Michael Gullqvist in Pro Mod is a hard guy to beat, and now he has taken the European Champions title for the third year in a row and of a total of four, and taken the times down to US standards with his 5.80 second runs. Amazing! Tell us about the season and what´s up until next season.

-    Yeah, we really hit the jackpot this year and it’s a great feeling, says Michael. This was our 4th FIA Championship and 3rd in a row, so I’m thinking we´ve been fairly consistent.  As for the Swedish Championship, which this year has included the same events as the EDRS European Drag Racing Series for Pro Mod, this was our 6th Gold, which I’m very proud of. Winning the Swedish Championship has become a tough task with several great teams focusing on it.


What about the Finals at Santa Pod this year?

-    Arriving at Santa Pod we only were one point from securing the championship, which meant we just needed to make one qualifying run down the track to get ten points, for being there. Because we did no testing at all in the season, we figured this was the right time to test some new stuff. It sure did not help in getting a consistent tune-up, but we took the chance to figure some new parts out. These cars need a lot of tweaking, you can’t just take something you´ve run before and hope for the best. The weather and track changes and you have to analyze the situation, make the right calls to make it go down the track.


Michael with Fredrik Westerlind (right and below) or "Turbo" as he is nick named, who is a key player which contributes a lot to the success of the team.

Michael Gullqvist 

Several of your competitors are getting down at consistently 5 second runs, what are your thoughts about that?

-    The competition has been tougher this year for sure, with several cars running in the fives. This has inspired us a lot and we just had to step it up. We need some tough competition, without that you tend to seek competition elsewhere after a while. If we won all the events, the joy of winning would be gone for sure.

Michael and team have lots of knowledge in Pro Mod racing, won three FIA championships in a row and are of course looking for new challenges. So the question is, what’s for the future?

-    I have some great guys on the team, they are not making many mistakes. Freddy ”Turbo” Westerlind has been with me since the early nineties, so he clearly knows what it’s all about, and Stefan Petersson has been on the team for the last two years and has run his own Pro Mod before as well as worked on Top Fuel cars, so I’m always confident in their great work. Robin Bergman and Rickard Lundin have also been important ingredients of our operation, we had a great team this year.

Myself, at the track I don’t touch the car much, I´m all focused on tuning the car between runs. Having these great guys that I can trust enables me to really focus on fixing issues with the tuneup, which has been key to our success. I’m sure we can run better still, we just need some more motivation to really try. And as long the competition steps up, I’m sure we’ll be running faster. This year we were in the finals at four out of six events and we lost two of them due to me cutting bad lights. I really wanted to fix this and I think I improved very much in the last two races.

-   I think we’ve helped taking the FIA Pro Mod Championship to a greater level and I think we’re close to the US standard today. We might go racing in the US again in a year or so and I think we can be pretty competitive.

I want to thank our partners Stavdal, Kjelland Transport, Lucas Oil, 7LAB, Blenco, Sjökrogen, Persåkers and Liqui Moly for their great support. Also I want to thank BILSPORT Magazine who has supported the Pro Mod championship for many years!