Nail-biting and frustrated Danny Bellio and his family saw their fellow Top Methanol Funny Car racers go down the Santa Pod and Tierp Arena tracks and set new records. But at Hockenheim the Belgian Danny’s Racing Team was back in action and although the numbers were by far what they were looking for, the progress they made was enough to go to the Scandinavian Internationals as well.

Danny Bellio, his wife, two sons and daughters in law, the whole life of this Belgian family is dedicated to drag racing. “Why spend money for a new kitchen as you can buy a new V8 for that?”, that shows how important drag racing is for them. Last few seasons Danny Bellio was one of the frontrunners in the FIA European Top Methanol Funny Car Championship. Racing on a shoestring budget, the team surprised by running record numbers and always come back after every setback. But for the first time in many years, Danny’s Racing Team had to miss the first part of the season.

Last winter the time had come to rebuild the team truck. Used to do everything themselves and burning the midnight oil to be ready in time to go racing, this time special parts had to be ordered and specialised companies had to do parts of the rebuild. And there it went wrong. Parts were delivered too late and not all the work was done in the agreed deadlines. As the truck was far from ready before the Main Event, the team had to skip that race and as the Sweden Internationals were only three weeks later, that race came too early too.

photo: Danny Bellio captured at the Santa Pod  podium in 2012

As a real racing family, computers were turned on and off, as they wanted to see the races, but on the other hand couldn’t see their fellow TMFC-drivers race and setting new records, while they were at home and couldn’t do anything at all. A very frustrating and nail-biting time.

And although the truck is not completely ready yet, the Bellio’s season started at Hockenheim, as waiting any longer was no option for the diehard racers. As the Dodge had a new engine set-up, the Bellio’s wanted to do some testruns prior to the NitrOlympX. A race in Denmark seemed to be okay, but when they arrived, the track was not good enough for the 3,000bhp Top Methanol Car and the team went back home almost the same evening. So they had to start from scratch in the NitrOlympX’s qualifying. As expected some problems turned up, but very unexpected they could not solve it in qualifying. The team already decide to skip the Scandinavian Internationals as it was no use to drive almost 1.800 km to Sweden to find out that the car still didn’t want to go down the track. But Saturday evening they found something that could be the reason why the engine sounded so strange and did not want to rev up as it should do.

The first round of eliminations was decisive. If the car would leave the line and sounded good, Sweden was in the program again. And to the relief of the whole team, everything seemed to be okay and the problem solved. As diehard racers, the decision was already made before Danny crossed the finish line. They only had to look at each other and they knew: let’s go to the Scandinavian Internationals. The European Finals is the next stop, but as the team is still looking for sponsors, it all depends on ‘not breaking parts’ in Sweden.