NHRA FOCUS: KEEPING SHARP IN THE OFF-SEASON

It's been a month since the final event of the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing season and it's more than a month until the 2010 campaign gets under way, but for most drivers, including perennial Top Fuel title contender Larry Dixon, it never really stops.

"I never completely turn that switch off," says Dixon, driver of the Toyota-supported Al-Anabi/Alan Johnson Racing dragster, who missed winning the 2009 NHRA Top Fuel championship by just three points. "Racing has been a part of my life since I was born – since before I was born, really. My mom was at the track with my dad when she was pregnant with me. I love racing, always have. It's a ton of work, but it's not like we're digging ditches here. It's almost not even work, I love it so much. We'll be back on the track, testing at West Palm [Beach, Fla.,] on January 11, and I'm already literally counting the days."

For now, Dixon has to be content with keeping himself in shape – mentally and physically. "My typical morning consists of working out," he says. "In the afternoons, probably four weekdays out of five, I'll go to the shop and check in with all the guys. I just like being there, being with everybody. If you're comparing winters, this one's nowhere near as hectic as last year, when everybody was thrashing to get a new team off the ground. Last year at this time, we didn't have trucks, trailers, or even a car, and we knew we had to be ready to leave in a few weeks to start testing. This is like a winter vacation by comparison. We're doing color changes to the cars, the uniforms, and the truck and trailer, so there's a lot to do, but it's nothing compared to last year, when every part we had was brand-new."

Like most pros, Dixon has a practice Tree, a small device that simulates the Christmas Tree starting system and provides a reaction time accurate to the thousandth of a second – just like the reaction times generated when racers leave the starting line on actual runs. Only Dixon doesn't sit in a chair with his practice Tree on a table, like most drivers do. His is hooked to an actual, life-size Tree and his training much more closely approximates real racing because he does it from inside what once was the cockpit of an actual dragster, a car that blew a tire at the finish line and crashed in Bakersfield, Calif., in January 1995, the week before his professional debut at the Winternationals.

"I also have a couple of computer games I'll play," Dixon says. "I've never been into that kind of stuff – that's more my [9-year-old] son's department – but there's a couple of games that I play just for the hand-eye coordination."

At least five days a week, Dixon works out, either at his Indianapolis home or at a gym, PitFit Training. "It's mainly cardio stuff," says Dixon, who, at 43, is as physically fit as any driver in the sport. "I'll get on the treadmill or the exercise bike and burn 300 or 400 calories, and I still step on a scale every day. Do I have to do that to be able to drive the car? Probably not. But you've got 10 guys at that shop preparing a car to win a championship, working as hard as they can, doing every single thing they can to make our team better, to be great. So I want to do the same thing. Alan could have anybody he wanted to drive this car. Who wouldn't want to drive for Alan Johnson? But he wanted me, so I want to be able to give my team everything I can. Watching my weight, being in shape – whatever I can to hold up my end, that's what I want to do."

With a two-and-a-half-month off-season, there's more than enough time to reflect on the past year and the one to come. "That last month of the season, the way the car ran, we were finally to the point where we felt like we were championship contenders," Dixon says. "We came up a little short, I know, but everybody is excited that the team is where it needs to be going into 2010.

"There are things I analyze all the time – not just in the winter," says Dixon, who won the 2002 and 2003 NHRA championships and has finished second the past two years. "I think about things I did last year, or in '08, or '05 – whenever. I go over what didn't go right, and what I'm going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. I take pride in what I do. I want to be the best at whatever I do, and I work at it all the time. When I'm done racing, I'd like to be thought of as a guy who put great effort into being a great driver, whether I actually was one or not. That mindset might be what gave me the opportunity to drive a car this good in the first place."