Here’s the first of a seven part series written by Corey Michalek about the competitive debut of he and his brother Kyle’s NHRA A/fuel dragster team. After years of crewing on top fuel cars, renting other people’s cars, and gathering the parts and pieces needed to run their own operation they debuted their own wholly owned team in Charlotte last year. It was a momentous occasion for the brothers and the weekend was petty amazing.
Corey and Kyle get it. They are good dudes and really understand the big picture as it comes to the sport of drag racing and what their goals are. They did not rush a bunch of stuff, they did not flame out before they made it, they did it the hard way and the right way and their reward was working 200 hours straight in their shop to get the car ready and to bring it to the starting line in Charlotte.
These guys are the real deal and so isn’t this series of stories. You’ll be hooked!
ADVERSITY
I missed it.
It was September 17, 2017, and the time was 4:51 p.m. I wasn’t nervous. There wasn’t a distraction, no one played games on the starting line, and I don’t have any type of an excuse. I just missed it. It’s been nearly three months and I still think about it every single day…multiple times a day. That’s not a cliché or some type of lip service, it’s a gut ache that won’t go away.
It’s impossible to tally every single waking moment that was spent over the course of the 27 months prior to the 2017 NHRA Carolina Nationals preparing for what needed to happen four-tenths of a second after the tree flashed in the final round, but I’m going to start by first taking a moment to paint a picture of what it’s been like being two brothers taking our lumps, fighting adversity, and getting our first taste of figuring out how to field a nitro car in the NHRA’s quickest and fastest sportsman class.
I feel that in order to accurately reflect the gravity of the situation and what could have been, we first need to document the timeline of events that led MBR to a final-round matchup against Shawn Cowie in our national event debut as car owners.
And that’s where this story begins.
This is the first of a VERY NICE series of videos from a national event. The rest of the videos are easily found on eBay. It’s definitely worth the time to watch them.