TAN Driver Blog - Johnny Ahten - TAD

Well, it’s been way too long since my last blog so I apologize for that. Let me fill everybody in on what’s new. I am actually typing this poolside while my kids are swimming and I must admit I’m bit jealous right now. 

Our last outing was the Regional in Sonoma. It turned out to be way hotter than I wanted, reaching 98 degrees on Saturday. When we arrived to park on Wednesday it was a nice 70 degrees with a slight cloud cover. Thursday stayed about the same with the marine layer keeping it cloudy until around noon. We put the car together and were able to make a half track pass at 4pm. Everything looked great, a nice .931 sixty foot and good numbers to half track. Plus the leak down looked great so we were very happy. The next day we had a bit of a weather change and it wasn’t in our favor. The temp went up and we slowed down with each incremental. We threw some at it for Saturday as it got even hotter and ran basically the same run as the day before. In the last session we tweaked it some more and ran another 5.53 so we knew it was a better run because it was the hottest so far. 

First round paired us with Ray Martin and his blown car was running strong in qualifying. We hopped the Stumppuller up and it was about ten degrees cooler for first round, both helped out. We had him covered all the way to the 1000’ clock which is where we suffered all weekend. We were just too fat on the top end running a 5.41 to his 5.38. Congrats to Martin for making it to the final and congrats to Chris Demke for another win for 801Racing!

The best part of the weekend was that I was able to bring my wife Monica and two boys and stay at the track in the motorhome. Summer is great having the kids out of school! My oldest starts football for the first time tomorrow and he is really excited. He really wanted to play tackle so we’ll see how that goes. Mama’s gonna be a mess.

Now that we have Sonoma behind us I have a long list of summer projects which have been put off for racing. Some are at my Dad’s and a whole bunch are here at my house. I hope to knock some out before it’s time to prep the car. That’s about all I can think about right now so I will sign off till the next one.


Johnny Ahten is the driver of the Island Renovations/801 Racing A/Fuel Dragster. Find him on Facebook and Instagram (johnnyahten).