five seconds Two hundred and thirty-three miles an hour. And less than three hundredths of a second was the difference between winning “the Super Bowl” of drag racing and, well, not.
Locals Greg and Joe Landwehr, co-owners of Enumclaw Cascade Automotive, celebrated their first national victory last month at the National Hot Rod Association’s Lucas Oil Winternationals with driver Cory “Mac” McClenathan, crew chief Glenn Mikres and owners Rick and Cherice. Akers.
“This is very, very important,” Greg said in a recent interview.
The team entered the Legends Nitro Funny Cars division with the fastest qualifying time of 4.733 seconds and stayed ahead of the competition the entire way.
During the final round, the car, a 1969 Pontiac Firebird-style racer dubbed the “Mac Attack,” barreled down the quarter-mile racetrack at nearly 233 mph to cross the finish line in 4.868 seconds.
The competition was hot on McClenathan’s tail, but he couldn’t muster more than 203 mph and came in at 4.895 seconds.
Although NHRA’s National Dragster magazine only featured the driver, winning a race like this is a team effort, and everything has to go perfectly to get this 5,000 horsepower car through the clue.
For example, “You can make all the power you want in this engine, but you have to transfer it to the track,” said Greg, the clutch specialist. “And to transfer it to the track, it has to go through the clutch system.”
And Joe is a jack of all trades, including mixing the nitromethane that feeds the engine. Get it right and your car crosses the finish line; Do something wrong and your engine can explode (which happened to one car during this race, limping across the finish line).
According to Motor Trend, mixing fuel can be a tricky business, as the chemicals involved in making the fuel can vary in purity and can be affected primarily by temperature, so think less Julia Child and more Walter White.
Then there’s the engine itself, tuned by crew chief Mikres.
But all this does not mean that the driver is not important (“He has to have the drawers”, said Greg); a driver must not only keep the car on the track, but also feel the machine as it goes from start to finish and report back to his crew on what went right and what went wrong so that adjustments can be made for the next race . The more in tune a driver is with their car, the better a crew can work with it.
This was McClenathan’s first national win in over 12 years.
“You have to have a team to do it… There’s no way one person is more important than the other,” Greg said, which is why everyone on the Mac Attack team got a “Wally” , a first-place trophy named after the founder of the NHRA. Wally Parks.
Greg attributes the team’s success to racing his car, rather than racing his opponents.
“We build this car where it’s safe and fast,” he said. “[Other teams] they’re trying to compete with us, trying to beat us…all these people are wrong. Every single one of them. And look at the final race… they said yes [the other driver’s car] fully airborne and sure enough, about two-thirds of the way down the runway, its engine exploded.
While this is Team Mac Attack’s first national win, the crew has also taken first place in the 2017 Funnycar Fever and 2019 Pepsi Night Fire Sacramento races.
Team Mac Attack posing after their big win. Greg Landwehr is third from the left. To his right are owner Rick Akers and driver Cory McClenathan. Second from left (in hat) is Joe Landwehr. Photo courtesy of NHRA-National Dragster
