Chicago Funny Car Circuit. We traveled around the central part of the United States and match-raced on the weekends in alcohol.
Did you look up to anybody while you were building all these cars and stuff, like anybody in motorsports or drag racing?
Boggs: Oh, sure, everybody looked up to Don Garlits, but in our categories, Dale Armstrong, Ken Veney, which I knew them all, and Wilford Boutilier, who was an alcohol Funny Car racer.
In ’70, they built that new track in Ontario, California, and had an event called the Supernationals. I think in ’75, Billy Williams, Dale Armstrong, Ken Veney, Wilford Boutilier, my brother and me and other people, towed from Ohio to California with a half-ton pickup truck and a little trailer. So you know you were pretty determined. Those were the good old days when it was really hard, and you had to do everything, build everything yourself and do everything.
What does race day look like for you? Do you have a routine or any superstitions?
Bellemeur: I typically do not. One thing that I do is I like to keep things loose. I joke with my team – we are very sarcastic around each other, and we keep things loose even on the bad days. Tony even tells me, ‘turn off the comedy show,’ and to be perfectly honest, I can’t. When I turn off the comedy show, that’s when I’m not in my zone.
Race day for me is, you eat light, you stay frosty, and you just stick to the plan and be ready for whatever may come your way. I know that on race day, if something does get out of that routine, I’ve got nine brothers and sisters by my side ready to pick me up off the ground, and we all have that for each other. It’s funny – I don’t really have to have a giant routine because I know that I’ve got a team around me that our routine is do the same thing as yesterday.
Lastly, beyond the obvious, how do you define your job?
Bellemeur: I’m going to look something up here – this was actually in my speech at the NHRA banquet, and you want to know something actually terrible? I had pneumonia at the banquet. My wife literally took me from the banquet to the hospital, so I don’t even remember most of it. Crazy, right?
I pulled a line from the famous quote that Lou Gehrig said, ‘Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.’ I get choked up every time I think about it. Can you hear it in my voice right now?
I firmly do. I define my job as the best job in the world. I get to drive a car that I, as a little kid stood outside of watching go down the racetrack, dreamed of ever wondering what it would even be like to get to drive. I get to drive the fastest one in the world with the best people and the best team owner, and my friends and I get paid to do it. How on earth could I ever complain about that?
If and when you retire, what will you take away from this whole experience?
Boggs: My whole lifetime, I have been around drag racing, and of all the people I’ve met – from Tony Bartone to Joe Penland to Morgan Lucas to all the people like Ken Veney, Dale Armstrong, Don Prudhomme, and all the people that I was around years ago – most of those people I’m all still real good friends with. I have people around here that I went to school with. There are four brothers, and they followed me around the country half the time to watch me race. I met Tony Bartone in 1992, and we’ve been friends ever since, and when I quit racing, we’ll still be friends.
It’s the people, some of them too are spectators, that I’ve met over the years, and you’ll never forget that. Like right now, I still have people call me all the time asking me questions about this car, that car. What should I do with this? From California to Florida to Texas to the whole country, and that’s one thing that I can take away from it, are those lifelong friendships.
Most people don’t have that. There’s no amount of money that can be put on what that’s worth.
You are one of the legends of our sport and arguably one of the greatest tuners of all time. What is it like being a legend in drag racing, and do you let that ever sink in?
Boggs: Maybe a little bit, but if you let it sink in too much, you’re going to get a big head and be a dumbass. I try to be humble.
This story was originally published on May 9, 2025. 
The post Vengeance Sought, Vengeance Found: Sean Bellemeur and Crew Chief Steve Boggs Reflect on 2024, Look Ahead in DI 193 Cover Story first appeared on Drag Illustrated.