Mike Kloeber's
Juggling Act is Over

By Chris Martin
Photos by Jeff Burk
3/7/03

For this story I wrote the headline: IHRA TOP FUEL CHAMP TUNER TURNS HIS SIGHTS TO NHRA GLORY AFTER 'JUGGLING' HIS WAY THROUGH 2002.

I know it's not the greatest of headlines, but at a real newspaper the writer never writes the heads; the copy desk does. But what Mike Kloeber did last year by tuning his driver Clay Millican and the Peter Lehman-owned Werner Enterprises Top Fuel dragster to the IHRA title and threatening on the NHRA side doesn't lend itself to a quickie blurb.

Okay, excuses exorcised. To the heart of darkness, okay?

I thought the most interesting Top Fuel occurrence of last year was not Larry Dixon winning the NHRA bauble, but rather Clay Millican's rattling off ten straight IHRA Top Fuel event wins and eventually winning 11 of the association's 12-event schedule. While it's true that Paul Romine, Bruce Litton, Jim Head, Jack Ostrander (the only guy to beat Millican all year) and Roger Dean are not on a par with the NHRA contenders, they nonetheless are capable of pulling an upset and running respectably.

Not only that, but by and large, IHRA tracks are not quite what the NHRA arenas are in terms of traction. Your ability to get traction and make power consistently is sorely tested at one of these emporiums.

What Kloeber did was even more amazing in that he also ran seven NHRA national events last year and qualified at six, putting his driver in the semifinals on two occasions and failing to qualify only once. What's more, his wrenching abilities had produced a by-2002 best of 4.55 at 322.73.

That alone would qualify as a serious contender for any personal Top Fuel team of the year honors, but what really made it all click for me is that Kloeber pulled this off while running two different tune-ups, one for NHRA, one for IHRA.

"If there's one development for 2003 that make me, Clay, and Roger happy, it's that the rules are the same now," Kloeber said. "What we run at NHRA is what we will run at IHRA. There are plenty of tuners who have the ability to run both of these set-ups, but it was a challenge for us last year to go back and forth from one to the other.

"IHRA's cars in 2002 weighed 75-pounds more and made you run 25-percent over on the blower and that limits what it can produce as airflow. In NHRA racing, there was no limit on the blower drive. If nothing else, IHRA made it tougher on you if you oiled the track. You actually could lose 20 points if you had one horrible run. They take away 15 points for an oil-down and you get five points for a clean qualifier. So if you went out and killed the engine and shut off early, that could hurt. What that all meant is that you had to be careful. We ran a ton of 4.60s, but to go after a 4.50 at an IHRA race with their rules meant running the car on the ragged edge. It just didn't make any sense to do that. Why not settle for consistency, do it with runs that wouldn't tear up the equipment, and win some races? I knew we could run them and we did at NHRA races.

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