Fast Company

They need less than five seconds to travel a quarter mile, but drag racers Melanie Troxel and Tommy Johnson Jr. didn't rush into love. In 1986 Troxel was a 13-year-old tomboy when she met the 17-year-old, mullet-wearing Johnson, who was competing at a Denver track alongside her dragster-driving dad, Mike. "I had a crush on Tommy," she recalls. "He says mullets were cool."

Fourteen years later Johnson was a fixture on the NHRA when Troxel joined the circuit, one of three females among 103 drivers. This time Johnson was smitten. "I was seeing her every week, and, you know, I got the fever," he says. She rebuffed Johnson's date proposals for six months before he persuaded her to have dinner with him. (He said they'd go "as friends.") After going out clandestinely ("She kept worrying what people would think," he says) and Johnson wooing Troxel with dates such as a ride on the Big Shot catapult in Las Vegas, they wed in 2003.

Married life hasn't slowed them down. Troxel, 33, leads the standings in the NHRA's top-fuel division and has a top speed of 331.04 miles per hour over the quarter-mile strip, a record for women. Johnson, 38, is sixth in the funny car class. "Other drivers give me a hard time about how she's been doing so much better than me," says Johnson. The couple, who live in a four-bedroom house near Indianapolis with their Yorkie, Spike, travel in a 40-foot RV to races. Don't get Troxel started on Johnson's backseat driving. "He even argues with the girl on the GPS who gets on and says, 'Exit 300 feet,'" she says.