Browse
Log in / Register
Share
MAY 7, 2025 — The first thing you notice is the noise. An Alcohol Funny Car detonates rather than starts, and the sound hits your chest at Maple Grove Raceway in Mohnton, Pennsylvania. There, during a 2025 NHRA event, the Follow A Dream team ran 1,000 feet at more than 260 mph while crew chief Jay Blake listened from the pits. Blake is completely blind — he has been since a 1997 accident — and his team's season is now chasing a whole new challenge.
Blake grew up around cars, made his living as a mechanic, and knew the inside of an engine the way most people know their own kitchen. In 1997, a truck tire he was servicing let go. The explosion threw him, and the resulting injuries cost him his vision. The recovery was brutal: long hospital stays, surgeries, and a kind of darkness that would have ended a lot of dreams on the spot. Instead, Blake found his way back in the most ordinary place imaginable — his own garage, where he opened a drawer of combination wrenches and picked one up. His fingers recognized the shape, the balance, and the job it did. He realized he could still identify the tools of his trade. "I will learn to do what I used to do again, just differently," he decided. It became the operating rule for everything that followed.
That rule took him to the drag strip. Blake attended a race after his recovery, planning to enjoy the sport as a spectator. Instead, he left with a different kind of plan: start his own team. In 1999, Follow A Dream was born — part NHRA race team, part living example that obstacles are just part of the route. The name is the message. Blake still says it the same way at every school and auditorium he visits: follow the dream, no matter how many detours it takes.
The racing side of that message is an Alcohol Funny Car. It looks like a cartoon hot rod with a huge rear wing, but it's one of the most carefully tuned vehicles in motorsports. Its 1,000-foot sprint at speeds above 260 mph puts enormous stress on every part, and the crew chief has to know exactly what the car is doing at every instant. For Blake, knowing means listening, touching, and translating. He walks the car before a run, running his hands over panels, tie rods, and suspension links. He bends close to the engine at idle, sorting out the rhythm of each cylinder. When the driver returns from a pass, the report is verbal: how the car launched, whether it wandered, what it felt like at the top end. Blake turns those words into wrenches. His crew serves as his eyes; he serves as the team's brain. It's a system built on trust, and it's why he lists teamwork among the tools that carried him through.
People ask him about those tools at almost every appearance. Blake lists five: positive attitude, education, passion, determination, and teamwork. He doesn't present them as a motivational poster. For him, they're practical instruments. Here's what he means by each:
Blake doesn't pretend the tools are always easy to use. There are days when the car fights back, when the parts budget runs thin, or when a track goes from smooth to slick in the middle of qualifying. He calls those days education. The team has had more than two decades of it. Follow A Dream has grown from an improbable idea into a fixture at NHRA events, and its pit area is as likely to be full of curious kids as it is of competing crews.
Blake tells audiences that list is what took him from a hospital bed to the racetrack. It's not a slogan; it's a job description.
The next chapter will test all five at once. Follow A Dream is preparing to move into a Nitro Funny Car, the top class in NHRA's Mission Foods Drag Racing Series. The leap in firepower is staggering. Where the Alcohol Funny Car runs methanol and produces a few thousand horsepower, the nitro machines pack roughly 11,000 horsepower into a machine that reaches 100 mph in about a second. The noise is louder, the heat is hotter, and the rebuild schedule between rounds is relentless. It's a serious step for any small independent team, and an especially demanding one for a crew chief who can't see the car he's tuning. Blake's answer is the same one he gave in 1997: he'll learn to do it differently.
The Nitro car also changes the team's calendar. While the new machine is being finished, the Alcohol Funny Car stays on the track at NHRA events like the Maple Grove stop, keeping the program sharp and race-ready. Blake and his crew are putting long hours in the shop, learning the new car's quirks before its first pass. Racing fans will track that progress on the timing boards. Blake tracks it his own way — by sound, by feel, and by the reports the drivers bring back from the finish line.
What gets less attention is the speaking side of Follow A Dream. Blake regularly brings student groups into the pits and talks to community organizations about how the team works and why. The response tends to be the same: people stop thinking about what they can't do and start asking what they can learn, adjust, or rebuild. A blind crew chief tuning a 260-mph race car is a harder argument to ignore than any motivational quote.
As the 2025 season rolls on, the Maple Grove race will be part of the team's story — one pit stop on a longer road. Blake doesn't frame any of it as a comeback; there was never a finish line to walk away from, just a route that changed. He picked up a wrench a long time ago and decided he'd do everything again, just differently. The dream stayed the same. It's still worth following — and if anyone knows how to find a new road, it's a crew chief who found one in the dark.
