{"id":76930,"date":"2020-12-04T10:02:54","date_gmt":"2020-12-04T18:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=76930"},"modified":"2020-12-04T10:02:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-04T18:02:54","slug":"kalitta-motorsports-todd-langdon-reflect-on-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/kalitta-motorsports-todd-langdon-reflect-on-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Kalitta Motorsports’ Todd, Langdon reflect on 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For any team that didn\u2019t win a championship, the off-season starts with \u201ccoulda, woulda, shoulda.\u201d That\u2019s true for Kalitta Motorsports, which fielded two Top Fuel and a single Funny Car in the NHRA\u2019s Camping World Drag Racing Series.<\/p>\n

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At\u00a0 the start, it looked – really looked – like this would be The Year for Doug Kalitta, Top Fuel\u2019s perennial runner-up. He won at the season starter in Pomona, went to the finals at Phoenix and was atop the points standings as the NHRA headed to Gainesville in mid-March. But that race didn\u2019t happen until\u00a0 \u00a0 September as the novel coronavirus took over the lives of everyone on the planet.<\/p>\n

Racing stopped. NHRA didn\u2019t reset and restart until mid-July and then held three races at Lucas Oil Raceway outside Indianapolis before the traditional U.S. Nationals on Labor Day at the same track. By that time, Steve Torrence and Torrence Racing were in their zone and Kalitta got knocked from his perch. The only win Kalitta would notch in the meat of the season came at the 2020 Mopar Express Lane NHRA Midwest Nationals in early October.<\/p>\n

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By then, Kalitta was two points behind the reigning titleholder and the series headed to Texas, Torrence\u2019s home state. Torrence would win at Dallas and come second to eight-time Top Fuel titleholder Tony Schumacher at Houston. By the time Torrence was runner-up to Antron Brown in the season finale, Kalitta stood second, a gaping 193 points behind Torrence and it was \u201cwait until next year\u201d time again.<\/p>\n

In Funny Car, 2018 champion J.R. Todd had a fallow year that left him in sixth place at the close of 12 races. Still, it was difficult for Todd and his Jon Oberhofer\/Todd Smith-led team to be disappointed with their season. \u201cIn March,\u201d he said, \u201cwe weren\u2019t even sure if we were going to get to race any more this year.\u201d The first two races were tough for Todd, but he appeared to have some impetus in the four Indy races that culminated with the Denso Spark Plugs U.S. Nationals.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\u201cThen we just fell off again. We didn\u2019t live up to our own expectations,\u201d Todd said, adding that he was glad \u201cConnie was able to keep our team going and let us go race,\u201d speaking of his team owner, Connie Kalitta. The downtime was tough for Todd, as it was for everyone in the sport. \u201cOnce we got going it was more about knocking the rust off and getting back in the groove of things. I\u2019m hoping that once 2021 gets started we can go test once or twice before the first race in March\u2026 \u201c<\/p>\n

The longer off-season this year, with the first race held in March at Gainesville, Florida, has prompted Todd to up his fitness with trainers at PitFit in Indianapolis. \u201cWith this much time off, there is really no excuse for me to not be in better shape when you go to that first event. My goal is to go to the gum as much as possible to work on getting better physically and mentally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

While J.R. Todd didn\u2019t rack up a win in 2020, his teammate Shawn Langdon joined fellow Top Fuel teammate Doug Kalitta in the win column, echoing Kalitta\u2019s monumental victory at Indy last year with his own U.S. Nationals Wally winners trophy. The class\u2019 2013 champion, achieved with Al-Anabi Racing\/Alan Johnson Racing, has been racing dragsters since 2009 and worked in Funny Car the past two seasons, notching two victories in that class.<\/p>\n

He returned to dragsters in 2020 and immediately felt at home with team owner Kalitta as his crew chief, assisted by Kurt Elliott. The U.S. Nationals was, for Langdon, \u201cMore gratifying based off of the circumstances and for my team. It is awesome to win the U.S. Nationals and I have won it before, but it was different this year. I was proud to be in the winner\u2019s circle with Connie at Indy and I was really more proud for my team, my guys. They work so hard and dealing with all the stuff that went on this year,\u201d made the victory even more gratifying.<\/p>\n

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After the five-month layoff as the pandemic took hold, Langdon felt prepared as he\u2019d competed in bracket races during that time. \u201cThe first couple of races in Indy were kind of like testing again. After a couple of runs, you got used to the speed and started feeling normal,\u201d Langdon said. He felt fortunate that, during the long wait to go back to NHRA Top Fuel races, Kalitta kept everyone on staff. \u201cThe whole sport was making adjustments to keep us racing, from changing the payout to shortening races. It was tough for everybody. Fortunately, we work for a great man, Connie Kalitta, and he kept everybody employed. We have great sponsors and partners that supported us – they stuck with us so we were able to keep racing. There was just a lot of challenges that we had to work around\u2026 \u201c<\/p>\n

After finishing sixth in the final 2020 Top Fuel standings, Shawn Langdon has projects with his personal race cars to keep him busy before the 2021 season begins, swapping motors from car to car and \u201ca lot of things to keep me busy on the bracket racing side of things. I\u2019m getting my nephew a new junior dragster and will help get that race car ready for him. I want to get ready for some of the bracket races on the west coast at the start of the year. I\u2019ll be spending some time in Indy and some in [his native] California. I won\u2019t not be busy – I promise you that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For any team that didn\u2019t win a championship, the off-season starts with \u201ccoulda, woulda, shoulda.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":76935,"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":[3465,3470,3399,22],"tags":[5614,2,3213,7084,6968,41,1632],"class_list":["post-76930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drag-racing","category-news","category-nhra","category-event-coverage","tag-anne-proffit","tag-drag-racing","tag-jr-todd","tag-kalitta","tag-langdon","tag-news","tag-racing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/Langdon-winning-U.S.-Nationals-Copy-Copy-e1607104619905.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YSK-k0O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76930","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=76930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76938,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76930\/revisions\/76938"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}