Kalitta DHL F/C to return!

KALITTA FUNNY CAR WILL RETURN
Written by Bobby Bennett
Wednesday, 09 July 2008

Funny Car could return to action as early as Brainerd


Team Kalitta wants answers and for that very reason their Funny Car team could return to action as early as the NHRA Lucas Oil Nationals in Brainerd, Minn.

Jim Oberhofer said it’s important that their team gets to the bottom of the engine explosion and subsequent parachute failure which led to the death of driver Scott Kalitta. There are only a short handful of drivers being considered for this position as successor to Kalitta’s cockpit.

“We want to figure out what happened first,” said Oberhofer. “That’s our number one priority. Obviously everything that happened to Scott was kind of like a perfect storm. You know everything that could possibly go wrong did. So that’s the main thing we’re looking at. We’re looking at -- What happened to the engine? Why did the engine explode … because we don’t have data obviously from a computer.”

Oberhofer said the outpouring of support from John Force Racing, Alan Johnson and Dick LaHaie among others has been incredible.


“We’ve had a lot of good people come out here and look and we’re narrowing things down to what we think happened -- you know we don’t know yet,” Oberhofer explained. “But we are narrowing it down. So that’s obviously the first thing we want to do; we want to find out why did this car explode? And then the other thing that we want to do is find out why when the car did explode like why the chutes didn’t blossom…why there was so much fire…the reason why I say these things is because we want to find out these things before we put a car out on the track again.

“So we would like to do that, put a car back out on the track but we are not going to do it unless we do it the right way. The other thing is you cannot replace Scott. He was a pit bull behind the wheel and he was an excellent driver. We’re looking at what our long term plans are, we can’t do this year because of the testing ban and all of this kind of stuff. We’re looking at maybe a short term solution, if we do bring that car out for the rest of the season with an interim driver. But whatever we do, we just want to do this the right way and we want to learn from what happened. We want to try and honor Scott the greatest way we can; we don’t know how to do that but we are going to. The best way we know how to do it is do this car right and make sure we have learned from everything that happened to Scott. Hopefully Scott will save another life down the road, that’s what we’re aiming for and hopefully what we will get.”

Oberhofer confirmed there’s an extremely short list of drivers being considered. Those not in consideration a source close to the team told CompetitionPlus, include those who sent in resumes before Kalitta’s funeral.

“We’ve got a few names…we’re going to lean on a few guys around here that are close to us or the other ones out there that are close to us also….Del Worshams, Tim Wilkersons, and things like that,” Oberhofer said. “Get their input and their opinion on it all. Kind of go from there I guess.”

Getting the Kalitta Funny Car back into action with Glen Mikres tuning would go a long way towards healing a major wound suffered by the team.

“We do want to get it back out there because you know it’s kind of silly, maybe it’s not silly, maybe it’s a part of the healing process just putting that thing back out there,” Oberhofer said. “It will never be the same without Scott driving it but we want to complete the mission that we had when we first ran the car and that was to have a competitive funny car that wins races. I think that car was starting to go down that path and it showed at Chicago that it was doing it and even at Englishtown it went down the track on a hot race track, when everything happened. We’d like to bring it back out and we want to bring it back out, Connie wants to bring it back out. We just have to make sure that we do everything the right way before we bring it back out and onto the track.”

Oberhofer said the right time could be Brainerd. If not then, Indianapolis would be the next logical venue.

“Yeah I think it’s realistic…A lot depends on who we put in that seat,” said Oberhofer. “We have a very short list of people that we want to put in the seat and we’re talking to other teams about people who are involved with Funny Cars getting their suggestions and opinions and things like that. We’re looking at a couple of different options. It’s something that we’re working on because Connie’s got so many things he’s working on. It’s hard to talk about; I don’t even want to talk to him about it. Sometimes he brings it up and sometimes I bring it up but sooner or later we’re going to have to make a decision if we are going to go in this direction.

“We know what we want to do next year but we can’t do that right now. We’re looking at a temporary solution for the rest of the season, we just want to make sure we do the right things and do things the right way. So we can get back out there and get this car back on track. It’s hard; it’s hard right now to try and think about who are we going to put there, how are we going to do it, and so on and so forth. There are just so many things going on and sometimes it’s just hard to even talk about that Funny Car because when you think about it; it’s Scott’s car. That’s what it is. It’s hard but we want to get it back out there and going down the track.

“We have a lot of good people who work on that car. There is a lot of regrouping to do with that car; we lost everything in that crash. Besides Scott, we lost everything on that car; there is not a good part left on that car. So where do you go from here? I mean we have a new updated car that is completely finished but is there other things we can do to fix this thing and make it even better than what it is right now? I don’t think there’s a car in the world that would have survived what Scott went through.

Oberhofer said the team will not race gun shy, but will be extra careful with every detail on the car.

“The main thing we have to do is take the proper procedures to make sure what happened to Scott doesn’t ever happen again,” Oberhofer said. “We still have to figure out what happened and what is wrong, so it doesn’t happen again. You know it was probably a one in a million run but it’s a one in a million run which means it could happen again so we have to do everything we can do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. I don’t know if we have a specific time frame.

“Yeah, going to Brainerd would be great. Indy would be fine. Even finishing the last three races of the season would be good but we’re just going to take it one day at a time. The guys on the Funny Car team are just now getting back here this week. We’re going to start to regroup, reassemble and order parts and things like that to get things back to normal. It’s a long road though…it really is.”