By Anthony Caruso III | Publisher
The Michalek Brothers Racing Top Alcohol Dragster driver Angelle Sampey did not make an eliminations pass this weekend at the Gatornationals. Sampey was vague about what happened.
On Monday morning, the Michalek Brothers released a statement on social media about what happened during the 56th annual Amalie Motor Oil NHRA Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway in Gainesville, Florida. They said that their dragster’s fuel “was tested under the minimum required temperature for our class.”
Their statement did not say what the minimum was. However, they said that the NHRA made the right call. “The NHRA 100% made the right call and we would expect them to do the same for others in violation,” their statement said.
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“To be clear, the temperature was significantly under the minimum,” their post said. “This wasn’t an attempt to run right at 50 degrees for max performance, but rather a bad estimation on our part. To clear up speculation, it’s pretty straightforward what happened. We are still running the original Top Fuel fuel tank in the car in the short term as we wait to take inventory of a smaller, purpose-built A/fuel fuel tank that includes an access hole for a temperature probe that regulates our fuel chiller’s output. With the current tank, we run approximately 5 gallons less fuel than what it is capable of holding and there is not an access hole to get our chiller’s temperature probe into where the fuel sits.
“This probe regulates the overall operation of the chiller and stops the chilling process when the fuel gets to a predetermined temperature. Our current option to chill the fuel with this tank requires the chiller to run unregulated and we then estimate if it’s close to 50 degrees by pulling fuel from the main fuel line supply to test it. We knew it wasn’t going to be 1:1 with the temperature of what was circulating in the tank, but we did not expect that much of a difference. As mentioned above, we missed, that’s on us, and we own it.”
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We do not know at press time if the NHRA will punish this race team for this outside of missing the eliminations at the national event season-opener.
The race team said that they are working on ways to monitor it in the future. The team wants to put this behind them as they get ready for the race at Belle Rose, Louisiana.
Sampey is sponsored by Hangsterfer’s Laboratories, FVP Parts, and Mission Foods.
Tough start to the year in Gainesville. After qualifying 7th with a 5.272 at 264.4MPH, we were unable to make the run…
Posted by Michalek Brothers Racing on Monday, March 10, 2025
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