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PHOENIX NOTEBOOK - JOHNNY GRAY FRIDAY NO. 1

192 views · Published 23 February 2013 · 3:29 · Indexed 28 September 2026

Channel: CompetitionPlusTV · 2013 · Sports

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For Funny Car driver Johnny Gray, the 2013 season will be his farewell to fulltime drag racing. And when he learned his sponsor from the past few years would not return, he and his sister, Terry Chandler, decided to sponsor the Dodge Charger themselves and turn it into a tribute to their late father.
 
The elder Gray wasn't keen on his son "fooling around" at the racetrack. He thought he should be devoting more attention to their oil and gas industry enterprise, Mar-Bob Energy. But when he finally agreed to come to the NHRA races and see what excited his son so much, he had to admit those Funny Cars were pretty exciting.
 
He came back and would bring his friends, and while Johnny and his crew were preparing the car, they would play the card game "Pitch." So the spread-out hand of playing cards that festoons each side of Gray's Dodge give a nod to the game his dad loved to play.
 
Gray wanted this tribute to be incredibly special, and in Friday evening's qualifying session at the Arizona Nationals, near Phoenix, he drew a Royal Flush.
 
Thanks to the right calls from crew chiefs Rob Wendland and Rip Reynolds, Gray ran a 4.034-second elapsed time at 313.80 mph on the 1,000-foot course at Firebird International Raceway, near Phoenix, to become the provisional No. 1 qualifier.

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