The Dubbin Motorsports Top Alcohol Dragster team failed to qualify at Norwalk, ending a planned comeback weekend at a track where the team previously scored a win. Driver Kirk Wolf and the team encountered issues across all three qualifying sessions.
In Q1, the team lost an O-ring in the barrel valve during the burnout, causing a fuel leak. Crew members worked to repair the leak but left the throttle stop in place, limiting injector blade travel and forcing Wolf to abort the run with only part throttle.
“We lost an O-ring in the barrel valve in the burnout, so it was leaking fuel everywhere,” said team owner Dean Dubbin. “While they were trying to fix that, we forgot to take the throttle stop off, but that turned out to be good news because the engine had an issue that would’ve been catastrophic if we had tried to make a full pass.”
In Q2, the car shook early and dropped cylinders past half‑track, leaving Wolf with a run that kept him just outside the show in the No. 17 spot. In Q3, the car left hard but rattled the tires just past 60 feet. Wolf tried a quick pedal slap, but the front end began to lift, forcing him to shut it off.
“In Q3, Kirk peddled it, and it hiked the front end up, and he had to abort the run,” Dubbin said of the Q3 attempt. “There isn’t much you can do when they start lifting the front end like that.”
The team made multiple changes over the weekend, including a clutch swap and a nitromethane drum change to rule out fuel contamination.
“Through the weekend, we put a completely different clutch in the car, and we even changed our drum of Nitro, thinking we had some contaminated fuel,” said Dubbin. “The car is extremely aggressive, and we have to work on getting it through the shake zone.
“To sum it up, we aren’t happy at all with what we are putting on the racetrack right now,” Dubbin added. “This team has too much talent and too much experience to be running like this. We will be doing some testing to get things straightened out before the Brainerd event in August.”
Dubbin declined to address rumors about a new Top Alcohol Dragster program under development, but he did hint that the team may roll out “something new” when they return at Brainerd later in the summer.
