FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — When Jeff Melnick returned to the Red Line Oil PDRA Championship Awards Banquet Stage to accept his 2025 Pro 632 presented by PTC Converters world championship trophy, he quoted the Meat Loaf song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”
Teamed with Alan O’Brien and the Greenbrier Excavating & Paving team, Melnick secured his second Pro 632 world title in the last three seasons on the strength of three wins in five final-round appearances across the seven-race season.
Melnick’s second championship season was much different than his first, but that had nothing to do with his on-track competition. Early in the 2023 season, Melnick was diagnosed with a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He underwent aggressive chemotherapy between races, and while the side effects presented challenges in racing’s extreme conditions, Melnick powered through and won the title.
During his championship speech, he broke the news that he was cancer-free and in remission. Without those challenges this season, Melnick could focus completely on the task at hand.
“Just getting to the racetrack was a major hurdle to overcome. It took every ounce, everything I had, to do that,” Melnick said, “and now it’s like, ‘Oh, this is kind of boring.’ I don’t have cancer and nothing’s really going on like that and it’s just a normal year. When you’re used to that kind of chaos, then you go to a normal year, it’s like, ‘Well, this is no big deal.’”
After winning the 2023 championship with a unique Barry Allen Racing Engines AMC engine and switching to a big-block Chevy platform for 2024, Melnick and the team switched again to a Ford for 2025. At just the second race of the season, Melnick qualified No. 1 and reached the final round at the Mid-Atlantic Showdown at Virginia Motorsports Park, where he lost to first-time winner Kyle Salminen.
He then qualified No. 1 and won the North vs. South Shootout at Maryland International Raceway before winning the next two events, the Northern Nationals at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park and the Thunder Valley Throwdown at Bristol Dragway, from the No. 2 position. Melnick closed out the season with a runner-up finish at DragWars at GALOT Motorsports Park and another No. 1 qualifier award at the Brian Olson Memorial World Finals at VMP.
“These guys worked really hard with this program and put a lot of effort, thought, money, time, energy, everything into it all year long,” Melnick said, crediting O’Brien, Allen, and tuner Patrick Barnhill. “We came out with a Ford this year. We thought it would be a good motor and we were right. It is a good motor, so we’ve been able to figure it out. We’ve been able to get three wins out of seven races. We had a great season.”
Melnick’s team owner, Alan O’Brien, also won the 2025 world championship in Laris Motorsports Insurance Elite Top Dragster presented by Greenbrier Excavating & Paving, while teammate Carson Perry swept the World Finals weekend in Super Street presented by Brian’s Heating & Cooling LLC by winning the Summit Racing Equipment PDRA ProStars, qualifying No. 1, and winning the event.
“Barry [Allen] is a really underrated bad dude in the industry,” Melnick said, also sharing credit with the whole Greenbrier team and his family for their support. “At the World Finals we were No. 1 qualifier with the 632 car with Barry’s big-block Ford. Carson Perry was No. 1 qualifier with the AMC nitrous combination in Super Street. Then Alan O’Brien was No. 1 qualifier in Elite Top Dragster with a twin-turbo AMC, so three completely different combinations, all No. 1 qualifiers and two of the three are professional categories. I think that speaks volumes for Barry’s abilities and Patrick’s tuning.”
