NHRA Rookie Ida Zetterström Blog: Let's Fix It and Go Back and We're Stronger
Coming off of first-round elimination losses at Reading, Charlotte and St. Louis, confidence-wise, that's never good when you have those setbacks like that.
I mean, we have learned something from each one of them, which is usually what helps me get through a stretch like this. If you can come back, you analyze it, then you're like, 'Okay, this time it was just that the car didn't do what we planned it to do, and we saw why. '
And then sometimes, when things don't go right, I have looked at something and thought I could have done that better. Maybe we could have had a chance.
All right, let's fix it and go back and we're stronger.
There's just still so much small stuff that we're trying to figure out, obviously, both from a tuning standpoint, but also for me as a driver. The car still feels very different than the car I'm used to in Europe, and I'm still trying to figure out what it really wants when it's doing certain things.
So it's very much a learning curve still.
I've had setbacks before where I've spun the tires for several runs in a row, and that really takes a toll on you. You know something is wrong, and you just can't figure it out, but you still need to have faith in everyone on your team. We're good enough to figure this out, it's going to turn around.
Obviously, yes, I'm a rookie this year, and I have the mindset that everything is new, but I know that I can do better as a driver. I know we have more potential as a team. And that kind of sometimes makes it more frustrating, because you're looking at it and you know all the ingredients are there.
Seeing the work that everybody puts in does make you appreciate success even more. We still see that there's so much potential here, and it's not the same thing all the time. You fix one thing, and all of a sudden something new pops up that you have to fix.
We don't have any more test sessions, so all of our "testing" has to be done during the qualifying runs at the track. And I think one of the biggest challenges for these last couple of events is that there have been so many cars—18, 19, cars for almost every event. So yes, you need to test, but you can't really test. You still need to be safe enough so that you can run and get into the 16-car eliminations, because qualifying takes more that just showing up.
It's different when you show up and it's 14 cars or whatever, because you can actually test things, and it's like, 'Oh, that didn't work out. Let's try something else.' We have had to be kind of cautious on that.
This week we are in Texas, and it looks like it's going to be very hot. And it's an all-concrete track, so that's going to be a little different than what we've been used to running for many of the events over here so far.
And then we go to Las Vegas, where I had my best ET and speed from a Vegas test session before my season. So obviously, I'm looking forward to going back there, because I still haven't been able to go quicker, faster than that so far.
Loving the All-Inclusive World of Drag Racing
One thing that was neat was being part of the first four-woman field in the NHRA Top Fuel event at World Wide Technology Raceway in St. Louis.
It was history for NHRA, but it's actually happened before in Europe, where we have had for four women qualify in FIA Top Fuel events. That actually happened the year before I started over there.
So I'm quite used to seeing it and I think it's very cool. The thing for us in Europe is that we have sometimes a very low car count, and if it was four women in the field, it might only be five guys. So we were almost on a 50/50 basis over here. And now it's definitely very cool to see so many women in the class over here.
Drag racing is so inclusive right from where you start. I mean, I've been involved with other type of motor sports where from a young age, they split up men and women—there's a women's class and men's class. For go-kart or motocross, or whatever it is, many of the times when you start, that's how you do it.
And then when you grow up and you start advancing to the classes, later they might try to get the top women to run with the guys. And maybe the guys aren't as keen on that, because they're not used to it. Or the girls might feel a little threatened coming in and running with the guys, or whatever it might be.
In drag racing, there's never been any question about that. You start Junior Dragster when you're like five or six years old, and boys and girls race together. It's never even a question of 'Hey, do you want to race with the boys?' You all race together. You've done it since the beginning. It's, it's never a thing.
None of the guys are like, 'Oh my god, we don't want to get beaten by a girl.' You don't make a big deal out of it in drag racing, which I think is good.
The message is, hey, there's just no difference.
Ida Zetterström, 30, is a native of Stockholm, Sweden, and the 2023 FIA European Top Fuel drag-racing champion and 2019 Scandinavian Super Street Bike champion. Zetterström made her NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing debut in a JCM Racing dragster alongside teammate Tony Schumacher at Brainerd, Minnesota, Aug. 16–18, and has now raced in five events and has a 3-5 record in elimination rounds. This season, Zetterström is sharing her first-year NHRA experiences in periodic blogs with Autoweek.