(Photo: Don Schumacher Racing)
By Aaron Bearden
It’s race day to open the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season at Auto Club Raceway, and stress levels are high. Teams and drivers will find out today whether the work put in over the offseason was enough to deliver them immediate success to start 2019.
Everyone will know the winning teams executed over the offseason, and they’ll celebrate at day’s end. But what most may not realize is the logistic victories each organization has made just to get to Pomona with everything intact.
All told the NHRA offseason lasts less than three months, with preseason testing and the holidays thrown in. That leaves teams scrambling from the start to get everything changed over and fresh heading into the new year – particularly large organizations like Don Schumacher Racing (DSR).
“We have a very short offseason,” DSR marketing and communications manager Ted Yerzyk told Motorsports Beat. “We finish up at Pomona in the middle of November, and I always joke about it. ‘We’ll see you back here in about 86 days.’.
“It causes me to lose a lot of sleep, because we’re kind of like chameleons, right? We shed all of our colors and show back up at the same place 2500 miles away with a different shade – new paint schemes, trailer wraps and all that stuff.”
DSR is one of the NHRA’s power organizations, with multiple cars competing in both the Top Fuel Dragster and Funny Car divisions. The additional teams give DSR extra chances at a Wally trophy to close out each race weekend, but they make the offseason a sprint to get equipment, sponsorship deals and clothing worked out for the coming year.
One of the biggest obstacles in DSR’s path is the renovation and re-wrapping of trailers.
“We travel 19 to 20 trailers to every race,” Yerzyk said. “We can bring up to 24 of them, depending on if we have the factory stock program or not. We raced seven last year, eight this year. Four are just for hospitality. One’s a kitchen trailer. One’s just a freight trailer to haul equipment… We have a lot of assets moving up and down the road.”
The process of turning around the trailers begins from the moment they arrive at the shop to start the offseason.
“Immediately when we get home, we start stripping all of our trailers.,” Yerzyk said. “Graphic design has already taken place, so we start with art approvals. Which goes across many lines, different partners. You have certain partners that are specific to one team, and then you have folks like NAPA, Pennzoil or Matco (Tools) that are across the board – official lubricants, official tools. So their branding is across all of your assets.”
After art approvals come wraps and designs on the trailer, rear doors, and even the race cars that will soon head to the track. Each Funny Car program has three bodies available at each race, while Top Fuel teams bring two. With the size of DSR’s program, that can lead to nearly 20 wrapped bodies for its teams alone. The organization also does occasional outsourced work for other teams, adding to the offseason workload.
Wraps are a challenge, and a task that requires extreme precision and patience. That makes employees that can accomplish it quickly and accurately a valuable asset for teams.
“What those guys do… When you’re around it, seeing Keith (Nelson) wrap a Funny Car and a dragster canopy is very impressive,” Yerzyk said. “The patience and the way they work the vinyl with torches, heating everything up and stretching without creases, is really impressive to watch.
“It’s one of those things where there’s one guy in our shop that can do it really well, and that’s Keith. So he’s extremely valuable employee to the organization, especially with as many vehicles as we wrap. I think we wrapped 80 different vehicles last year for our race teams, other teams and our factory stock program, our tow vehicles… It was an insane amount of wraps that we did in-house.”
While wrapping is being completed, the smaller team details have to be ironed out. Drivers need to take their yearly photos, and hero cards need made. Show cars also need built along with standard race car – DSR had two that needed sent out before the start of the season.
Approvals have to be gained from sponsors. DSR trades out its fleet of trucks for new Dodge Durangos each year. Clothing and helmets need made for both the drivers and the teams, and the correct sponsor logos must be placed on everything from tool boxes to crew shirts. That leaves multiple levels of graphic design work, all requiring various approvals and often with deadlines set by the partners.
The planning process is hectic and intense, making for long days at the shop and occasional travel requirements that often arrive unexpectedly. All of this goes on behind the scenes, while other members of the team work on the race cars themselves to ensure they’re in top shape come the return trip to Pomona.
While some think of the offseason as a time for rest, the three months off are far from a vacation time to NHRA teams. Instead they’re filled with heavily scheduled, intense work days with little margin for error.
“One of the questions we always get is: ‘What do you do all offseason?’ Because unless you’re immersed in it, and it’s your day-to-day life, you think we just don’t race for three months,” Yerzyk said. “But that’s not the case. We’ve got a fabrication shop making the front half of the chassis, building new chassis, mounting Funny Car bodies and building headers. The CNC shop runs non-stop making blocks and cylinder heads, hundreds of parts that our teams use. We also sell to other teams within the sport.
“It’s a 12-month business. It doesn’t ever stop. There’s never a lull. We work a full calendar year.”
Teams take most of the holiday season off, but the shop workers tend to work through most of the holiday calendar. Working Saturdays isn’t uncommon, and occasionally even the best-planned weeks can be turned on their head.
“You come in with a plan, but you don’t always stick to that plan,” Yerzyk said. “I joke that the day’s not throwing you a curveball, it’s throwing you a crazy knuckle slider, or a changeup. Sometimes when you come in, you feel like you’re stepping up to the plate against Mariano Rivera. How am I going to hit this guy?
“There are a lot of obstacles, but you have to be mentally prepared. We have a very seasoned group of people that gets along well, so we’re in regular communication. We use an app called Slack to communicate, and obviously we text.
“My colleague Kyle Cunningham, Blake Elliott, our senior VP Mike Lewis. We’re all heavily involved in the art approval process. Our graphic designer Aaron Holland, installer Keith Nelson. We work pretty well together, and that’s important. It has to be like an offensive line on a football team. You have to block and protect the quarterback if you want to be successful.”
Along with the planning and flexibility comes another requirement – passion.
The racing industry is filled with people trying to outwork each other and manufacture the perfect racing setup, from the bottom of the company ladder to the driver in the cockpit. For Yerzyk, a typical work week could be interrupted by a necessary flight to meet with a sponsor hours away, or a morning call from a vendor arriving at the team shop earlier than anticipated – both incidents that occurred for DSR in the weeks leading up to the 2019 season.
Working through those issues and opportunities requires more than just strong character or loyalty. There has to be genuine enthusiasm for the program and people within it.
“It’s really a 24-7, 365 (day) job,” Yerzyk said. “You have to have that passion and love for what you do.
“At the end of the day, it’s no different than other sports. If you’re a football coach, you’re probably putting in more than an eight-hour day. Planning and prepping, film study… You’re probably putting in 12-hour days regularly. That’s how our offseason is.”
With the 2019 offseason complete, teams flocked to Pomona earlier this week to begin a new year of drag racing. The fresh liveries, new threads and recharged teams were shown to the racing world for the first time.
Only then could behind-the-scenes workers like Yerzyk breathe a sigh of relief. The final weeks before the season still had hurdles to cross — Yerzyk noted DSR wasn’t done wrapping hospitality trailers in the final days before traveling to California — but once the race weekend finally gots underway, the fruits of the intensive offseason grind were on display for all to see.
“I get to Pomona every year, and when it all gets set up you look at it and take a deep breath,” Yerzyk said. “You can look at it and see that we accomplished a lot in a short period of time. It’s incredible.”
