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Charles Carpenter: Looking Forward to 2010

After making it through a roller coaster 2009 season, Pro Nitrous legend Charles Carpenter ignited his 2010 campaign with a runner-up finish in the LenMar Motorsports ADRL World Finals V at the famed Texas Motorplex, just south of Dallas.

With his fan-favorite ‘55 Chevy still carrying battle wounds from a horrific crash at the season-opening National Guard ADRL Safety-Kleen Dragpalooza V in Houston, Carpenter nearly came full circle to end the season, falling only .044 seconds short of holding off newly crowned Pro Nitrous World Champion Khalid Al-Balooshi and his record-setting 3.81 elapsed time in the finals.

Each of Carpenter’s formidable rivals in Texas ran into traction or mechanical problems when they faced the Pro Nitrous pioneer, and Carpenter was there to capitalize on the opportunities. He beat each of his opponents off the starting line and used a consistent string of three-second passes to put Rickie Smith, Pat Stoken, and Jim Halsey on the trailer.

“What’s the old saying” ‘It’s better to be lucky than good’?” Carpenter (right) said with a smile. “We certainly had some luck on our side, and I’ve always said you’ve got to have a certain amount of luck to win any of these races, but you’ve got to be there to take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself. The bottom line is we raced some of the quickest nitrous cars on the planet and beat every one of them except Balooshi. We’re not out there trying to rewrite the record books with each pass. You’ve got to get down the track to win races, and that’s exactly what we did.”

After qualifying 13th with a subpar 4.01 seconds at 185.03 miles per hour over the eighth-mile distance, Carpenter looked to step it up in the first round against fellow North Carolina legend “Tricky” Rickie Smith.

“We had missed the clutch call all weekend, and I thought we had it going into round one,” Carpenter admitted. “But once again we didn’t have enough for what that killer Motorplex track wanted and it just sawed right through the clutch from start to finish.”

Fortunately for Carpenter, Smith had bigger issues with his machine as he ran into immediate tire shake and watched Carpenter drive away with a 4.03-seconds pass at 184.22 mph. However, when the Carpenter crew returned to the pits and began their between-round maintenance, they discovered the clutch-slipping run had taken its toll on their 738 cubic-inch, Fulton-built engine and damaged two cylinders.

“We didn’t have the time or the manpower to repair it, so I did what I could to protect those two holes and softened the tune-up,” explained Carpenter. “Normally I tune it up each round, but I had to work backward due to the mineshaft conditions. We should have been running in the mid-to-low 3.90s by the finals, but in order to keep the motor alive we had to play it safe and hope it held together.”

It turned out to be the right call as a 3.98 at 185.21 was enough to hold off Stoken’s 4.06 in the quarterfinals, and a 3.99/185.28 was all that was needed to take the win over number-one qualifier Jim Halsey, whose ‘68 Camaro expired in a ball of flame after a major failure in the driveline at about half-track.

“We debated pouring the coals to it and trying to run faster in the finals, but ultimately Paul, Kelly, Mike, and I decided to leave it alone and just make another lap down the track,” Carpenter said. “We had made it down the track every run and didn’t want to mess that up or do any more damage to the motor. We knew there was no way we could outrun Balooshi, so we just went up there with what we knew would work and hoped they would make a mistake or I could get enough of a holeshot.”

Carpenter definitely got the holeshot, leaving with a big .065 to .191 advantage, but the mistake by Balooshi’s Al-Anabi team never came.

Though Carpenter led to about 500 feet, his 3.98 at 184.88 wasn’t quite enough to hold off Balooshi’s record-setting run that also set a new speed mark for the class at 196.42 mph.

“That’s an absolutely incredible run, or series of runs, by those guys,” Carpenter said of his Al-Anabi opponents. “This class has progressed so far in just a few short years. The power these guys are making is mind-blowing. We’ve got a car that has everything necessary to be competitive, but we’re giving up over 100 cubic inches. I’m thrilled with what we’ve been able to do with what we have to work with, but if we plan to compete next year, we’re going to have to explore our engine program options over the winter.”

Regardless, Carpenter was extremely encouraged by his Texas outing that placed him second in Pro Nitrous points since the National Guard ADRL counts all points earned in qualifying and eliminations at the World Finals each year toward qualifying for the following season’s championship-deciding Speedtech Battle for the Belts.

“It’s been an incredible year. I thought I was done after that wreck in March, but here we are with a runner-up finish and sitting second in the points to begin 2010,” Carpenter continued. “We’re going to use this momentum to get us through the off-season, and hopefully next year we can come out stronger than ever.”

Charles Carpenter (far lane) took a sizable lead over Khalid Al-Balooshi off the start of the Pro Nitrous final for the LenMar Motorsports ADRL World Finals V, but it wasn’t enough to hold off a pass by the Qatar-based driver that reset both ends of the class performance records.

(ADRL/Lorenzini/Tocher/McHugh/Richards file photos)