NHRA stars relive, talk championships at SEMA Breakfast

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

by Phil Burgess, National DRAGSTER Editor

 

A packed house enjoyed NHRA's annual SEMA Breakfast, which was emceed by Bob Frey and included past and present champions in Antron Brown, Tony Schumacher, Gary Scelzi, and John Force. (Photos by Robert Grice)

Force made a grand entrance, with a cup of coffee and a briefcase.

Laughs were a big part of the show, with the drivers trading good-natured barbs and colorfully reminiscing about their racing careers.

After the breakfast, all four champions signed autographs at the NHRA booth inside the SEMA Show.

NHRA’s annual SEMA Breakfast, part of the celebration surrounding the upcoming 50th annual Auto Club NHRA Finals, brought together a quartet of NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series champs, past and present, for a lively discussion about what it takes and what it means to win an NHRA championship, as well as to reminisce about their exciting title runs that concluded at the World Finals.

     Sixteen-time NHRA Funny Car champ John Force and seven-time NHRA Top Fuel champ Tony Schumacher, who will both go into this year’s Finals with the chance to add to their totals, were joined onstage by former world champs Antron Brown and Gary Scelzi before a crowd of SEMA Show attendees who packed Ballrooms A and B at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort and Casino.

     Emceed by Bob Frey, the panel discussion-themed event provided not just a glimpse back at event history through a series of introductory videos but also a look at the dynamics between rivals for recent championships.

     Schumacher, who can easily claim his eighth Top Fuel title in Pomona, naturally was asked to reflect on his famous 2006 championship, clinched with “The Run” — a national-record-setting final-round win over teammate Melanie Troxel — and fondly remembered as one of the greatest comebacks in the sport’s history.

     “Whenever you run a teammate in the final round, you hear people talking about giving away races, so for us it was a gift to [also] have to set the world record,” he reasoned. “I wouldn’t have to spend my whole life wondering if Melanie laid down for me because it didn’t end up mattering who was in the other lane. As much as they were a team car to us, Melanie was not a fan of ours and was trying to beat us. There’s much more to that whole story, how hard it was to win that championship; we were 330 points back halfway through the year and had to come back to win it with one of the great moments in NHRA history.

     "We don't have to win the Finals [to win the championship] this year,” he added. “That's kind of a letdown. The championships you win when you also win the race are way more gratifying than the ones you have to watch."

     Brown, who won his 2012 Top Fuel championship in dramatic fashion when teammate Schumacher was unable to defeat Brandon Bernstein in the final round, reflected, “When you think about all of those years you’ve been so close, on my motorcycles and in Top Fuel in 2009 and 2011, when you get that win, all of those emotions about all of the times you fell short and all of the hard work and time spent in the shop and traveling and racing, they come rushing out.

     "Lifting the [championship trophy] is better than not,” he added. “And it pays better, too.” Brown, who is too far back this season to win the 2014 championship, elicited laughter from the crowd as he acknowledged his poor start to this year’s playoffs. "Once we started the Countdown [to the Championship], it seemed like someone stabbed both of our tires."

     Scelzi, retired since the end of the 2008 season, was “pulled out of mothballs” for the show, according to Frey (“I guess the other guy didn’t show up; [NHRA] saw me out on the curb sleeping under a park bench,” countered Scelzi, one of drag racing’s liveliest characters during his heyday), and quickly and comfortably slid back into the good-natured bantering he enjoyed with longtime rival Force while also taking good-natured shots at his other former rivals in Ron Capps and Whit Bazemore. (Schumacher: "Watching Scelzi and Force, now this is a show.")

     Scelzi, whose 2005 championship broke up Force’s title runs in 2004 and 2006, good naturedly joked that he won the championship “by default” after both Capps and Force lost early but not before he himself had already been defeated.

     "Tony's right,” Scelzi said, jokingly referring to Schumacher’s earliest comment. “I didn't like winning the championship by default. [It was like] everyone went out early, so give it to Scelzi. That’s still a little bit of a void for me. It wasn’t the way I wanted to do it."

     Force, who also relived some of his great Finals moments, of course, stole the show with his stream of conscious thinking, gliding between references to the pit-row fight at a recent NASCAR event, his grandkids, Ebola, Chinese restaurants, meeting the stars of Duck Dynasty, and Schumacher’s adventures as a part of the U.S. Army team (“Schumacher's jumped out of airplanes. Highest thing I've ever jumped out of is a bar-room window") but was on point when addressing his upcoming battle with points leader Matt Hagan at the Finals in light of recent changes in his camp.

     "I race from the heart, and I've been beat up my whole life and kicked in the dirt; I was a loser for 15 years,” he said. “They can beat you on the racetrack — if they’re better or luckier, they’re gonna win — but if they don’t beat you mentally, then they never win. One of my crew guys asked me what 'What are you going to do if Hagan beats you at the Finals? How are going to show him you beat him mentally?’ I said, ‘I’ll grab him and kiss him on the lips.’ I may not win the championship, but I'll ruin him mentally.

     “[Listening to Schumacher talk], he sends chills up my spine: ‘I don’t want it easy.’ Let me tell you something; I hope Hagan has a heart attack.”In the end, when it came to this group of champions, as they discussed championships past and, hopefully, future, Schumacher summed it up best: "Coming in second means nothing."