After about two hours of rain Saturday evening, five-time NHRA Pro Stock champion Erica Enders knew the track conditions at zMAX Dragway weren’t ideal for her class to make its final qualifying run despite the work by the NHRA Safety Safari.
The cars are short wheelbase suspended race cars with a lot of horsepower.
“No downforce after rain and a cold race track is just not ideal,” Enders says. “It was not a safe racing surface. We risked our lives and over a million dollars’ worth of equipment to try to put some points in the column for the championship. We knew the risks that we took.”
Enders said Troy Coughlin Jr. got out of the groove, got loose, and shut off his car, and then Aaron Stanfield blew the back window out of his car and “completely nuked his race clutch.”
Enders was already the No. 1 qualifier and Elite Motorsports owner Richard Freeman told her he didn’t want her to tear up her stuff on a “run that doesn’t matter” because Sunday’s conditions weren’t going to be the same. Enders asked her crew chief if it was safe and he told her he didn’t think it was safe, he didn’t know if it was safe because no one had been beyond 100 feet. She decided to run, saying if she didn’t like what was happening, she would shut off the car.
“When I let the clutch out, the car went right,” Enders recounted. “When it got out of the groove it started to spin. You could feel the butt end of the car kinda unload and come up and then that swings it over.
“I thought in my head if I could get it back in the groove and under control before I put it in third gear, then I would be OK. But as I got it back in the groove all the way down the race track it was just very loose and very crazy. The racer side of me wanted to try to make the best run that we could so we could get those baby points. Not ideal, but it is what it is.”
Enders claimed the No. 1 qualifying position with a 6.509-second E.T., 210.18 mph, run. She meets Mason McGaha in the first round of Sunday’s eliminations.
Hight Bounces Back
Less than 24 hours after Robert Hight escaped injury when his NHRA Funny Car exploded five feet from the starting line, the three-time Funny Car champion bounced back to grab the No. 1 qualifying position.
Using the same chassis with a different body, Hight posted a 3.824-second E.T., 330.15 mph to steal the pole from Matt Hagan by one-thousandth of a second. Hagan’s E.T. was 3.825 seconds, 333.49 mph.
Hight said his crew worked until 11 p.m. Friday repairing his car and were back on duty early Saturday morning.
“We have a friend that lives here in Concord (North Carolina) and he races sprint cars,” Hight says. “He has some scales. So, we could actually go down to the level pad at the other end and weigh all four corners to make sure that the preload and everything in the chassis was exactly the way it was when we left the shop.”
Hight says his crew is the same one he had last year.
“I wouldn’t want to get back in a Funny Car after that big explosion with any other team,” Hight says. “I trust them. They believe in me as much as I believe in them.”
Salinas’ accomplishment came with an E.T. of 3.647 seconds, 338 mph, to claim the No. 1 qualifying position for the Betway Carolina Nationals.
Salinas Knew 300 mph Was On The Horizon
NHRA Top Fuel competitor Mike Salinas knew 300 mph at the eighth-mile mark was on the horizon. He just didn’t know when he would hit that historical mark in an event.
That time came Saturday night at zMAX Dragway in Concord, N.C., after about a two-hour rain delay that cooled the track. Salinas became the first ever Top Fuel driver to record 300 mph at the eighth-mile mark. That came three decades after Kenny Bernstein recorded 300 mph at the quarter-mile mark in 1992.
Salinas’ accomplishment came with an E.T. of 3.647 seconds, 338 mph, to claim the No. 1 qualifying position for the Betway Carolina Nationals.
“The track was amazing,” Salinas says.
“We’ve been working on this for a while. Our car has been close several times in testing and a few other deals. We knew we were going to do it; we just didn’t know when. This was not something that we just stumbled on. The way our car is running, it should run like this, pretty consistent if we can have the conditions the way they are.”
According to Freeman Stewart “gets it”
Walls Are Coming Down
Elite Motorsports owner Richard Freeman believes the invisible walls that have existed in the NHRA for decades are coming down and the change will benefit the sport.
“When I started out here, even within the Pro Stock pits, you didn’t go to someone else’s pit,” Freeman says. “And you damn sure didn’t crossover to Top Fuel or Funny Car.”
That’s not the case now. Freeman says the first time he met team owner Tony Stewart he thought, ‘This guy gets it.’
“He’s been in every sport there is as far as motorsports go and I think he’ll tell you he loves what he sees here, and he loves what he’s doing,” Freeman says. “Yeah, it’s a little more grassrooty, but at the end of the day, it’s more about people and family. The walls that have come down are between these classes. I think you’re going to see our sport change so drastically in the next two or three years and it will be for the best.”
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