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When Mason McGaha rolls out for the first Pro Stock qualifying session at the season-opening Amalie Motor Oil NHRA Gatornationals, fans will get their first look at a new paint scheme that the third-generation Texas racer hopes will look great if he can finally park it in the winner’s circle after his first career win.

The two-car McGaha team, with Mason and his father, Chris, have never gone for flashy schemes. Chris’ “Silver Bullet” has been predominantly just silver with black stripes over his 14-year Pro career, while Mason’s car had been traditionally blue with some fluorescent green stripes added the last two of his five seasons in the class.

“I’ve thought about doing a scheme a couple of times, but I never really pursued it,” said Mason, who has four career runner-ups in his career, including last year in Brainerd. “One of my crew guys, Dwayne, is pretty tight with the people at Fineline Graphics, and they hooked him up. We went back and forth and did some ideas and were having trouble with it. We almost scrapped that project, and were going to do the blue with the fluorescent stripes, and then he sent that last scheme that we decided on, got everybody to agree on it, and they liked it. The rendering here doesn’t really do it justice; it looks way better in person.”

The McGaha’s Harlow-Sammons Southwest Performance team had its struggles last year, with Mason DNQing five times and Chris missing the field three times.

“So many people come into the class and lease some equipment from somebody and they're instantly competitive,” explained Mason. They write a check and show up and they're running right up front, and when there's maybe eight KB-powered cars and eight Elite cars, you don't have to be super smart at math to go, ‘Hey, plus 8+8 is 16, and that's already a full field,’ so you have to really be on your A game. Before, even if we had a little bit of an iffy weekend, we’d qualify 14th or 15th and got to show up on race day. Now you’ve got to show up every time you go down the track. Every shift counts, and the difference between qualifying and not qualifying sometimes is just a couple of thousandths.

“I guess I can't blame the guys who rent equipment because it does make the class healthy, but it’s just a little bit more challenging for teams like ours. I wouldn't say we’d never do that, but we're gonna keep working on it till we just absolutely feel like we have no choice. We work on it ourselves and beat our heads against the wall, which makes the moments of success all the sweeter that we built it with our own hands.��

“It's no secret that we struggle with the power levels. I feel like we're right there, but we're still two-hundredths off of the frontrunners on our best day. KB/Elite looked pretty strong in Bradenton [Fla.] even though Troy [Coughlin] won it for Elite, but we've got some work to do, right?��

“We’re always working on the manifold. Chris, he's always drawing something up on the computer and going and buying a bar of aluminum and machining it and trying to design something. A lot of times what you try is worse or the same, but you're not really looking for the same. You're trying to get better, so you just go back to your normal design. We've had all kinds of goofy-looking different shapes, and maybe this will work. It might show some on the flow bench, so you'll dial it in, but it loses power, and it's like, gosh, we can't get anywhere. Sometimes it feels like we're running out of answers.��

“Everything we do is totally in-house. We're kind of our own little island with Southwest Performance. Southwest is broken up in two parts, the race car and performance side, and the machine side that builds all the parts that go into the oil field equipment for Harlow Sammons, and we’re really proud of that."

While father Chris has collected eight wins in his long career, including the NHRA U.S. Nationals in 2016, Mason is still looking for that breakthrough win.

“I feel like you're closing in on that,” he said, “but I’ve felt that way for three or four years. Every season I think is gonna be the one where I get the win, then it’s another runner-up. At some point, it's just gotta click.”

In the final round at last year’s Lucas Oil NHRA Nationals, Mason got out on Dallas Glenn with a brilliant .011 light but shook the tires.

“I had Dallas by five-hundredths on the Tree, and even though they had a performance advantage on us, I don't think they were going to cover five-hundredths, but then the car shook. That one stings. I still think about that one a lot, but that’s the name of the game. You just gotta keep working at it.”
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