NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

You’re the crew chief of the championship-winning car. You’re responsible for seven of the quickest passes in class history, including the best run of last year. You’ve also tuned your driver to the 10 fastest speeds in history, seven of which were recorded last year, and 10 No. 1 qualifier positions. What do you do?

Well, if you’re David Grubnic, you’re certainly not going to Disneyland, Nope, you’re going to try to make your combination even better and more reliable, even if it means burning a few races to start the season to do it.

“You can't stand still in this sport,” he said. “If you stand still, you'll get passed. In this sport, you're in a constant state of development.”

The humble Australian, crew chief for two-time world champion Brittany Fore’s Monster Energy/Flav-R-Pac Top Fueler, tested his new combination before the season-opening Gatornationals, ran his 2022 combo in Gainesville, then switched to the new setup at last weekend's NHRA Arizona Nationals.

“We changed everything: the clutch, the engine … everything. We've also incorporated the last piece of the JFR clutch components that we needed to absorb; last year we were still running the stuff that we inherited from Alan Johnson, the team's previous tuner], so now we're 100% JFR.”

Although better performance might be the byproduct, Grubnic’s goals are simple: Run quick without standing on the edge of parts destruction, a line that many teams unwittingly crossed in Phoenix.

The Monster team rarely experiences a catastrophic, highlight-reel explosion, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t standing on the edge at times last season.

“The general public doesn't do the post-run analysis of the engine, whereas I do, and there were times I’d look at it and I'll thank my lucky stars that we got away," he admitted.

And even though the car performed incredibly last year and won five events en route to the championship, Grubnic was not satisfied.

“We actually got it into a window to where I didn't have to cringe every time it went over 335 [mph], but it was still in a realm that was very sharp up there, and if you weren't perfect with your numbers and your set up, it could come out and bite you pretty quick.

“There are certain parameters that we want to see out of the engines that give us a level of comfort that we're in a working window. I'm not saying that it's going to blow up, but when we take the engine apart and study it, there are telltale signs that you're getting close to the edge. We don't want to operate there. We want a margin of safety, and I wasn't happy with the margin of safety that we had.

“You want to run well, and you don't want to hurt anything. because that’s not only self-satisfying, because you take pride in what you do, but, obviously, your owners like that, because part of our job is to provide performance and a winning combination on a cost-effective basis. 

“Admittedly, you get to a point where [your tune-up is] comfortable, and you want to utilize it for as long as we can. We've had a pretty good run. We got the championship last year, but it wasn't the way we wanted to do it. We weren't happy with our last six races; we just made less mistakes than everybody else. We had a better championship run in '21 if you go back and look at our moments, how many small points we got and everything we did, so it's something that we want to get better at. When we look back, there were some unforced errors, some self-induced, some others not, but ultimately that was my responsibility.”

Grubnic and the Monster/Flav-R-Pac team also are critically aware that their main championship rival, Steve Torrence, frittered away two-thirds of last season working on a combination to catch up to Force’s performance and it cost them a good seed in the Countdown and, ultimately, a chance for a fifth straight championship. With that in mind, Grubnic has given his 2023 experiments a hard cut-off.

“Chicago will be the cut-off,” he says firmly. “If it hasn't got to where I anticipate us to be, we'd have to reconsider whether it's worth pursuing. I can easily put it back to last year’s combination. I have all of the parts.”

A crew chief walks a tightrope between winning performances and parts attrition, and everything in Grubby’s world must pass the risk. vs. reward test.

“Sure, I can push it harder," he said, "but I might be risking more parts, so then it becomes, ‘Why would I risk parts, or the cost of doing business, when the return isn't just there as of yet.’ It's not like we're in the Countdown. It's going to be a slow start for us until we get it figured out, but we're hoping that during the year, we'll open up our window.

“Our premise is to sneak up on it from the bottom-up approach rather than push as hard as you can from the top down and introduce unnecessary risk. What do you think is a good safety margin to having these engines when you do run those performances? How close to the edge do you want to be? I don't want to be standing on the edge. I would like to be a few feet back from it. Nobody wants to be on the edge. So we are learning to step back from the edge and I want to keep heading in that direction.”

Speaking of the edge, Grubnic and Force have flirted with being the first in the 3.50s (3.623) and the first to exceed 340 mph (338.94) and even the first to exceed 300 mph in the eighth-mile to claim the Phillips Connect “300 at the 1/8” program,” worth a cool $30,000 to the first person to accomplish it.

We asked Grubnic if those sorts of barriers and incentives make his mouth water.

“The carrot out there was the financial bonus from it, but then you have to weigh what are we risking to get that?” he replied firmly. “We tried for once at Indy last year and we fell short by two-tenths or whatever it was [299.73 in Q4], and after that, I said, ‘That's it. Our 100% focus is on winning the championship and getting points.’ Obviously, it’s a bit of a different story if there were points involved, but there aren’t, so that's not really the objective."

And no one has come closer to 340 than Grubnic and Force, who blasted to a 338..94-mph clocking at last year's season finale in Pomona. Doesn't he want to be the first to crack 340?

“The same with 340; you can make an argument that that's a distraction," he said. "It's how you look at things. This race team's a business, and we've got goals and objectives that we have to meet. To be honest with you, nobody's come up to me and said that [340 or 300 to the eighth] is one of our objectives and until Yorba Linda [team headquarters] says that, to me, I'm not putting a great deal of emphasis on it. If it's meant to happen, it will happen, and if the conditions arise, and if we happen to fall into it, along with any other team, then congratulations to whoever gets it. But it's not a priority; it's more of a distraction. And we have to separate that distinction.”

But c’mon, Grubby, don’t you get a kick out of owning all the records and seeing those big numbers come up on the scoreboard?

“I'd be a fool or an idiot to say that there's no sort of self-gratification in that, but at the same time, I've been in this business a very long time and I live in a glass house, and these can easily disappear and go away,” he said in carefully measured response. “The last thing you want to do is ever get ahead of yourself in this business and think that you have a complete and concise understanding of how everything works out here. I know what we’ve got but I don't want to take anything away from my competitors -- anybody that pulls the wires on a nitro engine, and runs at the level that we run at, commands a lot of respect.

“Everybody's got a different method of doing things, and it's difficult because one method may work for somebody and it may not work for somebody else. With that being said, I'm always very careful because the way I run this thing is different than the industry standard. There's something I might do that might rectify a problem but could create a bomb elsewhere. We have to be very careful that we don't mislead, or we don't put the wrong message out there. Everybody has their own methods, and everybody has their own way of doing things and all of it comes from their own minds. So, with running these engines,  obviously, they have to look for the solutions for how they run the cars themselves.”

Force is currently on the pole at the Winternationals after Friday’s lone session, showing that the team hasn’t missed much of a beat, and she stands solidly behind Grubnic, whatever he decides to do.

“He spent all offseason making some big, big changes, and the whole team is aware of it," she said Friday night. “My first thought was, ‘We had such a great package. Why are we going to change it?’ It didn't make any sense to me, but, I have David Grubnic in our corner. He's the best crew chief. He's the best tuner. I don't doubt him in whatever he thinks we need to do to move forward and progress and get better. I stand right by him.”

All the way to the winner’s circle …