NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

At the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals, Leah Pruett’s Tony Stewart Racing dragster is covered in blue livery and bannering Code 3 Associates, a non-profit organization dedicated to, among other things, rescuing pets in disaster-stricken regions, wading into the aftermath of tornadoes and hurricanes to reunite beloved pets with their owners. Code 3 has long been a part of the Tony Stewart Racing and Stewart Haas Racing teams, and now they’ve come to the NHRA.

You can’t help but see a bit of an analogy between all that and the results of the team’s first three races, surviving a whirlwind of off-season work to start a Top Fuel team almost from scratch and being a little bit lost themselves with two first-round losses and a DNQ, but Las Vegas is quickly looking like the race that has reunited them with their potential.

Neal Strausbaugh tuned the car to two brilliant runs Friday –- a 3.77 and a 3.74 -– and Pruett finds herself atop the Top Fuel heading into today’s final two sessions and there’s every reason to believe that they could hold onto that spot or even improve on that performance.

That’s all quite a turnaround from the Gatornationals, where the team failed to qualify on its lone pass -– which was also round one of the Pep Boys NHRA All-Star Callout -– after the car smoked the tires, but Pruett always knew that the good times were coming.

“To not qualify in a race pretty much out of the gate in a season can be disheartening, but the one benefit is the attitudes that these individuals we have on this team," she said. “I've never been around such positive-minded individuals when you've had dark, long, incredibly insane hours of supply-chain issues and chassis and all the problems that we had, and for them to continue with a positive mindset helped me.

“We were definitely able to move past that [DNQ] pretty fast because of the situations that were surrounding it. It was the Callout, we only got one run down the track, and the rain just annihilated that entire weekend, so it's not like we had four attempts and we couldn't find ourselves. There were other great teams that didn't qualify, too.”

The silver lining for the Tony Stewart team came the next day when Funny Car teammate Matt Hagan defeated tire-smoking Blake Alexander in the final round to give Stewart his first NHRA Wally, and Pruett was just as excited for him and the team as she would have been if it had been her.

“Somebody showed Matt a video of us on the starting line, our reactions," she said. "You're never supposed to get excited until the actual win light comes on because anything could happen; then finally when the light came on, I just jumped [in excitement]. It never crossed my mind who would be the first one to get a win for Tony Stewart Racing because it's not our mentality. Hagan told me, ‘Leah that was really cool to like see your genuine happiness. I know you probably wanted to get that first win,’ and, sure, I’d have liked to, but we are one team, all team, as we say internally and externally. This is not like just mine and Tony's race team; this is Matt’s and Neal’s and Stretch’s [Mike Knudsen], so the sooner the win came the better, and the sooner ours comes the better.”

Now that the car is working well, Pruett has turned the focus on herself.

“I feel like I'm in a rut on my starting line and here's the thing: I'm going to get out of it,” she said. “All great drivers do and they're there right beside me getting out of it and supplied me with a car that I can drive and it goes straight and it hooks and doesn't carry the wheels at 300 feet. 

“Each curveball that gets thrown at you, It's just making you better for what really counts.”