Hendey Worsham Funny Car Beaver Hunt Shirt
NHRA Funny Car driver Del Worsham doesn't mind throwing career curveballs -- or at least a good change-up -- once in a while.
After two decades of racing Funny Cars, Worsham made the most of an opportunity to pilot a Top Fuel dragster for the first time for powerful Al-Anabi Racing in 2011, and that resulted in Worsham's first NHRA championship. The second curveball he tossed came last year when he followed up his championship season by stepping out of the race car and taking on the role of crew chief for Alexis DeJoria and the Patron Tequila Funny Car team.
And if that wasn't enough to keep his fans -- and even his family -- second-guessing, Worsham decided to jump back into a Funny Car this season and address a little unfinished business: the elusive Funny Car title. Worsham is right on track after qualifying his Toyota Camry for this year's Countdown to the Championship playoffs, which start this weekend in Charlotte, N.C.
"What I really set out to do in my career was to win a Funny Car championship," Worsham, 43, said this week, on the eve of the kickoff to the six-race Countdown. "I had never even thought about being a Top Fuel driver. That kind of just came along with the job and with Sheikh Khalid over at Al-Anabi Racing. Basically, he had a great-running Top Fuel car and not such a great-running Funny Car. We gave the Funny Car [program] a couple of years over there, and it just wasn't getting to where he wanted it to be. He made the decision about halfway through 2010 to go ahead and ask me if I'd be interested in driving Top Fuel. He said thought he thought his money was better spent on two Top Fuel cars instead of one of each."
So Worsham, the NHRA's 1991 Rookie of the Year when at 21 he became the youngest driver in series history to win a race, made the switch to Top Fuel.
"I've got to be truthful," Worsham said. "We weren't doing that well [in the Funny Car program], and I was on board [for the switch to Top Fuel]. Let's do this and try something new. Basically, I had been driving the Funny Car for 20 years straight, so it was exciting. It was fun. We got to go out [in 2011] and win a lot of races, win a championship, race people I had never raced against after racing against the same people for 20 years. It was exciting."
The run in Top Fuel was short, however, as the team tapped Worsham on the shoulder with another career opportunity after the championship party was finished.
"I had driven basically for 22 straight years and had finally won the championship in 2011, and the opportunity came along to work with Alexis DeJoria," Worsham said. "She was fresh and she was young. When this whole job opportunity came along, I just kind of looked at my career and where I was and I had accomplished pretty much everything I thought I could at that point, and I decided to give [the crew chief job] that a shot. It definitely surprised my family. People thought that was just idle talk [that I might quit driving], so when I actually did it, my wife and my kids, they cried. They couldn't believe it."
Worsham helped DeJoria to a 13th-place finish in her first full NHRA season. That season included a runner-up finish at Bristol, and she qualified for 16 eliminations in 23 race weeks. While the success was modest, Worsham figured the Kalitta Motorsports team was establishing a nice foundation for the long haul.
"I really hadn't thought about [another change] at all, and I was pretty content with what I was doing," Worsham said of the 2012 campaign. "I really thought our second year working with Alexis was going to be a great year. We were just kind of getting the bugs ironed out. We were all in new roles, kind of rookies in what we were doing. She was a rookie driver, and I was new to my job. We were just getting this whole thing rolling when it got turned again."
That turn was the offer from Kalitta to get back in a Funny Car and team up with crew chiefs Nick Boninfante and Jon Oberhofer. Turns out Worsham and Boninfante go way back in the sport, and that helped make Worsham's decision to climb back into a Funny Car that much easier.
"Nick and I worked together when I first started," Worsham said. "In fact, I was working with him and his dad in 1990 when my dad called and said he had a new partner, we had had a new sponsor, and we were bringing our car back out.
"Nick I have a lot of history together. In 1991, he worked with me for a few races in between jobs. He didn't have a job and I told him I could pay him X amount of dollars for so many weeks until he could find a job. He and I drove together from Englishtown, N.J., all the way to Denver after we had won Englishtown. To have a chance to race with him under these circumstances, where we're well-financed, we're a lot older, and we have a lot more experience than we did 20-something years ago just seemed like a pretty great opportunity."
It's been an up-and-down season for the team, and Worsham didn't qualify for the Countdown until knocking off Courtney Force and John Force in eliminations and advancing to the semifinals of the regular-season finale at Indianapolis. He'll enter the six-race Countdown as the 10th seed.
"As far as being like riding a bike and jumping right back on, it hasn't been all that easy," Worsham said. "Driving the car part isn't terribly difficult. I seemed to pick up on that right away. But just the whole getting into the whole race-day mental attitude, the first round, the second round, and trying to get myself back into that race mode as a driver, has taken a little more than I thought it would."
Still, Worsham feels he and his team are peaking at the right time.
"We had been in the top 10 for most of the season, and then toward the middle of the summer you could just tell we ran into a dry spell there and we couldn't seem to win a round," Worsham said. "Our competition behind us was making huge moves. Bob Tasca was making big moves with his team, John Force was moving [Robert] Hight and himself around. Everyone was making moves behind us, and we were just kind of floating along there and got ourselves behind.
"Leaving Brainerd, Minn., two weeks before Indy, the decision was made along with the engineers at Toyota that we needed to go to Indy and do some testing and figure out what is going on here. They sent a couple engineers out, and crew chiefs got together with the team manager at Kalitta and we tested just for one day at Indy. In my 23 years of racing, that was probably the most I've ever accomplished in one day of testing. We went in there with not a whole lot of confidence, and ran so well on the six runs that we made, that we left thinking we could to Indy and win the race. I'm sure that made the whole difference for the whole weekend."
Worsham was knocked off by Hight in that semifinal at the U.S. Nationals in Indy, but it was enough to secure his spot in the postseason. If he can win it all, he would become the first driver to win NHRA Funny Car and Top Fuel championships since Gary Scelzi pulled off the feat (2005 Funny Car; 1997, '98, 2000 Top Fuel).
"I only have one goal, and that's to win the NHRA championship," Worsham said. "I didn't come back just for the joy of driving. I came back to win the Funny Car championship."
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Source: https://www.autoweek.com/racing/nhra/a1937481/nhra-funny-car-driver-del-worsham-back-fast-lane-and-thick-title-hunt/
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