Owner/Driver – Craig Sullivan
Drag racing has had its hooks in Craig Sullivan his entire life.
His father, Tom Sullivan, was a racer and from an early age he was pitching in to help his dad with his race cars. At age 8, Craig could be found in the family’s garage, sitting in the driver’s seat of his Dad’s 1967 Ford Mustang and pretending to shift the gears as he supplied the engine’s noise.
From his beginnings in Super Stock, where he set a national record for his class, Sullivan moved into the ultra-quick Top Dragster ranks and fielded, at one time, the nation’s quickest vehicle of its type. A three-time champion of the Jon Kaase Top Dragster Shootout, Sullivan was a top-five finisher in Division 3’s Super Quick series 13 times.
By 1981, Craig Sullivan spent most of his weekends fulfilling his childhood dreams. He competed regularly in a ‘69 Ford Fairlane — the first of numerous race cars — at his hometown track, Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis.
Some four decades later, Sullivan, 55, has become one of the nation’s top competitors. His desire to pursue a semi-professional career has come to fruition as he climbed the ladder from local bracket-race competition to 200-mph-plus Pro Modified and Pro 275 vehicles.
In 2015, Sullivan swapped an American hard tail dragster with Roxboro, N.C., Pro Mod racer Chip King and received in the exchange a ‘69 Dodge Daytona originally built by Vanishing Point Race Cars and updated by Larry Jeffers Race Cars. He spent the ensuing months outfitting the car to suit his needs as well as having it wrapped in its unique, distinctive “Barn Burner” vinyl that pays homage to NASCAR legend Richard Petty.
Sullivan has campaigned “Barn Burner” in NMCA’s Xtreme Pro Modified ranks since 2016. He has shown improvement each year, finishing sixth, fifth and fourth in the standings, and earlier in 2020 he won the Slammers portion of a Mid-West Drag Racing Series Pro Mod event at Tulsa, Okla. and was runner-up at the NMRA/NMCA All-Start Nationals at Atlanta Dragway in late June. The car has become a fan favorite in terms of merchandise sales, custom slot cars, diecast scale models, and is a featured vehicle in the highly popular Door Slammers 2 online video game.
Sullivan is a rarity in his sport in that he’s one of the few who has successfully competed in cars given an extra shot of horsepower via three distinctly different “power adders”: nitrous oxide in Top Dragster, a supercharger in “Barn Burner” and a turbocharger in Woodruff’s Corvette.
In 2020, Sullivan expanded his racing scope to include a driving gig with Mark Woodruff, who owns an Xtreme Pro Mod 1969 Chevy Camaro and a Pro 275 ZR1 Corvette driven by Sullivan.
He described the boost supplied by the turbo as a unique sensation.
“The turbo … it’s just, like, unlimited thrust,” he said. “It’s like you’re in a jet, and when you take off, you feel the Gs. But when the jet gets airborne, just off the ground, that’s probably the biggest Gs at about 2,” he said in a story published on Competitionplus.com in July 2020.
“The turbo, when it really starts running, it’s 3.3 to 3.4 Gs, or almost 3½ times your body weight. It will carry that from about 150 feet out to the 660 (or finish line in eighth-mile racing). In every other type of power adder, the G meter is falling off, and you can feel that the weight’s not on you as much anymore. But in a turbo car, you’ve got all these Gs on you, and you’ve got almost twice the Gs negatively during deceleration when the parachutes pop open.”
Sullivan’s racing successes have allowed him to launch, and expand, Wild Irish Racing Engines, a venture that is part of Crag Sullivan Motorsports. Wild Irish Racing supplies high-performance motorsports powerplants to clients involved in drag racing and tractor pulling.
Sullivan also owns the namesake Sullivan’s Equipment, Inc., in Danville, Ind. It has blossomed from a small operation housed in a two-car garage into one of the top suppliers of auto body repair equipment in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Sullivan’s Equipment sells Car-O-Liner equipment and other lines that provide racks, computerized measuring and welding, and more.