Daydream believer

National Dragster, Apr 16, 2004 by Dillashaw, Bruce

Now driving one of the best Top Fuel entries, David Grubnic took an unconventional path to fulfill his boyhood dream

David Grubnic is an anomaly in fuel racing. Not because he is Australian - now entering his ninth year driving NHRA Top Fuel dragsters, the novelty of his nationality wore off long ago - but because his arrival in the class and his continued upward spiral flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

Excluding Grubnic, there are only two ways to go fuel racing: buy a car, assemble a team, and then nickel-and-dime it part time until a sponsor can be acquired or acquire sponsorship and buy a ride with an established team. Grubnic has done neither. Yet, since three years after arriving in the United States in 1991 at the age of 29, he has been driving Top Fuel dragsters, moving up steadily in the quality of entries he has driven and in the frequency with which their owners competed. Now, he is driving a championship-caliber entry full time for one of the sport's wealthiest and more competitive car owners.

Grubnic licensed in the McGee Brothers Top Fueler in 1994, briefly drove Bill Blomgren's Geronimo Top Fueler, and in 1998 began a five-year stint behind the butterfly of John Mitchell's Montana Express dragster. After driving for Bill Miller part time in 2003, Grubnic's dream came true when friend and team owner Connie Kalitta asked over the winter if he knew anybody interested in driving a third team car. What explains these owners' largesse toward the tall, lanky, blond Aussie?

"I would think it's my desire to race and succeed," said Grubnic. "I do my job correctly. Driving one of these cars represents 10 percent of what it takes to get down the racetrack under normal conditions. Ninety percent of it is the crew and crew chief. When you drive these cars, you want to drive it like it's your own.

"An enormous amount of credit has to go to the owners who have taken a chance on me," he added. "Running one of these cars is very expensive, and it is a privilege to drive for them without having brought in a sponsor. In this sport, I pretty much have a nuts-and-bolts degree - I can put the cars together and work on them - but I've never focused on the marketing. I'm not a salesman; I've tried, but it's hard for me to get money. But I know what to do if we get a sponsor."

Grubnic grew up in Brisbane, a metropolis of two million people on the East Coast of the kangaroo kingdom. His upbringing was conventional. He grew up in a house in the suburbs with his father Dusan, a "spray painter;" mother Rada, a seamstress; and older brother Peter, who today is a high-level executive with Shell oil in Holland.

For most of his teen years, Grubnic worked six hours a night, four days a week stuffing newspapers with advertising inserts.

One night in 1976 at the age of 14, he was at Australia's Surfers Paradise Dragstrip for a Funny Car match race. Once he saw those cars, everything else became secondary to one day driving a fuel car.

"I just couldn't believe it," Grubnic recalled. "I watched them go down the track, and then the goose bumps started, and that was the end of it. It all started from there."

He forgot about all other forms of dragstrip acceleration and focused on the fuel cars. Every time fuel cars came to the track, he was there watching and looking, soaking it up. Eventually, perhaps because they got tired of being stared at, a Funny Car team asked if he wanted to help. Still in high school, he would buy a $25 train ticket and take an 18-hour, 600-mile ride to south Sydney to help John Maher with his Top Fuel dragster.

"After I got involved with fuel cars, I lost interest in my car," said Grubnic. "I made a commitment that the next car I staged on a dragstrip would be a Top Fueler."

After high school, Grubnic took many automotive and business courses at Mount Gravatt College of Technical and Further Education without earning a degree, and for most of the 1980s, he worked for Ford as a zone manager for dealerships, handling warranty claims and presenting seminars on new products. During this time, he kept sending résumés to fuel teams in the United States, but he was too far away to take a job on a moment's notice. He flew halfway around the world in 1989 just to attend the national event in Seattle and make the rounds in the pits looking for a job.

Grubnic eventually shucked his job with Ford and left for the United States in 1991. Fortunately for him, he had the inside track on a job with fellow Australians Phil and Chris McGee, both famous for the double-overhead-camshaft fuel engine of the same name that they built and developed in the early 1990s. Phil taught Grubnic machining techniques, and Grubnic was soon building and assembling McGee engines at their business in Southern California's San Fernando Valley.

Recognizing Grubnic's intelligence and overriding desire to race, they were the first to take an all-expenses-paid chance on him. With no more souped-up experience than a year's worth of 13.9-second trips down Surfers Paradise Dragstrip with his 351 Cleveland engine-equipped '72 GT Falcon while in high school, Grubnic drove the McGee's blown fuel lakester in Southern California Timing Association meets at El Mirage lakebed to speeds of 260 mph.