 Rob's Father, Bob Atchison |
“We had been running a Quick 8, Quick 16 car, a Funny Car with a big-block Chev, and a lot of our customers at the shop here were Chevrolet based,” Atchison says. “There aren’t a whole lot of hemis out there, especially for street cars or even local racers; there’s more big-block Chev stuff than anything else, so it kind of suited what we wanted for the shop and our business there.”
After spending 1998 getting used to the new motor in local Quick 8 races, Atchison felt ready for the full IHRA schedule the next year. Despite qualifying ninth at Darlington, SC, his first time out, Atchison’s rookie season also was sometimes a humbling experience.
“We struggled early on, I can distinctly remember some races where I don’t think we could make it run a 6.20,” he says. “But we kept working at it and working at it, and maybe in some cases it was stubbornness, but in other cases it would give us enough of a glimpse of hope to say, ‘Hey, this thing can run.’ ”
Still, “Atch” admits there were times when he questioned the wisdom of going against the grain.
“We were at the end of our rope in a lot of cases, but the worst scenario for us was more or less when the motor was running okay, it wasn’t running great, it wasn’t running good, it was just okay; it wasn’t hurting a whole lot of parts, but it wasn’t setting the world on fire. But I was struggling with all kinds of other things. You know, the car was catching on fire from knocking panels out, more of a fuel system issue, I crashed the car (at Norwalk, OH, 2001) when I had parachute problems, you know it was a string of bad luck I guess for us, and maybe it wasn’t so much the engine combination; maybe it was drag racing itself that was beating us up pretty good.”
Atchison recognizes many racers go through similar ordeals, but says that having to figure out an unproven engine tune-up on top of everything else was a trial. “There was no information to be had out there. There was nothing we could buy, nothing we could borrow, it was all in-house and we just had to work through all of the problems.”
After Erickson came on board as his primary sponsor in 2002, things started to come around for Atchison, but consistency remained a problem. He always qualified well, never lower than seventh that year, but continued to have trouble going rounds. It wasn’t until the 2002-03 off-season that his team finally figured out a good combination for the 526 cubic incher up front.
“We changed a bunch of stuff and really worked on the consistency to run a good number all weekend. We kept working away in one direction and got the fuel system to where we felt it was right, but there would be other problems with the block or with pistons or compression, so we would go another way until finally we got to the point where it all fit together and it just worked,” Atchison says.
The result was a number one qualifier straight off the trailer at the 2003 season opener at Rockingham. But when it got rain postponed, the next race was on home turf at Grand Bend, ON, and by that time Atchison’s team had put the last pieces it was waiting for in the engine combination. After qualifying second, they dominated eliminations, putting together a string of 4.70s that led to Atchison’s first IHRA Ironman.
“The whole package had finally come together,” Atchison recalls. “Fortunately, we’ve been able to take that combination now and keep working on it, making it a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better, and it’s been consistently fast ever since.”
Atchison is understandably coy about the details of his now multiple-championship winning combination other than to say he has significant input on the manufacture of most major outsourced components and Atchison Machine handles the rest. CN Blocks out of Houston makes his engine blocks and Alan Johnson still provides the heads, modified to Atchison-generated proprietary designs.
“Alan and his guys have promised to keep that for me because I’ve stuck my neck out and pushed the combination and made it work for them and done some things that, even to them they didn’t think would be the right way to go, but it ended up working out. They’ve been willing to hold that information for me, but if I’m willing to sell it to customers—which in a lot of cases I do—I try to move the stuff on to customers who use our motors.”
