NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Buddy Hull will be making his season debut in Top Fuel this weekend, carrying a new major sponsor in Methanol Moonshine, local sponsorship from Chompie’s restaurant and Camelback Ford, a new crew chief in veteran Mike Guger, and a ton of expectations and dreams.

“We just want to we want to have a better race car and we want to be consistent and try to find a way to get out here all the time, for a full season,” said Hull. “So that's what we're working on.

“We signed Methanol Moonshine as a major sponsor, which is a huge help,” he said. “Wade Aunger, the owner of Methanol Moonshine, has a son who is a sprint car racer and they got heavily involved in racing over there, and he knew [drag racing journalist] Chris Bishop, and Chris helped Wade get the brand over here.

“We're also trying to get sponsorship regionally to try to bring some new blood into the sport. We’ve got Chompie’s restaurant this weekend — they're really helping us out. They're a great company. It’s a family-owned deal, but at the same time, kind of corporate — and we have Camelback Ford.”

The team didn’t get a chance to test in the offseason, so the plan is to use their first two qualifying runs as early-shutoff test passes before hitting it hard in Q3.

“We were going to test last week in Dallas,” said Hull. “We had a really warm winter in Dallas until we got ready to test and then it turns to winter. So instead we just worked in our shop every day, putting heads together and motors and everything else. 

Guger, who’s been a major part of the sport since the 1970s, learning under the wing of the late, great Dale Armstrong and tuning most recently for Leah Pruett and larry Dixon on the Vandergriff Motorsports team, installed his own tune-up into the car that last year ran a Tim Wilkerson-brewed combination, but Wilkerson’s new Scag sponsorship doesn’t allow him to help out around the pits as much as he used to, plus Hull felt Guger needed his own combination.

“Tim’s combination is different than the way I do it, and there's nothing wrong with it, but I've gone down this road before trying to make somebody else's stuff run,” said Guger. “Nobody thinks the same way and doing it from scratch was the only way I knew I’d have a chance of success starting out.”

“Every crew chief’s got their deal and I wanted Mike to have it his way,” said Hull. “I don't want to ask my crew chief to tune off someone else's configuration. On the other hand, every single big-name crew chief stopped by here to say ‘Whatever you need …’  and they're looking at the computer and trying to get Mike on the right track because everyone respects him so much and wants him to do well.”

Another thing high on the team’s plans is a new, lighter car that they hope to have by the time of the Dodge Power Brokers NHRA U.S. Nationals

Hull, a former competitive weightlifter, lost 22 pounds over the winter — “That's this lightest I've been in since high school,” he says proudly — to help the cause, but it’s still not enough.

“This car came from Wilkerson — it’s a 2009 [Murf] McKinney car, and it's a new ‘old’ car that’s only got 48 total runs on it and was front-halved in 2021 — but it’s heavy, plus I’m still the heaviest driver out here. We need to get as close to 2,330 pounds [the class minimum weight] as we can but right now we’re rolling across the scales at 2,490. 

“If we run a 3.80 in this car, we think that with the same tune-up and parts, a brand-new car would run 3.76. It's heavy — it was built a little bit beefier than a modern car — so it's a disadvantage.”

After the NHRA Arizona Nationals, the team will sit out next weekend’s Winternationals before picking up again at the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals in Las Vegas for the second of nine planned events this season.