Beyond all the tuning and retuning in his mind and going over a mental checklist of required pre-race maintenance the car would require upon arrival at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Stanley could hardly resist the temptation to extrapolate his team’s regular 3.6-second, eighth-mile performances in ADRL Pro Extreme competition, as well as their career-best 3.59-second effort at the 2012 Shakedown at E-Town, and consider the possibilities. It’s not difficult to imagine the numbers that could be attached to a full quarter-mile pull by a doorslammer producing nearly 4,000-horsepower, but Stanley, without question a sage veteran, refused to count his chickens before they hatched.
Thursday, November 14, 2013: Camp Stanley, along with son, John, longtime racing partner William “Axel” Weiss and the oddly unrelated Scott and Jimmy Kline, who have busted their knuckles and poured their hearts into drag racing alongside the Stanley boys for better than a decade, sit in the staging lanes of Bruton Smith’s glorious Vegas drag strip and await their turn. Some are piled on their paint-matched golf cart, others leaning against it, the breathtaking beauty and expanse of Las Vegas Motor Speedway seems surreal to the lifelong residents of Hagerstown, a town of 40,000 a little over an hour outside of the nation’s capital.
The mood amongst the event’s headlining racers, including former U.S. Nationals winner, turbo guru and owner of Pro Line Racing, Eric Dillard (filling in behind the wheel of the once quickest doorslammer on earth, Jose Gonzalez’s twin-turbo Camaro), 2012 NHRA Pro Modified World Champion Troy Coughlin, and West Coast heavy-hitter Mike Maggio was that the stage was set for a history-making run. World-renowned turbo crew chief Steve Petty had spoken openly about the possibility of one of the cars he was involved with—those driven by Dillard and Coughlin—dipping into the 5.60s. Meanwhile, Stanley and the rest of his Maryland Mötley Crüe were holding onto simply making a five-second quarter-mile pass devoid of any mechanical carnage or on-track chaos.
“We were hoping for the best,” says John Stanley, 41. “And you always do, but it definitely felt like there was a good chance we were about to blow some shit up. We’d been over it, but when I was strapping in the car dad leaned in and told me, ‘If it feels good, stay in it.’”
Responding to commands from his father over the radio as he slowly crept back towards the starting line after his burnout, the younger of the two Stanleys was still coming to terms with the idea of “staying in it”—even if it did feel good. He’d been on many a trip down 1,320 feet of drag strip, but it had been years since his NSCA Pro Street days. And while his father had tuned quarter-mile Pro Mods everywhere from America and Canada to Australia, New Zealand, England and even South Africa, it was always for those utilizing roots-style superchargers, never with the staggering boost and power capability of the screw-type blower he was staring at through the windshield.
“I let off the button and the car left good,” he recalls. “It was coming up on the eighth-mile and I was clenching my butt cheeks the whole time, watching that blower, hoping it was going to stay on there. Then some fuel started spraying on the windshield, and I let out of it. It would have made it to the other end, but I didn’t want to be responsible for knocking the blower off.”
Having aborted the run early, Stanley’s basic instinct was to shrug it off; try to find a little satisfaction in saving parts and living to race again. Parachutes blossomed and while coasting through the shutdown area, the faint outline of the Spring Mountains visible in the fall night sky, the familiar voice of Scott Kline came over the radio: “Five-seventy-nine.”
This story was originally published on April 26, 2014. 
