Salinas having a dream season on the track, dealing with painful economic challenges off it.
Mike Salinas is having a dream season out on the NHRA Camping World Drag Racing circuit this season.
It’s also fast becoming one of the most painful.
Salinas, the defending event winner at this week’s NHRA Thunder Valley Nationals at Bristol, Tennessee, finds himself having the best season of his pro career that started in 2011. He’s been an on-and-off regular in the NHRA over those past 11 years.
Salinas, 61, has never seen anything quite like this run of success on the track. He has three wins in the first eight events and has posted an impressive 17-5 record in eliminations. This from a driver who came into this season with just three wins in 78 career events and with a 70-70 career record in eliminations.
Salinas is second in the NHRA Top Fuel standings, just 30 points (just a little more than one round win) behind Brittany Force.
So, why the concerned look with a trip to Bristol and one of his favorite tracks coming up this week?
Mike Salinas is second in the NHRA Top Fuel championship standings.
NHRA/National Dragster
Salinas and his Scrappers Racing team are feeling the discomfort of a turn in the economy the likes of which was next-to-impossible for anyone to predict this past fall when Salinas was making out the 2022 budget for his race team. Navigating the current economic landscape is becoming more and difficult, and Salinas knows that goes not just for him and his race team.
“Fifty three percent more is what it costs us to go racing this year—53 percent more on top or our regular budget,” Salinas told Autoweek during a Zoom interview. “We’re all scrambling and looking for funds and looking for other ways to do this because the cost of doing business went up 53 percent right across the board in America.
“We as a country are in trouble because of it. The regime that we have in there—I’m not talking, getting crazy about this stuff—they’re not doing anything to help. When you’re asked how to fix the fuel problem, you don’t say, ‘We have to do away with fossil fuels.’ “
Salinas warns that it’s too late to prepare for a recession for those who don’t have a plan. The recession is already here.
“This one is going to hurt people,” Salinas said. “We are already in a recession, and most people don’t understand that. The scary part is, I feel really bad. This one is going to hurt a lot of people and it ain’t going to go away for a while.
“We haven’t seen this inflation for a long time.”
At the racetrack and back at the team’s Brownsburg, Ind., race shop, Salinas doesn’t have to look too far to see how inflation has turned 2022 into a different kind of challenge. The team is definitely living up to its “Scrappers” moniker.
“We have a parts problem, we have a supply chain problem,” Salinas said. “And it’s not affecting one person. It’s affecting all of us. Go try get some baby formula. Go try to get some other products.
“In our business, we stocked up to get ready for this thing way ahead of time—and we’re still feeling it. We’re having to readjust. We’ve all been through this before. But the younger people who have not been through a recession, they’re going to feel this one. I hope as drag racing community, we can all come together and help each other out.
“Some parts didn’t come for us at the last race, so some other racers lent us parts, and we are lending them parts to make it through these weekends. And it’s everybody. It doesn’t matter what your budget is, who you are. Nobody has everything they want right now.”
Salinas is not buying the current calculations that put the inflation rate at 8.6 percent. If the cost to run his race operation was up “just” 8.6 percent, he’d be OK with that. This, however, is a different animal altogether.
“Look, right across the board, across the board,” Salinas said. “Let’s use our race at Las Vegas for example. For me to bring a truck, Indy to Vegas, that’s $7,500 a truck, up and back. And that’s now. Times that by six trucks. Just to get there. Now, we have Suburbans pulling them. We have little cars. Hotels. Everything across the board has gone up.
“I’m really surprised that people are still showing up at the track—I’m talking the racers. I have some friends and they just got rained out at Seattle, Washington, at one of the regionals. They were happy they didn’t have to go because of the fuel. It was going to cost them $5,000 just to go. They’re like, ‘We’re okay, we can sit this one out.
“That’s where we’re going.”
Salinas isn’t ruling out the possibility of his own team taking a week off and sitting out an NHRA race weekend this year just to save some money and to help ensure they can make it to the end of the schedule.
“It’s not out of the question,” Salinas said. “We have talked about it. Right now, we are okay, but it is on the the table. It really is on the table. There’s a reason why some of these guys (in the NHRA) aren’t running every week, and that’s exactly why right now.”
Drivers just need to finish in the top 10 in the standings after the first 16 races of the 22-race NHRA schedule to qualify for the series’ Countdown to the Championship playoffs. With eight races to go in the regular season, the playoff picture is just starting to take shape, and Salinas is well to the good in the current playoff projections.
A few more wins, and sitting out a race or two to save some parts and some money might be something to think about.
“If we are so far ahead and it doesn’t hurt us for the Countdown, it’s not out of the question, guaranteed,” he said.
Keyword: NHRA Top Fuel Contender Mike Salinas Says Recession 'Is Going to Hurt People'