This is the Nitro Funny Car Bob Tasca III drives on the National Hot Rod Association’s POWERade Drag Racing circuit. The car achieves speeds in excess of 300 mph.

Courtesy of PCGCampbell

It’s been a wild ride for Bob Tasca III in his first year driving a Nitro Funny Car on the National Hot Rod Association’s POWERade Drag Racing circuit.

And what happened to him at the end of a practice run in Atlanta only begins to tell the story.

“I pulled the parachute,” he said, “and one of the cables broke. So I had both hands on the brake and I was literally steering the car with my knees as I was holding the brake back just to get stopped. The one thing I’m still adjusting to as a rookie driver is just how fast that sand trap comes up on you when the parachute doesn’t come out. That was a pretty wild finish to that run.”

Everything, it seems, has been happening at high speed for Tasca, who’s off to a fast start in his rookie season in the big leagues of drag racing.

It was only last November that he and his team began building their Shelby Mustang at his family’s Ford dealership in East Providence. But drag racing is a sport in which you have to be able to get moving in a hurry and, since then, things have been happening seemingly as quickly as he roars down the track at speeds exceeding 300 mph.

He had the third-fastest qualifying time at Las Vegas in mid-April. He reached the semifinal round in Atlanta two weeks later. He had a career-best elapsed time two weeks ago in Madison, Ill., and is confident that he and his team are only going to continue get better.

“When you’ve got a car running as good as this car is running,” Tasca said, “you just want to keep racing, because you know your day is going to come. This sport requires consistency and it requires drivers to cut great reaction times that can put their team in a position to win. And then it just needs to be your time. It can go either way in rounds, and our day is coming. It isn’t that far around the corner, the way this car is running.

“Seat time is what I need,” he said. “For me, every time I’m in the car gets better. This isn’t like other sports. It’s not like I can go out on a basketball court and practice shooting. You can’t simulate a 300-mile-an-hour ride unless you’re in it.”

It’s hard to even imagine it.

“It feels like an earthquake,” Tasca said. “When that engine’s roaring, it shakes the earth. It’s hard to describe the adrenaline that flows through you. When people ask me what it’s like, I tell them: ‘Imagine pulling the trigger on a gun, and then riding the bullet.’ ”

Tasca said he covers the final 360 feet –– the distance from one goal post to another on a football field –– of his quarter-mile run in half a second. The entire run takes a fraction over four seconds.

Which is why what happened to him in Atlanta was harrowing.

“A big part of my job,” he said, “is getting the car stopped.”

From a racing standpoint, the start is Tasca’s most important job. In a sport where outcomes are determined by hundredths –– and sometimes thousandths –– of a second, he has to be ready to come off the line the split-second he gets the green light.

“The driver has to be perfect,” he said. “There is zero margin for error. You’ve got to hit the throttle when the light turns green, then keep the car in a groove the best you can. If you don’t, you lose traction, and, if you do that, you lose speed.”

And, of course, the race.

For Tasca, speed thrills. He grew up listening to the stories his grandfather, Bob Sr., told of racing cars, back in the days when he also was building one of the premier Ford dealerships in the country.

“I’m a competitive guy,” Tasca said. “I couldn’t play pro football or basketball. Racing at this level, where there’s this kind of intensity, motivates me.”

Like his grandfather, Tasca’s motivation is part sport, part business. He was determined from the outset that his car would be much more than merely “a 300-mile-an-hour billboard.”

Sponsored by Motorcraft and Quick Lanes, Tasca and his crew — “The nine hardest-working people I’ve been around my whole life,” he says. “They’ll work from 6 a.m. till 2 the next morning, if they have to, to get the car ready” –– spend Fridays of racing weekends with employees from Quick Lanes near that weekend’s race. Saturdays are devoted to Motorcraft vendors and, on Sundays, they invite fans to share in the racing experience, spending hours with them.

“I’ve always had a passion to race, and to build a company,” Tasca said. “I’m a company guy. We have an all-Ford hot rod, driven by an all-Ford kid.”

He has been driving all over the country since opening the season in Pomona, Calif. This weekend, he’s in Bristol, Tenn., for the O’Reilly NHRA Thunder Valley Nationals.

“Naturally,” he said, “we want to win every race we start. But considering that we started from scratch last winter, we’re pleased with where we are. To come from nowhere and be a contender this soon is really remarkable.”

jdonalds@projo.com