There’s a version of race day that looks clean on the highlights reel – a crisp burnout, perfect launch, a number on the board that moves you up the qualifying ladder. And then there’s the version Clay Millican lived through during this past weekend’s Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals in Pomona.
This version included a grinding, sweaty, gear-oil-soaked Saturday that had his entire operation camped in the staging lanes, watching the clock, watching the track get torn apart, watching their own runs produce dropped cylinders and performance marks that fell below the team’s admittedly high expectations.
The weekend started off with plenty of optimism. Millican’s crew rolled into the third round of qualifying sitting 10th, the sun already pushing harder than it had the day before with the cloud cover thinning. The goal was simple and achievable: get into the top half of the field, and more importantly, avoid the scenario of Millican and teammate Tony Schumacher drawing each other in the first round, a repeat of what happened at the previous race in Phoenix. Millican had his helmet on and was ready to “stomp that loud pedal.” Then everything fell apart two pairs ahead of him.
Not long after Schumacher left the starting line, the rear end let go. It wasn’t a simple parts failure or a slow leak, but a catastrophic shredding that threw gear oil across the racing surface. When a Top Fuel rear end breaks at speed and the engine suddenly has nothing to drive, it doesn’t just stall – it over-revs violently and breaks just about everything connected to it in the process. The photos made the rounds fast. Nobody had seen anything quite like what was left of that housing. Within minutes, every hand from both sides of the Millican-Schumacher operation was over on Tony’s side of the trailer, working on the wreckage.
An hour passed. Then another. The NHRA Safety Safari worked the lanes with oil dry while Millican stood around doing what racers do in these moments…he waited, talked to his guys, gave updates to anyone who’d listen, and tried to stay focused.
“Really sorry, race fans,” he told the crowd over the PA system with the kind of genuine decency that makes Millican one of the most universally respected people in the nitro pits. “I promise you, Tony Schumacher did not come up here thinking to himself, ‘Uh, this is how we wanted the day to go.’”
When the staging lanes finally reopened, Millican and crew rolled back up for what should have been a redemption run. The track was understandably questionable, and everyone knew it. The oil dry was piled deep in the corners of the lane where Schumacher’s car had laid its mechanical guts across the asphalt. Millican completed his burnout, staged, and then almost immediately put a hole out after launching. The cylinder dropped on them before the car could build any real momentum, and the run was over before it ever really started.
Three runs into qualifying and they’d heard the same radio call three times. Hole out. Hole out. Hole out. There was a brief moment of confusion – one run turned out not to be a hole-out at all, but a broken fuel line near the injector hat that sprayed fuel and sent crew member Jesse Snyder grabbing for the kill switch. From there, the bad news never really stopped, with the fourth and final qualifying session adding a Christmas tree malfunction throwing another ten-to-fifteen minute delay into the mix.
What makes this story worth telling isn’t the mechanical misery – equipment breaks in Top Fuel all the time. Nitromethane is inherently violent, and the machinery that survives it does so by the slimmest of margins. Every year, teams have to send a representative to NHRA’s mandatory nitro safety meeting, sign their name, and confirm they understand exactly what they’re handling, because what they’re handling is genuinely dangerous stuff.
But the real story is how Millican handled the situation. Not once did he point fingers at the manufacturer, at the track crew, at the timing system, at the weather, at anyone. He stood there in the California heat, helmet under his arm, camera rolling, and talked straight to his audience. When crew chief Jon Oberhofer shrugged off the hole-out problem with a “dropping them holes, baby,” Millican didn’t dress it up. He reported it exactly like he heard it.
“It ain’t just us,” Millican said. “It’s nitro. And it’s our fault. We’ll figure it out.”
That’s the thing about a team like Millican’s – they’ve been here before. Millican said it himself at the end of an absolutely brutal day: the number on the qualifying sheet on Saturday doesn’t define what happens Sunday. Ladder position matters, but momentum is its own kind of currency, and a team that figures out their gremlins between sessions can come out of the trailer on race day a different animal entirely.
Pomona has always had a way of humbling people. For Millican, his people are the ones who spent two hours cleaning up someone else’s catastrophe without being asked, the ones who kept the cameras rolling through every long delay, and the ones who smiled through it at the end and said, “at least we’re racing in Pomona.”
And race he did. Starting from the No. 12 spot, Millican scored an upset victory over Shawn Reed in round one, running a solid 3.758 elapsed time at 318.47 mph. In the quarterfinals, he smoked the tires at the hit in a loss to reigning Top Fuel points champion Doug Kalitta. Although it wasn’t the result Millican and the Rick Ware Racing team wanted, their perseverance and first-round victory can help propel them moving forward.
They’ll be ready to line up again next weekend in Charlotte for the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals with something to prove, and that’s not the worst place to be.
