As NHRA’s Mission Foods Drag Racing Series 2025 season draws closer to its start at Gainesville Raceway outside the Florida city of the same name, it’s time for many teams to announce crew chief changes and other team adjustments. JCM Racing, the all-female nitro team fielding a full-season Funny Car for Alexis DeJoria and a partial season Top Fuel machine for fan-voted 2024 “Best New Talent” racer Ida Zetterstrom, has made changes to its crew chief assignments for the coming year.
DeJoria, who will make her JCM Racing debut next week at the two-day pre-season test in Gainesville, starting Tuesday, March 4, has two outstanding crew chiefs who will be hard at work attempting to make her a champion in her Bandero Cafe Funny Car. Joining Mike “Zippy” Neff at the controls is Todd Smith, who is headed to JCM after nine years with Kalitta Motorsports.
Neff, who has won championships with John Force Racing, returns to Funny Car after working with Tony Schumacher’s rail the past couple of seasons. He’ll be joined by Smith, who held crew chief roles at John Force Racing, Don Schumacher Racing – where he helped Jack Beckman to his 2012 Funny Car title – and with Kalitta Motorsports, where he and Jon Oberhofer propelled J.R. Todd to his 2018 title. JCM Racing confirmed the duo are co-crew chiefs for DeJoria.
“This s pretty much a band new operation we’ve been assembling for Alexis at JCM, “ Smith confirmed, “and it’s been a fun challenge to build this thing from essentially the ground up with Zippy and get everything ready in time for Gainesville,” and the Amalie Motor Oil Gatornationals. “Both Alexis and I are new to JCM and Zippy is back tuning a Funny Car after a few years on a dragster tea, so this kind of feels like a new beginning for all of us. We’re ready to come out of the gate swinging, and plan to utilize every minute of those two testing days making as many runs as possible and getting acclimated was a team.”
Zetterstrom, who made her NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series debut last August at Brainerd and ran the last eight races in a waning season, will increase that number to an even 10 for her 2025 campaign, the JCM team announced. With Jon Schaffer as her crew chief, the 2023 European Top Fuel titleholder made a trip to Gainesville two weeks before the season began to test before starting the year together with the balance of Top Fuel teams.
This year, Zetterstrom will compete in the Gatornationals, continue to part of the early-season Western Swing at Phoenix and Pomona, take one race off and run her first four-wide event at Charlotte. She will then race in Bristol, at Sonoma, in Indianapolis, Reading, Dallas and Pomona. While she has been vocal about her desire to compete for a championship, adding races to her current schedule “all coms down to funding,” she said. “The more funding we have, the more races we can run. We’re working hard to secure the right partners to help us complete the full season and chase championships. Every race counts,” Zetterstrom emphasized, “and we’re ready to make this season one to remember.”
JCM Racing, which began competing in 2022 with Tony Schumacher (and won its first Top Fuel race!) is the Maynard family’s multi-car NHRA team, co-owned by Joe and P.J. Maynard. While its executive offices are in Clarksville, TN, the race team’s operations remain in Brownsburg, IN. Since it began, JCM Racing has claimed 11 national event victories, heading into the 2025 season.
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