Billy Glidden Makes the Switch to EFI

When Billy Glidden qualified for last year’s U.S. Nationals with a 5.99 pass at 239.40 mph, it represented not only the first time he’d made it into an NHRA Pro Mod field, it was the first time in at least five years he’d made a quarter-mile run at speed in competition.

“Back in 2008-09, we ran the small-block and a Hemi in a couple of quarter-mile match races, but that was the last time,” says Glidden, who since then went eighth-mile racing with the ADRL for several years, then back to the quarter in 2013 with NMCA Pro Street. “Although we ran all the races that year and the first three NHRA races in 2014, we never did make it to the finish line under power. So it was exciting to run like that, but it was not a very good run, not by our standards,” he insists. “Even though we hadn’t gotten to the finish line before, we were always really good at the front numbers—always—very near the top at the 330 [feet] and actually still top half of the field at the eighth-mile. We just had trouble going the full quarter-mile.”

The U.S. Nationals, where he scored a semi-final finish after improving to a career-best 5.90 at 237.71 in round one of eliminations, also marked the first time Glidden raced with electronic fuel injection (EFI) on top of his nitrous-boosted Sonny’s Racing Engines power plant.

“In eighth-mile racing, you can certainly get away with being off a little. You can be much more aggressive to where you actually have the engine starting to get upset, but not actually hurt it,” Glidden says. “Whereas in quarter-mile, like we are now, if you’re on kill for an eighth-mile run, you’ll only get about 750 to 800 feet before it starts to eat itself up, so I just felt like it was time to switch so that some of the things I believe were going on that I couldn’t control with carburetors, we could have better control over them with EFI. When we switched, we went all in with John Meaney’s Big Stuff 3 fuel injection. I’ve also got a lot of good people on our side helping us, and I believe I know enough about it now to take care of things.”

Glidden, the son of 10-time NHRA Pro Stock champion Bob Glidden, is a 15-time champ himself, mostly in NMCA and NMRA 10.5-tire classes, though his most recent season title came in 2008 with the now defunct ADRL, where he finished as the eighth-mile series’ all-time win leader with 15 victories. Like his dad before him, who worked side by side with Billy’s mother Etta in the shop and at the track, Glidden races alongside Shannon, his wife and companion of 24 years, sharing the endless miles, dirty jobs, late nights and long days it takes to field a winning entry.

“It’s just the two of us; we are the racing program. Ours may be different than a lot of professional programs; in fact, it’s certainly a lot different. Shannon works on everything. As for hands-on help and being able to fill in a lot of the things, whether it be tools or a hand or point to the car and say I need the transmission out, she can do all that. She just does whatever she needs to as part of the program,” Glidden explains.

“The problem in this style of racing [NHRA Pro Mod] is you might have five hours between the first and second round and 30 minutes between the second and third round. It just doesn’t leave you time. You really need to sit down, especially when something like the fuel injection isn’t like your right hand. You need to be able to sit down uninterrupted to make the changes you’d like to change, but between doing the clutch, doing valves, leaking the engine, doing compression checks, changing tires, maybe you want to change the gear ratio, whatever, it really doesn’t leave you a lot of time.”

Though still seeking that first win in the NHRA Pro Mod ranks, since installing EFI on his 903-ci motor Glidden has seen his fortunes rise considerably. He qualified at two of the three remaining Pro Mod events following Indy last year (not attending the season ender at Las Vegas) and made it into the field at each of the first three races this season. He even reached his first final round this spring at Houston, where he lowered his personal best elapsed time to 5.88 in the semis, but finished runner-up in the final to Don Walsh.

“I’m still learning. I don’t know yet how to get it to where we can really run well more than a couple of really good runs,” Glidden freely admits. “For the final in Houston we had to change engines and really we just ran out of time, so we weren’t fully prepared when we went to the starting line. So what happened I felt pretty confident would happen, and it just tore the tires off.”

With the only NHRA Pro Mod nitrous car left running the Big Stuff 3 EFI management system and as a single-car team on a unique combination right down to his Mickey Thompson slicks, Glidden understands the battle to succeed will continue.

“Quite honestly there’s a lot of information out there that I’m really not in the loop for,” he says. “For instance, Rickie Smith, he has Pat Musi and Sonny [Leonard] both doing the fuel injection stuff, so he’s been gathering a wealth of information from those guys as well as racing in the PDRA and going to Qatar and Bahrain and wherever else, learning on someone else’s dime exactly what he needs to do for several years now.

“So Rickie’s been with it for quite a while and his performance shows it. He’s definitely the best with the nitrous stuff, but Shannon [Jenkins] and those folks, they’ve been running with the PDRA crowd as well as NHRA, too, and they already had lots of experience running with fuel injection before going to Sonny and EFI, so quite honestly, we’re just behind, that’s all.”

Glidden’s car, too, while obviously a decent piece, really isn’t ideally suited to Pro Modified competition. Built 10 years ago by Jerry Haas Race Cars, it now sports a 2010 Mustang body on its 105- inch wheelbase.

“You look at this car’s performance and it’s actually pretty impressive. It’s a 2005 NHRA Pro Stock car. It’s been head first into the wall. I’ve let the clutch out on it more than 10,000 times myself, and I mean that quite literally,” Glidden stresses.

“They say we can’t race Pro Mod with a Pro Stock car, but we do. They say we can’t race Pro Mod with Mickey Thompson tires, but we do. They say we can’t race Pro Mod with a Liberty transmission, but we do. In fact, it’s the same transmission I had when I raced NHRA Pro Stock eight years ago, same parts, and they were already used when I got them.

“Let me tell you, if any other nitrous Pro Mod program did nothing but drop their electronics and drivetrain into my car, it wouldn’t go five feet. It’s just not built for what we’re doing.

“But it’s all about funding,” he states. “We just don’t have it; we’re just doing the best we can out there with what we have, but on the flip side of that are the folks at Mickey Thompson, we’ve worked with for 15 years plus. We’re in business with them, but yet we’re still on a pretty personalized type of relationship. So them being our boss, it’s very easy for us to deal with, and then we really don’t have bosses after that.

“Shannon and I sacrifice near everything so that we can continue doing what we’re doing, so we look at the positive side. We’re together 24/7 and we enjoy each other’s company. We’re a really good partnership in life and in our business and racing, and I guess that outweighs knowing what we’re up against.”

After three of 10 scheduled events in the NHRA J&A Service Pro Mod Series this year, Glidden sat third in points, less than four round wins away from the lead. He obviously recognizes his famous last name may raise expectations for him in some people, but with a long, storied career of his own, he points out the pressure to perform comes only from within.

“You know, I don’t feel I have anything to prove to anyone,” Glidden says. “Although we didn’t win NHRA Pro Stock races, we’ve won a lot and we’ve won everywhere else we’ve been. The only place I haven’t won yet is at an NHRA national event. Anywhere else we’ve raced, we’ve won. If there’s a goal that I’d like to achieve before the end of the year, I’d like to be able to win an NHRA event. That would be great. And if it doesn’t happen, well, it won’t be because we didn’t put enough effort into it.”

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