Jeff "the Surfer" Diehl is steadying to hang ten in the hostile waters of the Funny Car ranks

by Brad Littlefield

Early in the morning on Friday, April 23, Jeff Diehl's firesuit was hanging in his transporter roughly 300 miles away in Las Vegas as he donned a wet suit in Oceanside, Calif. He had yet to catch many breaks in his budding Funny Car career, but there were no shortage of breaks in this cathartic session on his surfboard. Diehl hadn't been to his Salinas, Calif., home since the start of the season, yet he chose to head south to warmer water during his off-weekend on the West Coast. The time he has been spending at dragstrips across the country getting in tune with his Funny Car has been time away from the ocean, evidenced by the soreness and fatigue in his shoulders as he paddled out.

Diehl took to the surfing and hot rod cultures that overlapped in Southern California while he was growing up. His father, Bill, took a 2-week-old Diehl with him when he raced his dragster at Lions Drag Strip in August 1964. An alumni of San Clemente High School, where the auditorium is rife with banners of surfing titles, Diehl recalls surfing and driver's ed as the only two classes that held his interest enough for him to earn A's. Diehl made his living painting hot rods for 20 years while surfing and racing sporadically.

With surfing and racing being the two great passions in Diehl's life, he all but put away his surfboard when he encased himself in a chromoly chassis and carbon-fiber shell. Diehl formed a partnership with longtime friend and respected crew chief Tony Shortall as they attempt to establish a livelihood with their Funny Car team and run all 23 events in the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series. The waves have proven treacherous thus far, but Diehl has yet to wipe out.

On Thursday night before the Charlotte event, Diehl and Shortall worked side by side inside their trailer rebuilding a set of Diehl's cylinder heads to meet Shortall's standards. Both well over 6 feet tall with slicked-back hair, Shortall, a Baltimore native, stood in slacks and a collared shirt while Diehl sported his typical T-shirt, Dickies shorts, and sandals. In chairs outside, their wives, Leeza Diehl and Gretchen Shortall, engaged in girl talk that had them laughing loudly and often.

"Do you hear Cacklefest going on outside?" Tony Shortall wisecracked, drawing a laugh from Jeff Diehl.

Lying in the center of the pit was Lucy, Jeff and Leeza's ubiquitous black Labrador/Newfoundland mix, completing a typical scene at Ideal Racing with the allvolunteer crew yet to fly in. Beneath the gargantuan effort required to keep a nitro car running and funded, Diehl and Shortall have a close bond that allows them to keep it light even when times are frustrating. Diehl was the best man at Shortall's wedding during the 2007-08 off-season, and they've often met each other in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

The working relationship between Diehl and Shortall had a lot to do with timing. Diehl had been on his own for some time while Shortall, who once had his own engine-building and cylinder-head-porting business for stock cars, had been working his way from the bottom of the crew up to assistant crew chief and crew chief positions on the teams of Tony and Cruz Pedregon, car owner Dexter Tuttle, Cory McClenathan, and Jerry Toliver.

"The down economy gave me the opportunity to do a partnership with Jeff," said Shortall. "If things were thriving, I probably wouldn't have the opportunity or be willing to take that risk. Not being a rich guy or from a rich family, the only thing I have to invest in is myself and my own abilities."

"I'm at a point in my life where my wife's into it and my son [Treavor, 20] is grown up and moved out," said Diehl. "It's pretty much now or never to really pursue it 100 percent. I always wanted to do it, but I never jumped in with both feet until now."

"I traded in my frequent-flyer miles for a Flying J Frequent Fueler card," quipped Shortall.

Leeza is able to make it to all of the races while managing Nitro-A-Gogo, her handbag and accessory business, in between. Gretchen stays in Brownsburg, Ind., where she owns and runs Everyday Joe's Barber & Style Shop.

"Leeza's a big part of it," said Diehl. "She books the flights, techs the car, takes care of all the driving equipment, cleans, and does all the cooking and shopping and whatever else needs to get done. She's definitely not a tailgate girl. She's a big asset to the team."

Shortall stresses that their team is a business that goes beyond friends going drag racing.

"What people might not see from the outside looking in is that there's a whole, diverse marketing program in place where we can place products that I've set into motion with some different groups," said Shortall. "It's not just a couple of guys who are saying, 'Hey, let's go racing and have some fun.' When we're traveling down the road, I'll use the back of the truck like a mobile office, having phone meetings and conference calls. I have to keep yelling at Jeff to have the radio down so I can talk."

Much like a novice surfer wouldn't be wise to take on the big swells at the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, Diehl worked his way up the ranks and built up his confidence before paddling out to the big show. Diehl began with dragsters that were blown on gas and alcohol in the Super Eliminator (7.90) ranks in the late 80s. He ran a fairly competitive Top Alcohol Dragster in the mid-90s. After that, he began driving front-engine dragsters in the nostalgia ranks for team owners such as Jim Cullen, John Blanchard, and Brian Van Dyke, and he raced the Witch Doctor fuel altered with some success.

"I won the Nightfire Nationals in Boise [Idaho] and runnered-up a few times in the fuel altered," said Diehl. "Brian's car was really good, and we were always in the top five."

Diehl's nickname was given to him when Cullen painted it on his dragster. After they parted ways, Blanchard put it on his car. Diehl never totally embraced having a gimmick, fitting as it may be, but he figured that going along with it was the easiest course of action.

