Veteran racer helps other racers get their shot at the NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series.
One thing that really matters to NHRA Funny Car owner-tuner-driver Tim Wilkerson is that his crew listens to instructions—because any 300-mph, nitromethane-powered race car, he said, “is one dangerous piece of junk. It really is. It’s a rolling bomb.”
So Wilkerson, a 61-year-old, salt-of-the-earth fan favorite who can deliver a well-placed wisecrack now and again, is serious in his expectations. And surprisingly, a handful of drag racers, from 64-year-old Top Fuel driver Keith Murt to 19-year-old second-generation Funny Car racer Bobby Bode, have set any egos aside and entrusted their professional career launches to him.
Chad Green
NHRA/National Dragster
Wilkerson has evolved into a powerbroker and star-maker to up-and-comers in the NHRA’s nitro pro ranks, providing career boosts and tuning guidance to Top Fuel racers Murt, T.J. Zizzo, Buddy Hull, and Hunter Green and Funny Car racers Bode, Chad Green, and his own son, Daniel Wilkerson.
Wilkerson for years has been a privateer, sticking to his own operation that has been funded for nearly a quarter-century primarily by IT consulting and solutions firm Levi, Ray & Shoup. So this new niche he has carved out for himself, whether by design or through evolution, hasn’t fazed him. He doesn’t consider himself an empire-builder like Don Schumacher or John Force.
Wilkerson says that his motive actually is traced to the lowest common denominator: making money. But he does take some pride in knowing that his time investment and knowledge-sharing is helping the Camping World Drag Racing Series grow at a time it needs that the most.
“I basically had some opportunity to help fund my car by helping other people,” Wilkerson said. “And at the same time, it’s doing just that—it’s growing the field. So it’s just been a win-win.”
Despite helping Chad Green and Bobby Bode to tentative top-half-of-the-bracket spots in Friday’s opening qualifying for the Arizona Nationals at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park, Wilkerson managed to score a provisional No. 3 spot for himself.
So far he’s juggling these new obligations just fine.
“I just kind of change my hat and go work on something else and come back,” he said of his method to compartmentalize his many tasks. “I’ve got a great group of guys (directed by Richard Hartman) working on my car, so I can be absent a little bit.
“But I think it’s going to come to a head here before long. Those guys can basically take care of themselves. My son, Daniel is running Chad Green’s car. They’re parked right next to me every day. That’s probably going to be basically a two-car team for the whole year. I’m not physically over there every second, but I’m still helping Daniel try to get through all the ifs, ands, and buts,” Wilkerson said.
In Green’s case, he went from six races last year to 19 this year. “That’s a big jump. So we had to hire three more guys. That’s taken a transition a little bit. We kind of stole a guy out of Pro Mod and put him into Nitro Funny Car,” Wilkerson said. “But that’s what needs to happen.”
“You drive that Pro Mod with one hand,; you drive that Funny Car like you’re wrestling a gorilla.”
Wilkerson said he expects Green to compete in the Pro Mod class at “I think maybe just one or two (events). But I asked him not to do both, because I don’t think he drives well when he does both. They are separate. You drive that Pro Mod with one hand, and you drive that Funny Car like you’re wrestling a gorilla. So I just want him to focus on one car,” Wilkerson said. “We’ll see what he ends up doing.”
Green’s son, Hunter, is planning to make a few starts in the Top Fuel class this season.
“We spent some time and got Hunter a Top Fuel license,” Wilkerson said, “but I think he’s going to run Randy Myers’ A-Fuel car at three or four races to just again get more laps under his belt. That was my suggestion to him. So when we went to the test session (here, in early February), he made five or six runs in Randy’s car and got better and better and better at it. He made a couple runs in our car [the one Buddy Hull has purchased], and he did well in our dragster.”
Murt is not competing this season, saying he is “crazy-busy (with his construction business) and if he wants another Top Fuel car, ‘We will just go buy one.’”
Wilkerson continues to offer guidance to Funny Car newcomer Bobby Bode, an Arizona State University business major at nearby Tempe.
“They need very little guidance anymore. They, like everybody, like even me, get off track a little bit, and they’ll call me up and I’ll go there and spend a half an hour over there, staring at their stuff and figure out what happened,” Wilkerson said. “I just talk to Bobby. I make him the guy that makes all the calls (as opposed to dad Bob Bode, a seasoned racer, or anyone else). That works out really well. That way I don’t have five people asking me questions.
“He understands if we make a decision, if we make a change, how it affects the car, and when he drives it he can see how it affects it. He does stuff on his own, and some of it works, and some of it doesn’t and we’ll discuss that later on. He’s real good about it. He takes a good butt-chewing,” Wilkerson said.
“I’m always kidding with him about burning up his dad’s money. We giggle about it and on we go. We don’t need bad days, right? It doesn’t matter how wealthy you are with one of these cars. Everybody asks, ‘How much does it take to go racing?’ I say, ‘All of it, that’s how much.’”
Hull, 41, has known Wilkerson since he was about nine years old. “I used to make Buddy polish my trailer,” the 23-time Funny Car winner said.
Bobby Bode III
NHRA/National Dragster
“I was a little kid, and I’d go racing with him,” Hull said. “And he would always have me doing the stuff that kids would do: packing coolers, cleaning the trailer, polishing this, polish that, clean that table, clean out the oily diaper. And I came back for more punishment – no, Tim treats me really well. He treats you with respect.”
Wilkerson said, “My incentive with working with Buddy is get more quality drivers and teams into the sport. That was the goal when I started the Top Fuel team last year. Buddy asked me about renting the operation, and then he asked me about buying it. We worked out a deal with the understanding I would assist him with the tune-up if he built a good team of guys to work on it.”
Hull did. He said his mentor “knows I’m learning, so his expectations of us are just to do what he wants us to do and do that flawlessly. Tim’s guys are training these guys [his own crew], and after four or five races, I’d put these guys against anybody else.
“Of course, we can lose, but we’ve created a formula that makes it hard to lose. And I don’t mean lose a round of drag racing—I mean lose at the racetrack. I really believe that we have a race car that can actually win rounds of drag racing. If I do my job, we’re going to win rounds this year.”
Not many know that Wilkerson also helped so-called “super part-timer” T.J. Zizzo get started years ago. Wilkerson bought a dragster thinking he “was buying it for my sponsor. After we got it going, he’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ Zizzo found out about it, and I sold it to Zizzo and helped him get his license. I only helped him for a year or two.
“But it worked out good. Again,” he said, “when you find people that are smart enough to listen and not complain and contradict everything you do, it works out pretty good.”
Keyword: How NHRA Funny Car Privateer Tim Wilkerson Has Become a Star-Maker