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Prock, brother of NHRA nitro crew chief Jimmy Prock, has since moved his Applied Nitrous business to Rogersville, Tennessee. “He (Prock) hasn’t been out to see the car run yet,” says Rogers, who debuted the new ride this past May at an ORSCA event in Albany, Georgia, “but we’re hoping he’ll make it out soon so we can really get it going. I know there’s a lot more in it, but I don’t want to do anything stupid just because I don’t know enough about it.”
Which begs the question: why go with the EFI/nitrous combination in the first place?
“To tell the truth, the whole time I was under the impression that it was going to be a lot simpler than what it really is,” Rogers freely admits. “I was thinking that fuel injection would be a lot easier on the motor with the nitrous. It’s not so bad now, but a few years back you couldn’t go to the track too often when someone didn’t tear up a motor real bad on nitrous. Now they’ve got a better handle on it, but because of those times I wanted to go to fuel injection thinking it would be easier—but it wasn’t. But I think now, it will be better in the long run.
“So no, I didn’t know anything about it and even though nobody else around here knew either, I just didn’t think it would be that hard to find somebody.”
Rogers, 42, has a nearly life-long history in drag racing, getting started as a teenager with a street-legal ’67 GTO, then working as a crewmember on his brother Jeff’s 350-powered ’71 Vega strip warrior before graduating in the late-‘80s to his own 1982 Firebird racecar. Then, about 1995, Rogers bought a ’66 Chevy II, which he still owns and Jeff sometimes drives in ORSCA’s six-second index class.
“We did a little bit of bracket racing with it, but to be perfectly honest, I’ve never cared about bracket racing,” Rogers states. “I don’t really like it, I don’t want to do it, and when they started doing some 7.0 heads-up stuff around here, I got interested in that. That’s why I built the Chevy II, for 7.0 and then I went to 6.0 and we just more or less went out there to test-n-tune, have fun, and keep from getting in trouble on the street.”
