Millican’s Back-To-Back Wins Mark Three Straight Top Fuel Wins for Team Speed Society

Something tells me this is a sight we’ll be seeing a lot more often in the winner’s circle on Sunday’s around the NHRA’s national tour. After waiting nearly two full decades to get his first NHRA national event win last year in Bristol, the wins are rapidly becoming more frequent for Clay Millican and his Great Clips/Parts Plus/Strutmasters rocketship.

With Australian tuner David Grubnic’s renewed focus on consistency, Millican has found round wins coming much more frequently and, coincidentally, in groups of four. After putting up a quartet of passes over 330 MPH at the NHRA’s last event in Topeka, KS, the team rolled into Joliet, IL for this weekend’s Route 66 Nationals with a quiet but well-deserved swagger. While they struggled somewhat in qualifying – comparatively speaking, considering Clay had started 50% of the year’s first 8 events from the #1 qualifying spot – they still started eliminations from the #4 spot and parlayed that into a second straight march through eliminations.

On the other side of the ladder, a rejuvenated Leah Pritchett was fired up to put her Papa Johns Pizza dragster back on the path to success. Fresh of a week at the lake with her husband and friends celebrating her birthday, Leah and her team looked to find the magic they’d used to race to the win in the race previous to Topeka, the Southern Nationals held at Atlanta Dragway. Pritchett too had a subpar qualifying effort in Joliet, entering raceday from the bottom half of the ladder with a daunting first round date with DSR and Speed Society teammate Antron Brown.

The opening stanza saw Clay and Leah both lay down near-identical passes to take out their opponents, Pat Dakin and Brown, respectively. Millican threw down the quickest pass of the opening round, a stellar 3.755 at 329 MPH to send Dakin packing, while Pritchett dispatched AB with a 3.769, also a 329 MPH.

In the second round, Clay lost the belt off his supercharger up top, but still managed to hang on to win over an always-dangerous Scott Palmer, who’d hazed the tires around mid track. Leah used the quickest run of the second round, an off-pace 3.929 at only 298 MPH to send Kyle Wurtzel how after Wurtzel hazed the tires early.

The semifinal saw both cars put up more representative elapsed times to move into the final round. Millican faced off with perennial title contender Doug Kalitta in one of the closest races of eliminations, and it wasn’t without a bit of drama to keep things interesting. After leaving three hundredths behind Kalitta, Millican had driven around him around halftrack and appeared to be cruising to a fairly easy win. With a four MPH advantage at the 1/8th mile mark, Millican was pulling away when his chute deployed around the 800’ mark, effectively dumping an anchor behind his 11,000 horsepower dragster. Kalitta was charging hard, crossing the 1,000 foot mark moving a full 9 MPH faster than Clay, but came up .005 of a second short of driving back around him. Their elapsed times were 3.785 for Millican to Kalitta’s 3.819.

Pritchett’s semifinal was also a close race, but not quite as dramatic as the Millican/Kalitta show. Leah’s 3.832 at 326 MPH was strong enough to put Atlanta runner up Blake Alexander on the trailer after his 3.896 at 325 MPH came up short. This set up a rematch of last year’s all-Team Speed Society final at Bristol, and the results were much of the same.

Clay took a slight holeshot and parlayed it into his third career win and second in a row when his 3.894 at 289 MPH was enough to take down Pritchett’s 4.50 at 192 MPH after she smoked the tires and kicked the blower off early in the run. After points leader Steve Torrence fell to an uncharacteristic first round upset, this win pulled Millican to within 25 points of the top spot and moved Leah into third place behind him.

The tour moves to the east coast next week for the first trip to Virginia Motorsports Park for the first time in several years. Millican will be looking to pull of the rare triple-up while Pritchett hopes to play spoiler and take her second win of the season. We’ll bring you all of the action with our pre-race preview later in the week and a wrap up when the dust settles on Sunday!

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