Five seconds. Two hundred and thirty three miles per hour. And less than three one-hundreths of a second was the difference between winning “the Super Bowl” of drag races and, well, not.

Locals Greg and Joe Landwehr, co-owners of Enumclaw Cascade Automotive, celebrated their first-ever national win at the National Hot Rod Association’s Lucas Oil Winternationals last month with driver Cory “Mac” McClenathan, crew chief Glenn Mikres, and owners Rick and Cherice Akers.

“This is a really, really big deal,” Greg said in a recent interview.

The team came tearing into the Legends Nitro Funny Cars division with the fastest qualifying time of 4.733 seconds and stayed ahead of the competition all the way.

During the final round, the car — a 1969 Pontiac Firebird-styled racer called “Mac Attack” — bolted down the quarter-mile race track at nearly 233 mph to cross the finish line at 4.868 seconds.

The competition was hot on McClenathan’s tail, but couldn’t muster more than 203 mph and came in 4.895 seconds.

Although the NHRA’s National Dragster magazine only pictured the driver, winning a race like this is a team effort, and everything has to go perfectly to get that 5,000 horsepower car down the track.

For example, “You can make all the power you want in this engine, but you’ve got to get it transferred to the track,” Greg, the clutch specialist, said. “And to get it transferred to the track, it’s got to go through the clutch system.”

And Joe is a “jack of all trades”, including mixing the nitromethane that fuels the engine. Do it correctly, and your car crosses the finish line; get something wrong, and your engine can explode (which did happen to a car during this race, limping across the finish line).

According to Motor Trend, mixing the fuel can be a tricky business, as the chemicals involved to make the fuel can vary in purity and can be majorly affected by temperature — so think less Julia Child, and more Walter White.

Then there’s the motor itself, tuned by Crew Chief Mikres.

But all that’s not to say the driver isn’t important (“He has to have the cajones” Greg said); a driver has to not only keep the car on the track, but to feel the machine as it goes from start to finish and report back to their crew about what went right and what went wrong so that adjustments can be made for the next race. The more in-tune with their car a driver is, the better a crew can work with it.

This was McClenathan’s first national win in over 12 years.

“You have to have a team to do this… There’s no way one person is more important than the other,” Greg said, which is why everyone on team Mac Attack received a “Wally”, a first-place trophy named after NHRA founder Wally Parks.

Greg credits the team’s success to racing their car, as opposed to racing their opponents.

“We build this car to where it’s safe and it’s fast,” he said. “[Other teams] are trying to race us, trying to beat us… everyone one of these people made a mistake. Every one of them. And you watch the end race… they said they had [the other driver’s car] all suped up, and sure enough, about two-thirds down the track, his engine blew up.”

While this is team Mac Attack’s first national win, the crew has also taken first place at the Sacramento 2017 Funnycar Fever and the 2019 Pepsi Night Fire races.

Team Mac Attack posing after their big win. Greg Landwehr is third from the left. To his right is owner Rick Akers and driver Cory McClenathan. Second from the left (in the hat) is Joe Landwehr. Photo courtesy NHRA-National Dragster