337 MPH in 3.7 Seconds — (GUEST: Top Fuel Driver Clay Millican)

“You’re gonna get fired anyway, so you might as well start racing!"

Clay Millican was a forklift operator. He quit that job to chase a dream in drag racing, and now he's an NHRA Top Fuel legend. He's also our very first guest on It’s Not the Car!  

This show’s format rotates weekly, because squirrel. We call this format “Guest Teaches Us a Thing"—in this case, what it feels like to have 11,000 hp under your right foot. If you like it, don’t worry—there are plenty more to come whether you like it or not.

Related Trivia: Top Fuel racing can be absurdly violent. Clay's car once vibrated so much that it shook his dental crowns from his mouth. Mike, INTC's producer, wrote this episode description late at night with approximately four functional brain cells, and he will probably suffer the same fate simply by continuing to miss his dentist appointments.

This episode was produced by Mike Perlman.

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ABOUT THE SHOW:

It’s Not the Car is a podcast about people and speed. We tell racing stories and leave out the boring parts.

Ross Bentley is a former IndyCar driver and an internationally renowned performance coach and author. Jeff Braun is a championship-winning race engineer. Sam Smith is an award-winning journalist and a former executive editor of Road & Track magazine. Together, we explore the emotion at the heart of the machine.

We don’t love racing for the nuts and bolts—we love it for what it asks of the bag of meat at the wheel.

New episodes every Tuesday.