{"id":82781,"date":"2021-12-06T13:18:49","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T21:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=82781"},"modified":"2021-12-07T00:16:27","modified_gmt":"2021-12-07T08:16:27","slug":"greg-andersons-climb-to-the-top-of-the-pro-stock-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/greg-andersons-climb-to-the-top-of-the-pro-stock-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"Greg Anderson’s Climb to the Top of the Pro Stock Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Greg Anderson ended the 2021 NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series season with 99 wins in Pro Stock competition, the second-most successful drag racer in the sanctioning body\u2019s 70-year history. NHRA celebrated that milestone year in style, with 20 races in 2021, 17 in the Pro Stock class.<\/p>\n

At the season finale on the Auto Club Raceway at Pomona drag strip, three of the four crowned Camping World titleholders – and all four were decided in the season closer – also claimed Wally trophies by winning the Auto Club NHRA Finals, as well as securing their season-long titles.<\/p>\n

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At the end of that day, Steve Torrence earned his fourth consecutive Top Fuel championship, Ron Capps, the lone champion not to also earn a race winner\u2019s trophy, took his second Funny Car title, while both Anderson and Pro Stock Motorcycle\u2019s Matt Smith, celebrated both race wins and their fifth championships on this historic race track.<\/p>\n

For Anderson, who eclipsed now-retired mentor Warren Johnson\u2019s 97 Pro Stock victories at Texas Motorplex in early October with his 98th win for KB Racing and Chevrolet, the pathway to this achievement showed he is nothing if not resilient. For the past half-decade (or more), Anderson has been hounded by spectacular competition in Pro Stock, easily NHRA\u2019s most technical and difficult category.<\/p>\n

Why most difficult, you might ask?\u00a0 Right now all top competitors are racing Chevrolet\u2019s Camaro SS bodywork atop their 500ci gasoline-fueled engines, a fact that designates race preparation as, conceivably, the most important part of the competition. Yes, cutting a good light is essential to victory in Pro Stock and yes, having good teammates who can – and will – share information is critical to Pro Stock success. But the business model for success in this class is, reliably, having good business sense.<\/p>\n

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KB Racing has always been run in business-like manner. The team\u2019s been known in the past to shield much of what it does from both public and community eyes, and was visibly uncomfortable when NHRA decreed in 2015 that all Pro Stock cars needed to physically face fans, rather than showing their rear ends to the community. That didn\u2019t sit well with KB Racing and, at the race following this decree, they tried very hard to meet the letter, if not spirit of the law.<\/p>\n

The KB Racing team\u2019s sashay around that rule did get them in minor trouble, but they eventually came around and allowed the public – and their competitors – to see some of what they were doing in between rounds. Some of this discontent made racing life even more difficult for Anderson and then-teammate Jason Line, as did rampant competition from Elite Motorsports, whose top driver Erica Enders came close to toppling Anderson and taking her fifth title this year. For now, she\u2019ll have to be content with four, just as Anderson was from 2010 to 2021.<\/p>\n

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This year was very different for KB Racing. Line announced his decision to step back from driving Pro Stock at the close of the pandemic-hit 2020 season and Anderson had a new teammate in Kyle Koretsky, \u201cKid Chaos,\u201d the son of former Pro Stock racer Kenny Koretsky. He also had new sponsorship from www.HendrickCars.com, the entity owned by NASCAR powerhouse owner Rick Hendrick, who earned the NASCAR Cup Series championship with Kyle Larson this year, his 14th Cup driver\u2019s title. The blue-and-white Camaro Anderson drove this year was a tribute car to Hendrick\u2019s late son Ricky, who died in a plane crash on October 24, 2004.<\/p>\n

The ups of Anderson\u2019s 2021 season purely outweighed the downs, as he took his 97th win in the first Countdown to the Championship round at Reading, PA the week after NHRA\u2019s U.S. Nationals, the sanction\u2019s largest and most prestigious race of the year. At that race he was edged by Enders, who dogged him through to the season closer. Teammate Koretsky would win the next round at zMax Dragway in Charlotte, while Enders would take the third contest on the World Wide Technology Raceway drag strip outside St Louis.<\/p>\n

