Windsor man wins first-ever national electric vehicle drag racing title in upgraded Tesla Model 3

On a recent Wednesday at the Sonoma Raceway, Craig Merrilees nodded toward the Sunoco pumps dispensing $9.99-per-gallon racing fuel.

“They’d charge more,” he said, with a smile, “but the pumps don’t go any higher.”

The price of racing fuel doesn’t much concern Merrilees, a 55-year-old Windsor resident who for the last few years has been turning heads at the track’s popular Wednesday night drag races by competing in an electric vehicle.

Whether he’s racing open courses or lining up in autocross — timed laps around cones set up in parking lots or on airport tarmacs — or experimenting briefly with super bikes, Merrilees is a motor sports omnivore, as his friends in the Santa Rosa-based Empire Sports Car Association can attest.

These days, he’s making his mark as a pioneer and innovator on the drag strip, racing — and winning — in a metallic blue 2018 Tesla Model 3 Performance car that tops out at 162 mph.

Not everyone in the hot rod universe is happy for him.

Many people who compete in drag racing are older, notes Nick Bublitz, manager of the drag strip at Sonoma Raceway. “They see this car, they don’t really understand what makes it tick. They feel like it could just be a cheat code,” he said.

Despite grumbling from purists, the National Hot Rod Association added an electric vehicle class for its 2022 season, heralding the expanding foothold of fossil-fuel free speedsters in the future of motorsports.

On October 30 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Merrilees edged Alex Fangmann to win the first ever national championship in the NHRA’s new “Street Legal EV Class.”

It’s generally acknowledged, not always with pleasure among racetrack die hards, that electric vehicles are coming to drag racing.

“Craig is the cutting edge of that right now,” said Bublitz. “He’s Chuck Yeager, breaking the sound barrier.”

The Street Legal division, Merrilees points out, is a “foot brake” class. What that means, he explained, is that racers can’t use a “transbrake or delay box.” That put him at a slight disadvantage in Las Vegas, said Merrilees, who hadn’t “footbraked regularly” in about four years, he said, “when I was running in street class at Wednesday night drags” at Sonoma Raceway.

Pioneers in a new era

Transbrakes and delay boxes are gizmos which, simply put, help drag racers get off to better starts. Now widely used in the sport, the first prototypes were developed a half century ago by a pair of Bay Area hot rodders, Dan DiVita and Ted Seipel.

Seipel, who won 11 NHRA titles in a career spanning 6 decades, is the patriarch of the “the first family of drag racing in Northern California.” His wife, Georgia, formerly managed the drag strip at Sonoma Raceway, as did their late son Kyle, who gave Merrilees critical support and encouragement before his death in June 2021.

A half-century after DiVita and Seipel were brainstorming in their garage, figuring out ways to get off the line faster, Merrilees is following in their footsteps, winning races in his Tesla, but also designing a transbrake and delay box that will work in electric vehicles.

Trusting that others will follow, he’s founded the fledgling company EV Rippers, a purveyor of “electric vehicle drag racing parts.”

While unrelated to racing, his day job also involves alternative energy: Merrilees helps design and maintain industrial- and commercial-scale solar panel installations.

A taste for racing

In his spare time, he’s drawn to “racing and performance driving,” and always has been, dating back to his boyhood in Cleves, Ohio, where Merrilees spent countless happy hours on go-karts at the nearby Edgewater Motor Sports Park.

In high school — by this time, his family had moved to Costa Mesa, Caifornia — he was determined to take his drivers license test the day he turned 16.

But the schedule for drivers’ education classes at Estancia High School didn’t align with that goal. Rather than endure even a slight delay in getting his license, he spent his own money on private drivers’ ed.

On his 16th birthday, Merrilees got his license, and drove that night to a Malibu Grand Prix course in Fountain Valley, where he drove “these cool little open-wheel race cars” the first day it was legal for him to do so.

