To Top Level Top Alcohol! 

Spiro Kontos’ KonRodz Racing continues to make very impressive strides within NHRA TAFC class racing.   Last weekend they claimed some serious Canadian racing performance notoriety…..

With highly talented Cassie Simonton (Brooklyn Park MN) at the controls of his Chevy Monte Carlo Funny Car, Spiro’s team recorded career best elapsed times during NHRA’s running the of 4-Wide Nationals held at Zmax Dragway in North Carolina.

The team was rewarded during qualifying with consecutive laps of 5.545 secs 261.47 mph and 5.536 secs 261.02 mph.   The second lap solidified them as the event’s #3 seeded car entering eliminations — their best qualifying effort yet in NHRA national event racing.

But maybe more impressive is the fact that the Ontario-based team is now the quickest TAFC ever based from Canada.  According to our records there math has eclipsed the previous all time quickest run by a Canadian TAFC – 5.566 secs set by Roger Bateman driving for Brian Friesen in 2009.  We also believe the terminal speed (261.47 mph) is Canada’s fastest too for the class.

“I’m very proud of Cassie and the whole team,” said owner Spiro Kontos.  “I’m very excited about our performance here – thanks to our tuner and crew chief Randy Anderson we have come a very long way.”

Kontos revealed that the performance step was a result of two things – some serious off-season developments and some aggressive pre-season testing.

“Randy did a lot of work over the winter and there is now a lot more of his knowledge in the car,” Spiro continued.  “There are really not that many mechanical changes – just a better application of things.   We were also very aggressive in testing (running a 5.55 and 5.56 secs) and we learned a lot from that experience and it has set us up nicely.” 

The team did however have some misfortune when the car would not fire for round one of eliminations – ending their very promising event bid prematurely.

“We will regroup and move on to the next major NHRA event,” Kontos added. “We are going to continue to race at a very high level and make our fans and sponsors proud of us.”

Posted by:  Bruce Biegler (Photos by:  Bruce Biegler)