If California’s Auto Club Raceway at Pomona were a baseball diamond, the Top Fuel box score from Sunday’s Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals might look something like this:

A solo home run for Leah Pruett – to score at her home base
But there was no joy in Mudville, for her final-round opponent, Justin Ashley, ended up on the disabled list
Swing and a miss and Steve Torrence was out
Antron Brown, hitting from the bottom of the lineup as the No. 11 qualifier, makes his pitch for a second victory this season a reminder to Torrence that he’s coming on strong
Brittany Force was the leadoff hitter, qualifying No. 1 for the third straight time
But Brown and Force’s pitches were out of the strike zone, posing no threat to runaway points leader Torrence
Double play for Don Schumacher Racing, which claimed victories in both nitro classes
Strikeout for Doug Kalitta, the perennial Pomona power player who lost in the first round

And after all that, anyone who doesn’t believe Brown’s theory that “there’s a ridiculous amount of intensity and drama that has to do with our sport” should be tossed from the game.

For the statisticians . . . Pruett capitalized on her second straight trip to the final round, earning her ninth overall victory and her first since August 2019, at Brainerd, Minn.

But it came on a single pass as extreme heat did more than give fits to Camping World Drag Racing Series tuners. It also threw a health alarm into her final-round opponent, Justin Ashley.

Racing-surface temperatures soared to more than 140 degrees, and the air temperature creeped toward 100 degrees. Ashley, 26, became ill, unable to make the final pass. That handed the victory to Leah Pruett, who had been longing for a victory after a two-year lull but wasn’t thrilled to get it this way.

His team reported that he was battling heat exhaustion bordering on heat stroke. So Ashley withdrew from the competition and was taken back to his pit via tow vehicle for treatment.

Within an hour or so, Ashley said from his hauler, “These race cars are too powerful to drive if you aren’t 100 percent.

“I was drinking water throughout the day, but before the final round I just didn’t feel right,” he said. “I talked with my crew chief, Mike Green, and my father [former racer Mike Ashley], and they encouraged me to do what was in my personal best interest.

“There will be more races, and I take this as a learning experience. I congratulate Leah and look forward to racing her in a final very soon,” Ashley said.

Pruett was hoping for the same thing after her race. “That’s what racing is all about, the competition.”

She said she saw some sort of commotion going on in the opposite lane. She said she knew her own crew chief, Todd Okuhara, was telling team owner Don Schumacher that it looked as if they would be making a single pass.

“I comprehended it, but I didn’t want to, to be honest. I really wanted to have a final round. Leading up to that final round, I was thinking about when I had raced Doug [Kalitta] in the final and close races and feeling extremely, extremely proud and really, really being up on the tire. So I changed my mentality from being up on the wheel – which I’ve been trying not to get, to do whatever it takes . . . be more in a safe zone than a “want to choke someone out zone” . . . to just do what we normally do.”

So with just seconds to process what was happening, she went through her paces and won with a rather meaningless-at-that-point 0.130-second reaction time, 4.021-second elapsed time, and 247.61-mph speed on the 1,000-foot course. Clearly and understandably, though, her team had a muted celebration at the starting line in Ashley’s absence.

At the top end of the racetrack, Pruett said, “We dug deep, and this Wally . . . is about the perseverance of the Sparkling Ice Spiked/Mopar/Dodge SRT team and dedication.” Later, she said, “The most impressive part for me of today was how our team has continued to persist and persevere and grow,” gratified that she and her Okuhara- and Neal Strausbaugh-led crew “are pulling the rope in the same direction.”  

Pruett called Ashley “such an incredible racer, and an extremely difficult one [to race against]. For anyone to get out of the car in a final round at an event like this shows that he was being smart for what is best for him. I think it also shows to what a degree we are athletes and how important it is to take care of our bodies and our minds.”

Meanwhile, Ashley said, “I want to thank the entire racing community and especially my sponsors, Smart Sanitizer, Strutmasters.com, Auto Shocker and KATO Fastening Systems, for the outpouring of support I received today,” he said. “I especially want to thank Tony Stewart and Leah Pruett for their concern and interest in my health. I have known NHRA as my racing family for a long time, but today it really showed how special our sport is. I thank everyone that stopped by, texted, or posted well wishes on social media. I will be ready to go for Topeka.”

That’s where the tour heads next for the Menards NHRA Nationals Aug. 13-15 at Heartland Motorsports Park.

Pruett’s victory combined with Ron Capps’ Funny Car to help Don Schumacher Racing hit a double in the nitro classes for the 68th time.

Earlier in the day, fans likely thought they had witnessed the biggest Top Fuel drama in the first round, with Antron Brown ruining best buddy Steve Torrence’s quest for a sweep of the challenging Western Swing.

Torrence said he wanted to score hit that triple at Pomona and sweep the three-race-in-three-consecutive-weekends Western Swing, but that wasn’t what he primarily came to do. His focus simply was on winning this race – and every one after it through November on the way to a fourth straight Top Fuel series crown. So the runaway class leader wasn’t heartbroken that he didn’t become the sixth dragster driver and eighth overall to master the mid-season challenge. But he didn’t come to this historic track for the first time in 20 months, since he clinched the 2019 championship (his second of three), expecting to lose in the first round. That hadn’t happened in 16 races, dating back to last July at Indianapolis.

Brown’s crew chief, Brian Corradi, said early Sunday morning before racing started, “Good luck to Steve. I know what it was like to [sweep the Swing] in ’09, and I know what it was like in ’12, where it got taken away at the last race, too. That’s how it goes.”

Torrence’s early exit – a shocker in itself – meant that for only the third time in 15 races, the Top Fuel final round would not have a Capco Contractors Dragster, including Billy Torrence’s, at the starting line.    

“We just got a little behind in qualifying,” Torrence said.  “We didn’t get down the track on the first two [qualifying] runs, and then we had to be a little conservative just to move up in the field and get lane choice. But give all the credit to Antron and his guys.  They figured it out and made a good solid run.”

However, Brown, in the Matco Tools/Toyota/Sirius XM Dragster had plans of his own. He knocked off Torrence on the hot, tricky racetrack that already was approaching 130-140 degrees and called it “a blessing we got through that round.” He defeated Shawn Langdon next but lost to Ashley in the semifinal.

Brittany Force earned the No. 1 starting position for the third time in a row and advanced to the quarterfinals on a bye. But she fell to Ashley in Round 2. So neither she nor Brown gained much ground in the standings, which will be reset and bunched up per NHRA order after the next three races, anyway.

Kalitta was optimistic this would be a season-turnaround this weekend for him and his Mac Tools team, but in the first pairing of the day, Clay Millican eliminated him. Kalitta lamented that “it sucks” to “lose in the first round at your favorite place.”

It’s Pruett’s favorite place, too. She said, “I don’t think I’ve seen as many win lights in my life as I’ve seen at this racetrack.”

It’s where she started her drag-racing career 25 years ago, racing with guidance from her father Ron, who passed away suddenly in January. So the moment for her was bittersweet, nostalgic, happy, relieved, and wistful all rolled into one.

At the end of the day, the day belonged to Pruett, who had worked on her driving and her mindset for months to earn the honors.

She said, “Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I’m an opportunist,” Pruett said. “The glass is half empty. The glass is half full. I don’t know. There’s water in it. I’m going to drink it.”

And she did.