Willpower
By Abigail Nelson '01
Photos by Brea Walker '02
It is a warm winter day in Pomona, California. At the
Carquest Auto Parts NHRA Winternationals, thousands
of fans have driven to see their favorite drag racers. It is
Sunday, the final day of NHRA≠s annual season opener,
and fans eagerly wait to see who will take home the
trophies in the first event of the season. In the team
pits, there is a flurry of activity as those teams who qualified in
the days before prepare for the first eliminations of the season.
The Kalitta Motorsports pits are set up with trailers, tents and
hospitality centers. Hillary Will '02 is in her trailer preparing
for her first final round of her professional career.
Will's team works quickly on her Top Fuel dragster. They
make adjustments on the dragster, knowing that this car will
soon be racing at more than 300 m.p.h. and knowing that
every adjustment on the car must be perfect. A crowd gathers
around the pit to watch the team work and hopes for a glimpse
of the driver or an autograph.
The team prepares to start the 10,000-horsepower engines,
and the fans put in their earplugs and cover their ears. They
stand behind the dragster as it thunders to life and exhaust
burns their eyes. Fans are amazed and fascinated by the dragsters
and at the precision that it takes to prepare one for a race.
In the hospitality center set up next to the trailer, Will's
family and friends sit. Her father, Steve, and grandfather,
"Grandpa," as everyone calls him, are proud. In the past eight
years they guided Will's career and taught her to become
a drag racer. She has received much media attention this
weekend, both as a rookie and a female driver, with her good
qualifying times. Both her father and grandfather know that
each race is a separate race, and anything could happen in
eliminations.
Will has left her trailer to go to the starting line for driver
introductions. The pro drivers are called out to the starting line
and are introduced to the fans before the races begin. Being
introduced to the fans as one of the professional drivers is
something that Will has been dreaming of for a long time.
"I used to watch the driver introductions and hoped that
someday it would be me out there with the pro drivers," she
said. "Now it is."
At 25, Will, now sitting behind the wheel of a Top Fuel
dragster in a fire suit and helmet, has come a long way from
racing her Dodge Challenger at her local track. She is now a
professional drag racer.
A fast start
Will began drag racing more than eight years ago. She grew
up outside of Eureka, California, five hours north of San
Francisco. Her first drag race was at her local track, the
Samoa Dragstrip. Her father, who gave up racing to have
a family and a business, had given Will his old '73 Dodge
Challenger, and this was the car she drove to school every
day.
One day he asked her if she wanted to take her car down
the quarter mile to see how fast it would run. Will, who had
always been a fan of drag racing, was nervous, having only
watched the sport. With encouragement from her father, Will raced the Challenger and found she liked it˘a lot. She began
racing Super Street and started to win.
"We started winning and then I knew I was really hooked,"
recalls Will. As she kept winning races, she was able to move
up and began racing Super Comp and Super Gas.
In 1998 Will traveled east to Wheaton, recommended by a
local doctor. She majored in economics and was a diver on
the swimming and diving team, and wondered how her love
of racing would intersect with her academic career.
"I kept coming home every summer during college just so
that I could race, thinking each summer was my last." Her
dream of becoming a pro racer never faded.
After graduating magna cum laude in 2002, Will moved
back home and, like most graduates, began looking for a job.
She was hired by a local company as a financial analyst. While
unhappy sitting at desk all day, her job paid her enough to get
by and also allowed her to leave for long weekends to race.
"The more I raced, the more I developed a passion for it,"
she recalls. "Even when I was physically at work, my mind
was focused on racing."
Going pro
Will saved enough money to attend the Frank Hawley Drag
Racing School, and in January 2004 got her Top Alcohol
Dragster license on her first try. Racing a Top Alcohol Dragster
is similar to being in the minor leagues for baseball. The next
stop for a drag racer, like a baseball player, is to go pro.
When Will received her Top Alcohol license, her team
already had a car she could race in Top Alcohol. Will had
a lot of family support from her father, the team owner, and
Grandpa, the transporter for the team. Her brothers and sisters
often attended her races, as did many of her aunts, uncles and
cousins. [Will also enlisted the help of her former Wheaton
roommates and diving teammates, Abby Nelson and Brea
Walker, the author and photographer of this story, to do her
public relations and photography.]
Bucky Austin, a Funny Car racer and family friend, offered
to build the motors for the dragster.
