Jeff Arend

Canadian native Jeff Arend will be back behind the wheel of a Funny Car once again in 2006, competing at races on the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series schedule. The 43 year-old former NHRA Funny Car national event champion will begin the season in the car the debuted early in 2005, featuring a Murf McKinney chassis and a Chevy Monte Carlo body. Veteran tuner Paul Smith, who guided Arend to victory in 1996, will once again handle the crew chief duties.

FROM THE BEGINNING

Arend fell in love with drag racing as a teenager and has been involved with race cars in one form or another since 1979. Arend honed his driving skills while growing up in the Toronto area, driving faster and faster streetcars as his career evolved. Beginning in 1985, Arend started driving a roadster that ran in the 8.80’s. By the end of the decade he was racing regularly in the Quick-16 series. With the need for speed flowing through his veins, Arend built an alcohol burning ’48 Fiat Topolino in 1990 that was capable of running in the 6.40 elapsed time range at over 200-mph. The popular “Bad to the Bone” car helped Arend revive the match-race concept and soon he was being paid to appear at events.

In 1993, Arend sold his race car and the following year he began working as crew chief on the Alcohol Funny Car of fellow Canadian racer, Al Billes. While racing with Billes, Arend became friends with veteran driver, tuner and drag racing school instructor, Paul Smith. In November of 1994, Arend went to Smith’s school in Florida and earned his nitro Funny Car license in the required minimum of three runs.

Arend made his NHRA Funny Car debut at the 1995 Gatornationals, where he qualified a respectable 10th. He continued to race part-time with Smith on the NHRA tour in 1995, qualifying at every race the pair attended and finishing his rookie season 18th in the points standings. Arend continued to race part-time with Smith in 1996, becoming the first Canadian to eclipse the 300-mph barrier. That same year he also defeated legendary driver John Force during a London Motorsports Park match race, setting a Canadian track speed record for Funny Cars.

The highlight of the season occurred at the Keystone Nationals in Reading, Penn. where Arend won his first NHRA national event. He finished the 1996 season 17th in the national points standings. Arend ran only a handful of races following the 1996 season. He moved to California in 1997, got married and began working for the next five years as the operations manager and instructor at Frank Hawley’s Drag Racing School in Pomona. Arend kept his license updated by driving Chuck Beal’s Funny Car part-time from 1998 through 2000. During that period he became the first driver selected for a chance to win the Winston ‘No Bull’ $100,000 bonus.

Arend became a father in 2000 when his wife Windy gave birth to their daughter, Jenna. He continued to work for Frank Hawley until Hawley moved the school to Florida. Arend wanted to stay in California, so he began working for Gale Banks Engineering in Azusa, Calif. in 2001.

In March of 2004, a whirlwind of good fortune came Jeff Arend’s way in the form of Urban Casavant, founder and Chairman of the Board of CMKM Diamonds, Inc. In a remarkable feat, Arend and Paul Smith formed the CMKXtreme Machine Funny Car team in just two weeks, showing up at the NHRA event in Las Vegas in April ready to race. After rain cancelled Arend’s relicensing process, the team went to Houston, where the likable Canadian driver completed the licensing process and stunned everyone by qualifying in the No. 3 position with a career-best run of 4.878-seconds in the CMKXtreme Machine Corvette.

Arend and the team went on to qualify at 16 races in 2004 and finished the season 16th in the POWERade point standings, despite competing at just 19 of the 23 national events on the schedule. Arend reclaimed the honor of being the quickest and fastest Canadian racer in history when he blasted down the quarter-mile at Chicago’s Route 66 Raceway in 4.844-seconds at 318.77-mph last spring. Arend return to Chicago in the fall and ran a career-best 320.36-mph and made history as the quickest and fastest driver of a Corvette.