"Every time I tried to get rid of it, people got mad," Diehl shrugged.

Diehl bought a body from Toliver that he mounted on his altered to do some match racing.

"I did that for a year, and I ran the car not really turned up," said Diehl. "You can call it 'nitro Funny Car racing,' but it only ran six flat. I've always had my sights on driving a Funny Car. I went every way but that way for some reason. I had to work my way up and prove to myself that I could handle it and that I wouldn't be dangerous in one of those cars. It took a long time for me to build the confidence and put one together."

In 2006, Diehl's first foray into NHRA Funny Car racing was in the seat of Chuck Beal's Funny Car at two events. Unfortunately, the most notable event in that span was a fiery explosion during preseason warm-ups in Phoenix. Diehl ran his own Funny Car on the East Coast later that year and managed to win an IHRA event in Budds Creek, Md.

Though friendly and approachable, Diehl marches to the beat of his own drummer and has little interest in the locals-only driver fraternity. Diehl decided at the onset that he wouldn't get far if he tried to emulate hired drivers, so he embraced what makes him different and forged his own path.

"That was something I took on early," said Diehl. "I'm [6 feet, 5 inches]. When I started, I was 190 pounds, but I'm happily married, so what are you gonna do? I didn't see that I had what it took to play the driver game. I kind of like painting my own cars. I didn't have the finances to just go out and buy it. It took a lot of years of collecting, pack ratting, hoarding, selling this, buying that to get what I have now. The thing that's empowering about it is that I do own it, and nobody's going to tell me I'm not driving it on Sunday."

After missing the three fields he attempted to qualify for in 2009 by .007-second, twohundredths, and three-hundredths, Diehl's resolve was tested further at the get-go of the 2010 season after frustrating nonqualifying efforts in Pomona and Phoenix, during which he ran quicker on Friday than the bump on Saturday. Diehl, refreshing for his lack of pretension or entitlement in all aspects of his racing career, admits his frustration but doesn't whine about the qualifying format that was implemented last season.

"I always ran quicker the day before, but what are you going to do?" said Diehl. "I should be able to run that e.t. or quicker when I need to. If you don't qualify, there's still good that comes out of it. I'm kind of getting comfortable driving the thing. The laps are good. You can kind of get a handle on the tune-up."

Shortall's perspective on qualifying and the firstround payout has changed since teaming with Diehl.

"With the big teams, qualifying money gets divided up among the crew," said Shortall. "Qualifying money to us gets us to the next race and buys more parts, so you look at it differently. I can't remember ever worrying about qualifying money before. My goal isn't just to qualify; I want to win, but I have to be realistic and look at the big picture."

Having left a healthy share of qualifying money on the table in Pomona and Phoenix and living on race-to-race sponsorships from companies like RimzOneOnline.com, PiranaZ Apparel, J.G. Parks & Son, and Stephen Pearcy's Top Fuel Records, Diehl and Shortall pulled their rig into a truck stop in New Mexico shortly after the Phoenix event and discussed their next move.

"We were sitting there going, 'Man, what the hell are we doing here? We've got no money, and we DNQ'd twice. Let's reevaluate this,' " Shortall recalled.

In a sort of drag racing version of the classic surfing documentary Endless Summer, they stayed on the road and haven't looked back. Diehl qualified in Charlotte and Houston, though he received a good deal of coverage in Charlotte for the wrong reasons when he launched the body off his race car. Fortunately, the damage was limited to a rotating assembly and a set of heads, and he was able to get a roof from Jim Dunn to replace the damaged one from the incident.

Diehl enters two events at a time. He looks at surviving the four-in-a-row events in June that precede the Western Swing as the pivotal point in his season and the rest of it as going downhill.

"All I can do is laugh when I think about seven races in two months," said Diehl. "It's going to be hard, especially with our crew all having regular jobs, but we're going to go for it. We've been assessing what we have left after every race and moving on. We really want to run the whole season as long as it doesn't kill us financially."

The performance of Diehl's Funny Car is a challenge that Shortall is making ground on. The process of tuning for a smaller team with a limited and used parts supply requires him to use more savvy than when he was calling the shots on Tony Pedregon's Funny Car at the end of last season. The levels of expectations are different, but Shortall wants to make Diehl a consistent qualifier that isn't first-round fodder in a few races' time.

"It's quite a bit broader on this," said Shortall. "It's not a refined process. Tony Pedregon's car was a championship team that was a very welloiled machine. On this, we're working with way different parts on a way different budget. I can still make this work and be competitive. Tony's deal was like connecting the dots as opposed to this being like a big, old 1,500-piece puzzle that you dump on the floor."

Almost any successful nitro racer, be it John Force or Don Garlits, has been at the groundfloor position that Diehl and Shortall are in. Trying as it may be, they have no regrets about taking the risk and savor in having destiny in their own hands.

"We're a quarter of the way through the season, and we're still out here," said Shortall. "If this thing fails, it's our fault. If it moves forward, there's a sense of accomplishment in that."

"Somehow I'm keeping my head above water," said Diehl. "I would like to be able to make a living drag racing, which is why we're doing this. I really enjoy it. I like driving the car. I like the lifestyle, believe it or not. Have I made it yet? No, but I'm tryin'."