"So we headed to the Top Alcohol Dragster class with a
team that didn't know anything about racing in that class,"
Will recalls. "All we knew was that we had the desire. We didn't even have the right tools and parts, but Bucky taught us
what stuff we needed, what clutch combinations to run, what
type of crew we needed and so on."
With Austin's guidance and the support from her family and
friends, Will and her team raced in a few divisional races in
2004, and in April 2005, won her first national event in Las
Vegas. She caught the eye of the media and other racers as
a Top Alcohol driver, running her career best of 270 m.p.h.
in 5.33 seconds and becoming the sixth female in history to
qualify number one in Top Alcohol Dragster.
In April 2005 Will decided to take her biggest risk ever.
"I finally decided that I wanted to go all or nothing and make
racing my career. I took a big risk and left my job to devote
100 percent of my time to turning my hobby into my career."
With her goal to secure sponsorship for her team, bringing in
enough money to eventually go pro, Will put all her efforts into
Girl Power Racing.
Her efforts and hard work were noticed by many, and in
August 2005, Will was approached by Ken Black Racing and
Kalitta Motorsports, who were teaming up for Top Fuel racing.
Connie Kalitta, owner of Kalitta Motorsports, is a drag racing legend, making it to 22 NHRA event final rounds with 10
wins as a driver. In 1977, he served as crew chief for Shirley
Muldowney when she became the first, and as yet, the only
female Top Fuel champion in NHRA history. Muldowney is in
charge of sponsor relations for one of Kalitta≠s dragsters driven
by David Grubnic, and she also serves as a mentor for Will.
Will was hired and moved to Michigan, where Kalitta
Motorsports is based. In the off-season, the team had a
dragster custom built for her. Her new dragster is still the
Girl Power Dragster, and Will hopes that she will be able to
inspire women and girls to believe in themselves.
"I hope other girls are inspired to take risks like trying
out for basketball, raising their hand in school, or applying
to business school," she says. "They have to believe in
themselves."
There was a learning curve for Will, learning to drive a Top
Fuel Dragster, one of three classes in drag racing. Each race
pits two drivers against each other on a quarter-mile track. A
Top Fuel dragster will reach 300 miles per hour in the time it
takes to read this sentence. Generally a driver will try to get
to the end of the quarter-mile track in about 4.5 seconds, at a speed of more than 320 m.p.h. In order to exceed 300 m.p.h.
in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate at an average of more
than 4Gs; however, by reaching 200 m.p.h. well before halftrack,
the launch acceleration is closer to 8Gs. At the end of
each run, a parachute on the back of the dragster is deployed,
forcing the car to go from about 5 positive Gs to 5 negative Gs.
If all the equipment is paid off, the crew works for free, and if
nothing on the car breaks, each run costs $1,000 per second.
"Drag racing is a very unforgiving sport," says Will. "Wins
and losses are literally separated by thousandths of a second.
The smallest driver mistake can have negative results. I must be
very focused and very precise in every movement. Sometimes
that≠s not easy when I≠m traveling over 325 m.p.h."
Each race takes place over a long weekend, with qualifying
runs on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. In these runs, it is not
the winner of each race that matters, it is their time. Drivers
have several chances to qualify for the final round. The final
round works elimination-style, with the winner from each race
advancing to the next round.
In the off-season, Will quickly adapted to life in Michigan.
As a Top Fuel driver, driving is only one part of her very
demanding job. She goes to the shop every day to help with
her car and to get to know her team. She is responsible for the
travel planning of the entire Kalitta Motorsports team of over
50 people. She also works in the office, often talking to the
media on the phone, doing some public relations, and working
hard to find a major sponsor for her team. She received her
Top Fuel license and learned how to drive her new dragster.
She tested in Las Vegas before the season began, with some of
the best times of all the teams testing that weekend.
Back in Pomona
At her pro debut in Pomona, Will heads into the final round
in a good position. She consistently ran well in qualifying,
with her best time of 4.515 seconds at 324.76 m.p.h. qualifying
her number four going into the finals. In her last qualifying
run on Saturday afternoon, Will≠s parachutes deploy too late,
and she rolls into the sand at the end of the track. It is a scary
moment, and the first time this has happened to Will. While
the incident will be replayed several times on ESPN2, Will
walked away uninjured.
Will finished at the Pomona Winternationals with a loss
due to a broken blower belt, but she is looking forward to the
next race.
"I just can't wait to do this all over again. I know my crew
is awesome. I have a great team˘a lot of support˘and
couldn≠t do anything without them."
