There’s a reason Greg Anderson has qualified on the pole five times in his career while racing The Strip at Las Vegas.

To understand why, roll the clock back six years, to a time when Ken Black selected Greg Anderson, an up and coming Pro Stock driver, to be the hired gun for his KB Racing Pontiac for the answer. Black told Anderson that performing at the top of his game was important to the survival of the team and his position in particular. But just as the successful Las Vegas businessman drove his point home, he paused to make one more point.

Winning around the country is admirable. Success in Vegas was mandatory. There’s a reason Greg Anderson has qualified on the pole five times in his career while racing The Strip at Las Vegas.

To understand why, roll the clock back six years, to a time when Ken Black selected Greg Anderson, an up and coming Pro Stock driver, to be the hired gun for his KB Racing Pontiac for the answer. Black told Anderson that performing at the top of his game was important to the survival of the team and his position in particular. But just as the successful Las Vegas businessman drove his point home, he paused to make one more point.

Winning around the country is admirable. Success in Vegas was mandatory.

When the team owner in the large cowboy hat speaks, you had better listen.

Anderson did and if his Friday run holds during the first day of the SummitRacing.com NHRA Nationals, he’ll nail down his 71st career No. 1 effort.

Those are the kinds of numbers that make Black smile.

“It’s been a good run for us every since that first flop,” Anderson admitted. “We did come here and test and made sure that would never happen again. It is that important to Ken Black that we run well here. I understand his side of this. He does this for a hobby but it’s a job to us and we probably take it a lot more serious than he does. He wants to have fun and winning races and qualifying No. 1 makes it fun.
 
“I wish we had six or eight races here.”

Anderson made his way to the media center on Friday just as conditions became treacherous. While taking questions from the media, his attention was fixated on a table blowing through the staging lines, a victim of the high-winds that eventually forced NHRA officials to cancel the day’s competition.

A reporter asked him about the conditions and he just shook his head and laughed.

“It’s getting a little breezy,” he said sarcastically.

Anderson knew when he made his one and only run of the day, a 6.718 elapsed time, it was as if he’d received the reprieve of a lifetime from Mother Nature.

“It wasn’t too bad when we ran, we got lucky. To be quite frank, I believe I got luckier than the rest of them. It seemed like the wind stopped and died down.”

Anderson smiled when he explained how his teammate Jason Line and his team whined a little about how they didn’t get a break from the wind.

If anyone knows the dangers of racing in windy conditions, it’s the multi-time world champion.

“You’re fine if it goes down with you or straight at you, but when it’s going across, you have problems,” Anderson explained. “When you get past the grandstands with the wind blowing, it can feel like someone picked your car up and moved it over a body width. That’s not a comfortable feeling at the speeds we are running.

Anderson estimates his Summit Pontiac is running 180 by the time he encounters the crosswinds of Vegas.

“These cars are not built for cross-winds, when we wind-tunnel we don’t wind-tunnel with a cross wind.”

Then Anderson paused and tried to justify a run that was only a few ticks off of the track record. He stopped as a thought came to mind. It appeared to work for him.

“Maybe that’s what happened, I got a piece of paper blown through the beams at the right time,” Anderson surmised.

 

 

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