TAD Racer Dubbin Can't Get a Break

Courtesy of Todd Veney/Pro Sportsman Association

If it isn't one thing it's another this year for Alcohol Dragster racer Dean Dubbin. He's reached the semifinals somewhere at least once in each of his first three seasons in Top Alcohol Dragster, but 2014 has only grown more frustrating as it's dragged on, topped (he hopes) by a first-round foul last weekend at the Central Regional at Tri-State Raceway in Earlville, Iowa.

Opponent Randy Meyer had dominated all weekend and eventually won, but in the first round against Dubbin, he was, for once, vulnerable. "I knew I was going to smoke the tires," he told Dubbin later. "You know what's sad?" Dubbin said. "I did too."

Meyer did went up in smoke right off the line – right after Dubbin left before the Tree came on. It's not like Dubbin, up against the No. 1 qualifier, got the yips, completely lost his concentration, and took off – a solenoid failed, and as soon as he went up against the converter, the car left. "I was probably 50 feet out before I even knew what was going on," he said. "The solenoid shook itself loose. You have to use it for the burnout, and to back up from the burnout, and to go up to the starting line, and it activated all three times, but for whatever reason, when I went to bring the motor up to leave, it didn't, and the car just left."

Dubbin's frustration was further compounded when he realized, somewhere around half-track, that Meyer hadn't blasted past him with another great run that would have beat him anyway. Instead, Meyer coasted across the finish line about five seconds behind him with a 15.80 at 53 mph.

"I was idling down there, and Randy was nowhere to be seen," Dubbin said. 'I knew it,' I said to myself when he didn't come around me. 'He did smoke the tires.' That was the time to get him, right there – first round, when he had to run a whole different motor than he'd been running all weekend. The starting line was great, the track was super smooth, and I really thought the conditions were going to play right into our hands. Out in the middle – where an A/Fueler really needs the track to be good – it wasn't quite as good as it was down low, where our kind of car needs traction. That's where we really have to perform, because at the other end the other end, the converter is going to be slipping. My little 464 cubic inch motor is all out of torque by half-track."

Torque converter setups like Dubbin's leave just as hard as A/Fuelers and blown-alcohol/pedal-clutch cars, and he had .900 and .901 60-foot times at his first race of the season, Tulsa – and that was at a corrected altitude of nearly 5,000 feet. "This whole thing started right after that race, when we had to switch to another motor that we thought was identical to the first one," said Dubbin, an awning manufacturer from Royalton, Minn. "The car started shaking and smoking the tires, and that's something it never used to do. The power level is different, obviously. The car will shake, I'll click it off, we'll come back and give it a bunch more power, it will smoke the tires, and we'll think, 'OK, just back it down a little from here, and we should be good.' But it's not happening. The car shook so hard in Brainerd that it took all the teeth off the ring and pinion."

Dubbin was gone after one round at the Topeka and Brainerd national events and at the Denver and Earlville regionals. The other two times he's raced this year, at the regional events at Tulsa and Topeka, he didn't qualify. "We really thought 2014 was going to be a big year, and it's been the exact opposite," he said. "I've never not qualified at two races in the same year – ever. We really wanted to run hard for the regional championship this year, so we rented the track for two days before the first race, Tulsa, and thought we had something to work with for the rest of the season. Didn't even qualify. At Denver, the car usually runs pretty good – we're always right there with the all clutch cars except Taliaferro's and Whiteley's. I was No. 2 going into the last qualifying session there and ended up third. 'This is looking pretty good,' we thought. Out first round. We've just been plagued with little issues all year, and it's driving me nuts."

As the season winds down, Dubbin, who's already entered more events this year than in any of the three previous years of his Top Alcohol Dragster career, will head back out to Oklahoma for the Central Region closer in Noble, and there's an outside chance that he will still, as originally planned, hit Las Vegas after that.

"It depends," he said. "I have to see how things go in Noble. If the littlest thing that you'd never think of doesn't bite us there, we just might be at Vegas. I thought about Earlville all the way home: 'What could I have done?' In hindsight, I guess we could've checked that solenoid before we went up there for first round, but why would we? It's never been a problem before. We'll be looking at it from now on, trust me. We'll be looking at everything. The only good that's come out of all this is that we're learning to check every unexpected piece for something wrong – that, and the fact that this has really taught the whole team [Mike Moran, Neil Hinman, Bob Lair, and Dubbin's wife, Karen] to persevere. This isn't like when I used to run Top Dragster – it's more like running Top Dragster now that that whole deal has stepped up – and you have to be 100 percent on top of everything all the time. I can tell you this: We'll be testing before we start racing next year, and we're going to figure this thing out. This car should be running in the low 5.40s and high 5.30s and going rounds, and next year, I really think it will be. I don't know what I did to piss off the luck gods this year, but we're going to get this deal figured out."