{"id":48584,"date":"2018-01-29T08:58:35","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T16:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=48584"},"modified":"2018-08-16T12:26:53","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T19:26:53","slug":"changes-ahoy-at-kalitta-motosports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/changes-ahoy-at-kalitta-motosports\/","title":{"rendered":"Changes Ahoy at Kalitta Motosports"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Changes
Image courtesy NHRA.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kalitta Motorsports is going to look a bit different this year. Already announced are changes to the team\u2019s NHRA Funny Car operations, with Alexis DeJoria \u201cretiring\u201d for the time being and Shawn Langdon moving over from Top Fuel to the flopper class to drive a blue Global Electronics Toyota Camry; he passed certification Funny Car runs the day after Las Vegas last October.<\/p>\n

The team had already announced the pairing of Doug Kalitta and Richie Crampton in two dragsters for 2018 and two Funny Cars, for Langdon and J.R. Todd; now it\u2019s clear that the management for this operation has warranted a few changes at the top.<\/p>\n

The Ypsilanti, Michigan mega-team is pretty well isolated from the balance of NHRA\u2019s nitro runners, most of whom prep their cars near Brownsburg, Indiana. That doesn\u2019t harm their chances to attract quality team members, as they\u2019ve got a good core group that works well together. Those race-winning \u201cmosh pits\u201d aren\u2019t corporate; they\u2019re real.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been apparent, at least for the past few years, that Jim Oberhofer, the long-serving crew chief for Doug Kalitta, had a great deal on his plate. Not only did he oversee Air Doug\u2019s Mac Tools dragster, Jim O has also served as general manager for the entire Kalitta Motorsports group the past few decades. It was a bit more than he felt capable of performing, as Oberhofer has always stated that his primary intent is to see driver Doug Kalitta finally earn his first NHRA Top Fuel championship.<\/p>\n

Those efforts might have been diluted by the extra duties Jim O has been called upon to perform. That, coupled with his wife Tammy\u2019s cancer diagnosis, her ultimate death and the book he wrote about setting priorities following this tragedy, certainly meant that Oberhofer was allocating time based on the immediate needs of the shop, likely before his needs as a crew chief. Setting aside time for his family? Well, that was the root problem.<\/p>\n

Now, in talking with www.competitionplus.com<\/a> editor Bobby Bennett, Jim Oberhofer revealed he\u2019s stepping back from the general manager\u2019s post. After seeing his driver, Doug Kalitta, earn a third-place result this past year, having Langdon, who joined the team at Houston in 2017 qualify for the Countdown to the Championship a ninth consecutive season, and switching drivers in the third SealMaster dragster from Troy Coughlin Jr to Crampton at the U.S. Nationals in September, the game of musical chairs and their logistics became a bit much.<\/p>\n

True, Kalitta won the Countdown\u2019s initial contest in the six-race playoff series for top 10 drivers at Charlotte, his tenth year in a row in the Countdown. Yes, Kalitta qualified No. 1 twice last year and had three runner-up results. It just wasn\u2019t enough for Oberhofer, as he told Bennett. \u201cAs the team\u2019s grown over the years, the whole organization has grown. You go from one car to two cars, two cars to three cars, three to four and then you add a CNC shop in the mix, a chassis shop into the mix, a repair shop and you\u2019ve got marketing people, PR people and social media people. Pretty soon you\u2019ve got almost 80 employees,\u201d he told the website.<\/p>\n

It was time to step back, and that\u2019s what Oberhofer is about to do. He\u2019s putting his primary efforts into making Doug Kalitta\u2019s championship in Top Fuel a reality. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about this for the past two years, and I\u2019ve been thinking I need to do one or the other.\u201d He\u2019ll stick with crew chiefing and continuing to get to know his daughter better.<\/p>\n

As he explained to Bennett, \u201c18 years of being the figurehead for Connie over here at Kalitta Motorsports, there\u2019s been a lot of great times, there\u2019s been ups and downs and everything in between. But it\u2019s taken its toll on me. And in the middle of all that, we lost Scott [Kalitta at Englishtown in 2008], I lost my wife. My kid went from being just five years old and now she\u2019s 22. I missed a lot of things with that. I want to live life a little bit. I want to enjoy racing.\u201d<\/p>\n

To that end, Rachel Delago, a longtime, essential member of the Kalitta Motorsports team takes over the post of general manager, with former driver and team manager Chad Head, who also worked in operations with INDYCAR some years ago and will aid Delago moving forward. \u201cWe weren\u2019t happy with how the Kalitta team performed last year. Four total wins is unacceptable; it\u2019s not what we\u2019re about. We\u2019re not out here to play second fiddle to Schumacher, Force, Torrence, anybody like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Look for Jim Oberhofer to make his ultimate statements about this change in the pits as he tunes the car and on the start line from here on out. He\u2019s going back to what brought him to this dance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kalitta Motorsports is going to look a bit different this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":48585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3465,3470,5029,3399],"tags":[5614,4732,4730,41,7,1632],"class_list":["post-48584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drag-racing","category-news","category-racing","category-nhra","tag-anne-proffit","tag-jim-oberhofer","tag-kalitta-motorsports","tag-news","tag-nhra","tag-racing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/5173925949001_5343789912001_5343762971001-vs-min.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YSK-cDC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48586,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48584\/revisions\/48586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}