Kalitta Motorsports will return to the track at the National Hot Rod Association’s Summit Racing Equipment Nationals five days after Scott Kalitta, son of the team’s founder, was killed in a fiery crash in New Jersey.
Doug Kalitta (Scott’s cousin), Hillary Will and Dave Grubnic will run their top fuel dragsters this week in Norwalk, Ohio. The three pulled out of last week’s race after Kalitta’s death Saturday.
“We’re a race team and that’s what we do,” team spokesman Jim Oberhofer said. “Scott was a drag racer to the core, and he would want us to compete in Norwalk, so we’re going to go racing this weekend.”
Kalitta, 46, died when the engine of his funny car exploded in flames after he reached more than 300 mph on the quarter-mile drag strip in Englishtown, N.J. After the explosion, the car hit a retaining wall in the runoff area of the strip.
The NHRA is investigating the accident, the second to result in the death of a funny car driver in the past 15 months. Driver Eric Medlen died in a testing accident in Florida in March 2007.
Funny cars are stretched, front-engine dragsters with bodies that resemble production cars. They run on nitromethane, a volatile fuel that allows the supercharged engines to develop 8,000 horsepower. The cars carry a data recorder similar to those used on airplanes to recover crash data.
Kalitta, a two-time NHRA champion in top fuel, came out of retirement to race in that series in 2003 and started driving funny cars full time in 2006. The son of Connie Kalitta, one of the sport’s pioneer racers, Scott Kalitta started his top fuel career in 1982 and had 18 event wins in the elite drag-racing series, including championships in 1994 and 1995. He won three top fuel titles at the Mile High Nationals at Bandimere Speedway. In his final appearance at Bandimere, he made it to the semifinals in funny car last July.
Denver Post staff contributed to this report.
