NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

It’s been fourteen years since GT Tonglet’s last NHRA competition run, but the veteran Pro Stock Motorcycle competitor has picked back up right where he left off.

It’s not to say that he hasn’t been riding in the meantime. Tonglet has been street bike-style drag racing, grudge racing, and this past year has even started riding Top Fuel Harley.

However, Tonglet’s family passion for NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle, especially his father Gary Tonglet Sr.’s, had led them back to the circuit. As it so often happens, it started one night when Gary Sr. and Jr. were sitting around bored and mentioned they’d like to go back to Pro Stock bike racing.

“Plus I was losing a lot of weight from bicycling, and I thought to myself, if I diet for a little bit, we could probably go back,” Tonglet shared. “We all worked on our parts the last month, and so it all came together about a month and a half ago.”

With so little prep time, Tonglet only made his licensing passes, but he couldn't get in the testing he had hoped for before the Texas NHRA FallNationals.

“I would have loved to have made ten, twelve runs, but Q1 this weekend was my third run on a Pro Stock style bike in 14 years,” Tonglet said, who competed under the Vance & Hines colors earlier in the early 2000s with Andrew Hines and debuted the Harley-Davidson Pro Stock bike.

“The Top Fuel bikes are completely different. So none of that transferred or correlated over to what we're doing now. So, I'm still rusty,” he continued. “We were talking about it last night - if I have 8,000 or 10,000 runs down the drag strip, ninety percent of them are on a Pro Stock bike or a Pro Stock-style bike, but it's just been fourteen years since I rode it, and these things, when I quit in 2012, we were trying to run like 6.80s, and now they're going 6.60s. So it's a learning curve for sure.”

The bike he’s competing on this weekend, though, is familiar. It’s his brother LT’s 2010 championship Suzuki, with a 2016 engine he and his father built.

“Our expectations were to come out here and make four runs or more. I really want to be in better shape going into Las Vegas. There's an opportunity to ride a top-of-the-line bike for me in Las Vegas, and if everything works out, I just needed to shake the rust off this weekend,” Tonglet said.

He and his dad are chipping away at their tune-up after Friday’s qualifying run and factoring in the cooler conditions.

“We made a decent run last night. We're still working the chassis out. I'm a different weight than LT was when he rode this. So trying to get it to work out for us,” Tonglet said. “I was hoping it was going to be hot, but it's so cold, so they're making extra power, and we just can't control it, but I think we can turn it around. We keep making decisions, and hopefully they're the right ones.

“It's a weekend for my dad. My dad loves this class, and we're just out here trying to have fun and be competitive.”