Working in Oregon in the 1990s, he joined a pit crew at the Portland International Raceway. One day, Merrilees asked the driver of a turbo Porsche to “show me what this thing can do,” he recalled.

“So he went out there and gave me a hot lap with it. And I was just awestruck. I was like, ‘This is so cool. I’ve got to do this.’”

For $500 he bought a used race car — “It was a Pinto, of all things” — and within a year had gone through the training and novice races, then intermediate races, so that he no longer had drive “with that orange rectangle on the back of the car that tells everybody you’re a newb.”

After a couple years racing the Pinto, he upgraded to a 1973 Mazda RX3, a swift but fuel-sucking chariot named “Otar.”

By the turn of the century, said Merrilees, he’d developed “a green bent,” and become “more of an environmentalist.”

He was fascinated by the tzero, a Tesla predecessor built by a company called AC Propulsion. Around 2006, he remembers attending a high-end car show in Carmel called the Concourse d’Elegance, where he saw, and sat behind the wheel of, a Tesla Roadster prototype. He was smitten.

It took another 12 years, but he finally bought a Tesla in 2018. After pouring $10,000 “into suspension upgrades and tires and all this other stuff,” Merrilees said, his Tesla proved to be “quite capable” on open courses, such as the 2.52-mile loop at Sonoma Raceway.

Discovering the drag strip

One of Merrillees’ friends at his car club suggested he give drag racing a try. The Wednesday night “bracket racing” format at Sonoma Raceway was a blast, said the friend.

“Why would I just want to go in a straight line?” he replied. “That’s boring.”

He didn’t know what he didn’t know.

In bracket racing, a highly democratic form of the sport, both drivers post a dial-in time — the time they believe it will take them to get over the course. The slower car is given a head start.

To win, drivers need to run closer to their dial-in time than their opponent. If you go faster than your dial-in time — racers call it “breaking out” — you lose. Unless your opponent breaks out worse.

Once he got a taste of bracket racing, and the strategy and mind games involved, Merrilees fell hard for it.

“I've got one of the faster cars out there,” he said, “but it doesn't matter how fast you go, right? Because this is bracket racing.”

Indeed, one of the most successful drivers at Wednesday Night Drags runs a Ford Taurus.

Merrilees had a strong rookie season in 2019. Too strong, concluded the managers at Sonoma Raceway, who booted him from the “Street” category, which is open to street legal vehicles. Moving forward, Merrilees and his Tesla would race in the “Comp Rod” division — in which drivers were allowed to use transbrakes and delay boxes.

“Now I was playing with the sharks,” he recalled. “And I was drowning, because I didn’t have the technology these guys had.”

So he built that technology, designing a transbrake and delay box for electric vehicles. He started showing up in the finals again, and winning.

Pole position in EV field

Merrilees has since been dubbed “the leader of the pack” among EV drag racers by event promoter Peter Biondo, a multiple NHRA world champion.

Biondo has said “there’s no denying” that EVs “are going to make their way into drag racing.

But he’s no hurry for it to happen. After taking a poll among drivers earlier this year, Biondo told Merrilees he cannot, at this time, race his Tesla in the popular drag racing series Biondo promotes, The Flings.

Merrilees understands the suspicion and resentment. “Part of it is, these guys have put so much time and money into their racing programs,” it rubs them the wrong way “to get beat by a showroom Tesla.”

While they’re a “great addition” to drag racing, said Bublits, EVs will never take over the sport completely.

“I don’t know how many people are going to pay to watch silent cars go down the track,” he said.

Electric cars have some advantages, said Bublitz, who has raced, and won, in Merrilees’ car. “But they also have disadvantages.”

An EV is “not affected by the weather as much. On the downside, the car’s got so much computer control” that it can be erratic.

“I think it all levels out. Bracket racing’s a driver’s game. The car is just a tool. Some tools are sharper than others. But when it comes down to it, the driver wins the race.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.