With some serious upgrades to the LG-TengTools-Hauraki top alcohol funny car but just a handful of high speed runs completed, Hamilton’s Morice McMillin is ready to take on the big guns at the Century Batteries Power Series, the three-round National Drag Racing Championship.

The first round at Fram Autolite Raceway, takes place on 6 February and sees the 24-year-old fully prepared to take another step closer to the highly experienced and well funded racers leading the Castrol Edge top alcohol division.

McMillin signed with LG Motorsport this season, bringing the well-known brand imagery of LG Electronics and Radio Hauraki to sit alongside the logo of his team’s major sponsor TengTools on the Dodge Avenger funny car.

“Competing in New Zealand’s fastest motorsport certainly has its dangers and challenges,” says the talented young racer who started racing at the age of eight in junior dragsters.

“But we take things very much in our stride. Compared to several other teams, we’re all pretty young, up against guys who have been racing at this level for 20-plus years. Every season we keep learning fast and, this year, we’re out to catch some of the bigger names of the sport, that’s for sure.”

McMillin finished third in the national championship in his debut season and secured a new quarter-mile national record for the funny car class with his best time of 6.66 sec, which saw him hit a top speed of 339 km/h (211 mph).

“We have always been behind horsepower-wise over the last two years, so with some new equipment this year we hope to make that gap smaller. We know there is a lot of hard work in front of us, but I also know the team is more capable of making our mark in the championship hunt!”

Over the past decade, McMillin has quickly gone from a self-described annoying young teenager asking all the questions to a respected competitor in the class.

“I do have to pinch myself sometimes when suiting up to race guys who I have looked up to for years. All we need to do now is beat them!”

With six-second 200mph dreams but only a shoestring budget, Top Alcohol was the only way this team was ever going to race

What you see in these well-framed photographs is an alcohol-burning, supercharged and injected Funny Car, built and campaigned on a miniscule budget by Morice McMillin and Ryan Sheldon, who choose to race in one of the most competitive yet confusing classes in a sport full of confusing classes. And they’ve done well. By travelling around the country they racked up enough round wins to take third in the NZDRA National point score, and ran a best of 6.73 at 211mph in their first season of running the car.

It’s a twisted, convoluted tail, the evolution of this team, but they met up years back when they both ended up crewing on Mark Thomas’s Top Doorslammer ute. Ryan has been around drag racing his whole life. He crewed on Thomas’s little green lorry from its eight-second beginnings in Wild Bunch racing before trotting off to the US for a few years. When Ryan returned, it was with a plan to campaign his own Doorslammer, and he purchased the big ’59 Chev of Reagan Porter. He also slid right back into his former position on Blobby Thomas’s crew, and set about buying an engine he knew quite well, the alloy 532 KB Chev out of the ute.

New to team FatMan then was the gofer, a cheeky little runt named Morice McMillin, who had also been around the sport most of his young life, and had proved not only able to take the tons of verbal abuse heaped upon him, but more than capable of throwing a few barbs of his own.

After a couple of years of this fun, Morice’s dad, Noel (yep, he’s also spent donkeys’ years in the sport, especially in the thankless administration side), surprised everyone including himself by purchasing an old Mustang-bodied funny car. It hadn’t been on a track for about a decade and it needed a chassis upgrade (as in a new chassis), but hey, the price was right and the thing came complete, including an injected big block Chev.

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Carl Wilson shows us how to handle a 650kg, 900hp sprint car at Western Springs, Mopars at Meremere tear up the strip with some American muscle, and we check out this season’s new cars at the test and tune day at Meremere, including Parry Hunt’s new doorslammer. Other drivers include Tony Massey and his 1971 Escort Mk1, Anthony Marsh’s rail, Todd Vincent’s Top alcohol machine and Ross Taylor’s doorslammer.

Carl Wilson shows us how to handle a 650kg, 900hp sprint car at Western Springs, Mopars at Meremere tear up the strip with some American muscle, and we check out this season’s new cars at the test and tune day at Meremere, including Parry Hunt’s new doorslammer. Other drivers include Tony Massey and his 1971 Escort Mk1, Anthony Marsh’s rail, Todd Vincent’s Top alcohol machine and Ross Taylor’s doorslammer.

Jonny Udy’s late model twin turbo Monaro. From the GT1 Race Series in Taupo Dwayne Carter’s ex-V8 Supercar BF Ford Falcon. We catch up with young top alcohol dragster Todd Vincent

Jonny Udy’s late model twin turbo Monaro. From the GT1 Race Series in Taupo Dwayne Carter’s ex-V8 Supercar BF Ford Falcon. We catch up with young top alcohol dragster Todd Vincent

The first season for the Morice McMillin/Ryan Sheldon Top Alcohol funny car had many highs and some better than expected results, culminating with a 3rd place finish in the NZDRA Top alcohol championship. The 09/10 season looks even better for the Hamilton based team with the announcement of Teng Tools taking over as naming rights sponsor for the team.

TengTools, already involved with the team as an associate sponsor were happy with the teams performance and exposure during the debut season” After a successful season last year we are proud to increase our involvement with Morice and his team. Quoted Teng Tools operations manager Stephen Cole”

The TengTools Funny car is now committed to competing in all 5 rounds of the Century Yuasa Power series Drag Racing Championships this season.¨¨The combination remains essentially the same as last season with only routine maintenance undertaken, giving the team a good baseline to start the season from and improve even more on the teams personal best set last year of 6.73 at 211mph (339 km/h).

The team have also been lucky enough to retain associate sponsors, Brad Penn oil, Nostalgia Motors, Mitsi Spares, Jonesey’s Garage and Horne Engineering for another season.

It was a cold, wet night. Hell, they all had been for weeks. But the voice on the other end of the phone was insistent, and if I was gonna make the rent on my run-down office this month, I guess I was taking this case, whether it was a shitty day or not. That’s the way we impoverished private investigators make a living ” by listening to voices on telephones and doing what they ask. Truth was, things had been more than a little slow lately and if I wanted to keep Sam Spayed (no, not Spade), Private Eye across the opaque glass at the top of my door, I needed to start listening to whatever this voice wanted. “There’s this guy who used to run with the Top Alcohol mob on the other side of the pits. Seems he’s gone and got himself a Studebaker Top Doorslammer and he’s making plenty of waves over there. I want you to check him out and see how he’s doing it. Don’t leave any stone unturned. His name’s Yearbury, Wayne Yearbury.” Then the caller hung up.

With around 3000 horsepower and plenty of Funny Car influences on its build, we needed to find out more — and hired a super sleuth to dig out the full details on Wayne Yearbury’s six-second Studebaker Doorslammer.

Something in my mind had clicked when the voice said Yearbury¦ wasn’t he racing an Alcohol dragster back when I was in short pants and pretending I still believed in Santy Claus? Time to check out some old hot rod mags and see who this guy hung out with ” after all, chances were he’d had some help in throwing this weapon together, and some of those associates might not be as close-mouthed as they should be, maybe they’d let something slip that they shouldn’t. I could only hope. (more…)