By the time the tour made its traditional fall stop in Texas, Anderson was tied with Warren Johnson, his mentor known as The Professor. That changed at Texas Motorplex, when Anderson became the winningest Pro Stock racer of all time and the second-most successful NHRA racer to 154-race winner and 16-time NHRA Funny Car champion John Force.<\/p>\n

Pro Stock didn\u2019t race at Bristol this year, while eventual Rookie of the Year Dallas Glenn, also a KB Racing teammate and, like Anderson, a whiz with the wrenches who got his start as a team mechanic, earned that victory. Anderson, as said, won the race and the championship in Pomona, NHRA\u2019s historic home track. It was a long trek for Anderson to get to 99 wins, but this season was a magical one for this driver, who took 12 No. 1 qualifiers in Pro Stock\u2019s 17 races and went to nine final rounds, winning five of them.<\/p>\n

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It took 11 seasons between Anderson\u2019s fourth and fifth titles, and his first Pro Stock victory came on April 29, 2001, more than 20 years ago. Grateful to even have a ride in NHRA\u2019s door slammer category, Anderson was better known, before he began driving Pro Stock cars in 1998, for its dexterity turning wrenches and tuning cars for WJ, helping The Professor to three category championships in 1992, 1993 and 1995. \u201cHe worked here for 10 or 12 years,\u201d Warren Johnson acknowledged. \u201cHe was here every day, and whatever it took, he did. He had an accelerated learning curve of racing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson knew one thing Anderson needed to achieve that fifth championship title and to out-race Enders. He needed to get rid of any \u201cclutter\u201d in his brain and concentrate on the job at hand. Greg Anderson managed to do that three years in a row, 2003, 2004, 2005, when he won his first three championships. He did it again in 2010. Although it took 11 years for Anderson to earn his fifth title, the 2021 season was very much reminiscent of 2004, when he rampaged to 15 wins in 19 final rounds.<\/p>\n

There are more goals ahead for the Minnesota native who lives outside Charlotte, NC now. He\u2019s one of only four drivers to achieve five world championships in Pro Stock\u2019s 51-year history, and he helped Chevrolet earn its 17th Pro Stock driver\u2019s championship to go along with a total of 346 race wins, including 228 with the Camaro body style.<\/p>\n

Since winning the season opener at Gainesville, FL in March, Anderson has been atop the Pro Stock points standings, so while it was a long time coming, this fifth title, behind only Bob Glidden (10), Johnson (6) and former adversary Jeg Coughlin Jr., who also has five PS titles, this one came just at the right time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a magical season in so many ways and for so many reasons,\u201d Anderson said. ‘This one really means a lot to me. My HendrickCars.com Chevy is just bad to the bone. Every race I went to, I had a great chance to win that race. I\u2019m very proud of everybody on the KB Racing team and so grateful to our team owners, Ken and Judy Black. We definitely came prepared to race, and it paid off in the beset possible way.\u201d One away from 100 victories, \u201cNow that is the goal. And I don\u2019t want to stop there,\u201d he declared.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greg Anderson ended the 2021 NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series season with 99 wins in Pro Stock competition, the second-most successful drag racer in the sanctioning body\u2019s 70-year history.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":82782,"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":[3465,17,3470,5029,3399,22],"tags":[5614,2,887,41,7,1632],"class_list":["post-82781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drag-racing","category-guest-column","category-news","category-racing","category-nhra","category-event-coverage","tag-anne-proffit","tag-drag-racing","tag-greg-anderson","tag-news","tag-nhra","tag-racing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/Greg-Anderson-action-2021-Pomona2-min-e1638864957104.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YSK-lxb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82781","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=82781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82787,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82781\/revisions\/82787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}