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When the staging lanes finally reopened, Millican and crew rolled back up for what should have been a redemption run. The track was understandably questionable, and everyone knew it. The oil dry was piled deep in the corners of the lane where Schumacher\u2019s car had laid its mechanical guts across the asphalt. Millican completed his burnout, staged, and then almost immediately put a hole out after launching. The cylinder dropped on them before the car could build any real momentum, and the run was over before it ever really started.<\/p>\n
Three runs into qualifying and they\u2019d heard the same radio call three times. Hole out. Hole out. Hole out. There was a brief moment of confusion \u2013 one run turned out not to be a hole-out at all, but a broken fuel line near the injector hat that sprayed fuel and sent crew member Jesse Snyder grabbing for the kill switch. From there, the bad news never really stopped, with the fourth and final qualifying session adding a Christmas tree malfunction throwing another ten-to-fifteen minute delay into the mix.<\/p>\n
What makes this story worth telling isn\u2019t the mechanical misery \u2013 equipment breaks in Top Fuel all the time. Nitromethane is inherently violent, and the machinery that survives it does so by the slimmest of margins. Every year, teams have to send a representative to NHRA\u2019s mandatory nitro safety meeting, sign their name, and confirm they understand exactly what they\u2019re handling, because what they\u2019re handling is genuinely dangerous stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the real story is how Millican handled the situation. Not once did he point fingers at the manufacturer, at the track crew, at the timing system, at the weather, at anyone. He stood there in the California heat, helmet under his arm, camera rolling, and talked straight to his audience. When crew chief Jon Oberhofer shrugged off the hole-out problem with a \u201cdropping them holes, baby,\u201d Millican didn\u2019t dress it up. He reported it exactly like he heard it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt ain\u2019t just us,\u201d Millican said. \u201cIt\u2019s nitro. And it\u2019s our fault. We\u2019ll figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the thing about a team like Millican\u2019s \u2013 they\u2019ve been here before. Millican said it himself at the end of an absolutely brutal day: the number on the qualifying sheet on Saturday doesn\u2019t define what happens Sunday. Ladder position matters, but momentum is its own kind of currency, and a team that figures out their gremlins between sessions can come out of the trailer on race day a different animal entirely.<\/p>\n
Pomona has always had a way of humbling people. For Millican, his people are the ones who spent two hours cleaning up someone else\u2019s catastrophe without being asked, the ones who kept the cameras rolling through every long delay, and the ones who smiled through it at the end and said, \u201cat least we\u2019re racing in Pomona.\u201d<\/p>\n
And race he did. Starting from the No. 12 spot, Millican scored an upset victory over Shawn Reed in round one, running a solid 3.758 elapsed time at 318.47 mph. In the quarterfinals, he smoked the tires at the hit in a loss to reigning Top Fuel points champion Doug Kalitta. Although it wasn\u2019t the result Millican and the Rick Ware Racing team wanted, their perseverance and first-round victory can help propel them moving forward.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
They\u2019ll be ready to line up again next weekend in Charlotte for the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals with something to prove, and that\u2019s not the worst place to be.<\/p>\n
The post Clay Millican Perseveres Through Punishing Pomona Winternationals Weekend<\/a> first appeared on Drag Illustrated<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a version of race day that looks clean on the highlights reel \u2013 a crisp burnout, perfect launch, a number on the board that moves you up the qualifying ladder. And then there\u2019s the version Clay Millican lived through during this past weekend\u2019s Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals in Pomona.\u00a0 This version included a grinding, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}