NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Last season, two-time NHRA champion Del Worsham picked up one win and finished seventh in points, and this season he’s looking to come out on top again, this time with his father, veteran team owner and crew chief Chuck Worsham. At the end of the last season, Worsham left Kalitta Motorsports to rejoin his family-owned team, Worsham Racing.

 

Worsham will be racing with Lucas Oil as his primary sponsor for the first six races of the season in his Toyota Camry Funny Car but at this weekend’s Circle K NHRA Winternationals Worsham’s main goal is to start the season strong, and to continue to work out the new kinks.

 

“This is a throwback team,” said Worsham. “When I look around the shop, most of the guys who are here right now have worked with me at some point through my career, through the last 20-something years. I’m back with my dad, and we haven’t moved back into our big shop yet. We had people lease our property from us, so as of Feb. 1, we can’t get our big shop back. So we’re still working out of this little shop and it reminds me of our garage back from when I was kid. It’s crammed, it’s tight spaces, but everybody is there, and everybody is smiling, and we’re getting the work done. And when we get back from Pomona we’ll move back into the big shop, but for right now it reminds me an awful lot like the early 1990s.”

 

The season opener at Worsham’s home track in Pomona, Calif., will be the first event for him when he’s back on his own. Prior to this season, Worsham has runner-upped at the Winternationals three times, twice to John Force in 1993 and 2002, and then to Ron Capps last season.

 

“With Pomona being my home track I have a lot of family and friends here, and that’s always fun,” he said. “But this is also the place where I had my first race, it’s the first place I ever competed. It was the finals, not the Winternationals, but coming here reminds me of the beginning when everything was exciting and anything you accomplished was a really big feat. And so if we could go to Pomona—you always want to win—but if we could qualify that would be a pretty great start to our season.”

 

Worsham and the new team made their first runs together at the Nitro Spring Training test session in Phoenix last weekend.

 

“Testing went well,” he assessed. “We went into testing with a couple of goals that we needed to do, and we did those in one day as planned, and got back to work for Pomona. I think a lot of our success is going to come from preparation, and we didn’t have a whole lot of time, but we did what we had to do, and got the answers to what we needed to know, and we’re back in the shop working. We’re further ahead than where I thought we would be. I made this decision in mid-November, and I knew we had to race in a couple of months. Most corporations had already set their budgets and I knew finding a sponsor who was going to invest in our team was going to be tough. For being the first weekend of February, we’re ahead of where I thought we would be."