TJ Zizzo Makes His Best U.S. Nationals Qualifying Effort
When a race has been going on for as long as the historic Toyota NHRA U.S. Nationals, it allows time for some full circle moments. At the 70th running of the U.S. Nationals, TJ Zizzo, the driver of the Zizzo Racing Rust-Oleum Top Fuel dragster, experienced one of the most full-circle moments of his career, as well as qualifying the highest he’s ever qualified for this legendary event, at the No. 3 spot.
“We take extreme pride in qualifying for the U.S. Nationals,” Mike Kern, Zizzo Racing crew chief. “We talked this morning about how we raced Doug Kalitta here in 2010 when we were the No. 10 qualifier. We most likely had some parts from them that we had bought, and we beat them in that first round. For this race, we knew we were No. 3 qualifier. We knew we were racing Ida Zetterström and her crew chief, Jon Schaffer, bought some of our used parts. One of our goals this morning was not to let them beat us with our old parts like we have done to others in the past. It’s funny to say that, but we feel that we have come full circle from where we began. We want to win and we are doing everything we can. We also want to keep more teams out here, like teams supported us when we were just starting.”
In a competitive field of 20 Top Fuel dragsters vying for 16 race day spots, Zizzo qualified at No. 3, based off his third qualifying run of 3.716 seconds at 332.67 mph. It was the quickest run of that qualifying session, earning him four bonus points. He and his team were proud of this effort, with the number of hurdles they faced throughout the weekend.
“Everything has to be perfect all the time,” said Kern. “It really has to be in order to get through the U.S. Nationals. In our case, we had a lot of little things, but we still were the number three qualifier. But for the most part we were able to stay on top of a lot of them.”
Unfortunately for Zizzo and his team, things did not go perfectly during the first round of eliminations against No. 14 qualifier Ida Zetterström.
“We broke a clutch lever but that doesn’t take away from our success,” said Zizzo. “I am so proud of this Rust-Oleum team. They worked so hard, and this race is a marathon not a sprint. This event is special, and we had a great qualifying effort, and we just had an issue on race day.”
Zizzo and his team will next be in competition at the NHRA Midwest Nationals on September 27-29 at World Wide Technology Raceway, just outside of St. Louis, Mo. They will be attempting to get their second No. 1 qualifier of the season, after their first at the Gerber Collision and Glass Route 66 NHRA Nationals presented by PEAK Performance in May.
“We’ll analyze everything when we get back to our shop in Chicago and make changes to not let stuff like broken clutch levers never happens again,” said Kern. “Since day one of this team, over 20 years ago, our mantra was admitting our mistakes and learning from them. We fix them and then we move on. We plan to move on in a big way in St. Louis.”
This story was originally published on September 3, 2024.
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