Josh Hart came into the Mission Foods NHRA Drag Racing Series with guns blazing. The Ocala, FL resident won in his first attempt at his home race, the 2021 Amalie Motor Oil Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway. He followed that with a second victory at the fall zMAX Dragway Charlotte race.
Since then, Hart has gone rounds but hasn’t lifted a Wally winner’s trophy doled out to the victors of each race. He elevated crew chief Ron Douglas to a part management of his team and continues to have R&L Carriers as his primary partner, with other entities joining him from time to time.
But the lack of victories has nagged both Hart and Douglas. After the tenth race of the NHRA’s 20-contest 2024 campaign, held at Summit Motorsports Park outside Norwalk, OH this past weekend, Hart decided to make some changes, adding veteran crew chief John Stewart to assist Douglas in race preparations and tuning of his R&L Carriers dragster. The team has also scheduled a comprehensive testing session prior to the NHRA Northwest Nationals at Pacific Raceways in three weeks.
Stewart, colloquially known as “Stewie”, has more than five decades’ experience tuning nitro Funny Cars and dragsters with some of the biggest names in the straight-line racing business: he’s worked with Darrell Gwynn, Don “The Snake” Prudhomme, Joe Amato, Shawn Langdon and has collaborated with the great crew chief Dick LaHaie. One of Stewart’s great strengths is his understanding of the dynamics of nitro cars’ intricate clutch systems that are critical in transmitting power to effect performance in these 11,000-horsepower dragsters.
“John is a welcome addition to our team and this move is something that both Ron and I talked about. We feel this is needed to get our R&L Carriers team on track for the Top Fuel world championship,” Hart emphasized after his failure to make a stout 16-car dragster field at the most recent Norwalk race.
“We are going to test prior to heading to Seattle, so we can make the most of the final four regular season races prior to the start of the Countdown [to the Championship],” which begins following the 70th U.S. Nationals at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park over the Labor Day weekend.
“Competing at this level, with so many intricacies involved in the modern-day Top Fuel dragster, every team has two top-tier crew chiefs or tuners with years of experience in the pits, so this is just what we need, to be as competitive as possible,” Hart concluded.
The 11th race of the 2024 Mission Foods NHRA Drag Racing Series, the Pacific Northwest Nationals, takes place at Pacific Raceways the weekend of July 19-21.
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