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SUNDAY NOTEBOOK- POINTS LEADER KALITTA MISSES CUT AS LANGDON BUMPS HIM FROM FIELD IN FINAL QUALIFYING CHANCE; ZIZZO, TATUM SUPERPART-TIMERS; FORCE REMAINS NO. 1 QUALIFIER
1 – CALAMITY FOR KALITTA MOTORSPORTS – True to history, the NHRA’s Toyota U.S. Nationals already has delivered totally unexpected drama at Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis. And it centered on the Nos. 1- and 2-ranked drivers in the Top Fuel class.
For both Doug Kalitta, the reigning Top Fuel series champion and points leader for the past six races, and his Kalitta Motorsports teammate Shawn Langdon, their hopes of making the 16-car field came down to the fifth and final qualifying session.
In the end, Kalitta failed to break into the order for Monday’s final race of the regular season, the one that determines seeding for the six-race Countdown to the Championship. Worse yet for Kalitta, Langdon was the one who bumped him out.
And Langdon had to sweat out his own nerve-wracking moment in the next pairing, for Jasmine Salinas had a chance to bump him and leave one of the Top Fuel category’s premier teams with no representation in this 70th edition of the Labor Day classic.
But the rookie driver lost traction early in her run, and Langdon got his reprieve. She expressed keen disappointment but promised to “try to shake things up in the Countdown” as she joined Krista Baldwin and Lex Joon on the sidelines.
Kalitta won the U.S. Nationals in 2019, and Langdon is a two-time winner (2013, 2020).
Before the final session, Kalitta – who has had five No. 1 starts and three victories in five final-round appearances this year – said, “Last year, Antron Brown got in on the fifth session [at No. 15] and won the race. That’s the kind of mojo I’m needing. We should be good.”
He did make the field for a few minutes with a 3.793-second run, but Langdon relegated him to the sidelines in the next pairing.
After experiencing his first failure to qualify since the October 2010 event at Las Vegas, 302 races ago, Kalitta said, “Obviously, my theory didn’t quite come true,” and said he would be cheering for Langdon when eliminations begin Monday morning. “We’re out here together trying as a team. It’s just one of those deals. There’s a lot of good-running cars out here this week. We’ll just have to get ’em at the next one.”
Langdon said, “All we need is one run to get in.” That one run didn’t give him complete satisfaction. He said, “We’re better than this. You got to do what you got to do for your team. We’ve got a good car capable of winning.”
At the same time, he knew that “we’re on the hot seat now,” as Salinas sat in the water box, waiting to better Langdon’s bump-spot elapsed time of 3.784 seconds. But she smoked the tires and clocked a 4.142-second E.T., handing a relieved Langdon the last berth in the field.
4 – GERDA JOON’S ROCKY ROMANCE WITH NITRO – She hated nitro; didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But once Gerda Joon learned how to work with it, she has cast aside any hesitation, boldly stepping up to become tuner for not only husband Lex Joon but also for rookie Travis Shumake. She is the only woman crew chief in the Mission Foods Drag Racing Series’ nitro classes.
Many assumed that Gerda Joon tuned Lex Joon to his 2005 FIA European Top Fuel championship. But the truth is that while she was active in helping him run his alcohol car, “She did not like nitro in terms of so much power, so much impact,” he said.
He added that she was gung-ho to be involved in the alcohol program: “She helped me on that, to put it together, and we had a great time and she was my back-up girl and anything else, and she was always helping out, putting pistons in the car and things like that. So that was cool. She learned lot, but then we started running nitro. She still helped us putting the motor together, but when we fired it up, she always walked away. She never wanted to be part of that.”
What changed her mind was not a growing love of nitro. That might never happen, because she said this weekend she still is afraid of nitro. “It’ll bite you in the ass,” she said with emphasis. If necessity is the mother of invention, an abruptly bolting crew chief gives birth to a new career.
“We went to a race in Brainerd, and my crew chief left me the weekend before. It was the first weekend we had an official sponsor with Strutmasters. My crew chief left me because he could not deal with stress. So we were there and we needed someone,” Lex Joon said. “When we fired up the car to set the fuel system, nobody wanted to help us. We went to all the teams, and nobody wanted to help us. So she got fed up with it, and so I put somebody else in the car. But since then, something happened to her. She said, ‘That cannot happen again.’”
Along came seasoned crew chief Lance Larsen to start helping Joon, who remembered that Larsen suggested Gerda as the crew chief. And Joon recalls clearly his own reply: “Ah, you can forget about that one.’” Larsen said, “Well, we can give it a try.” Gerda Joon was looking at them from a distance, and she was becoming suspicious. Joon said, “She said, ‘What’s going on? I don’t like this.’” Larsen had a conversation with her and told her, “You can do this.”
Gerda Joon, who’s refreshingly blunt, snapped back, “Well, I am scared, and I hate it.” She said, “I was perfectly fine with backing him up, putting him in the lights, and I was always in front of the cockpit, checking if everything was done. And then I let him know, ‘OK, it’s up to you.’” But this was a whole other matter.
Larson said he’d help her get established, so she gave it a whirl. And Larsen told her, “You can fire up any car anytime for me. You are doing a great job.” Once she got on her way, Rob Flynn, currently the Scrappers Racing crew chief, helped her deepen her knowledge and broaden her comfort zone. And, Lex Joon said, “She started talking to him a lot because I’m outside working on the car. So that’s how basically she became the crew chief, because she got an open line with Rob Flynn. And now she’s working on everything. And by the time she gets the tune-up ready, she calls me in, and then she asked me to look at things and make the final decisions. And there we go.”
Gerda Joon said she’s particular about how she does her job. “It has to be the same [routine] over and over and over again. That’s the only way I can do it.”
Lex Joon is yielding his dragster to Shumake for the occasional race and has Shumake backing him up on the starting line. Lex said, “To be honest, I would love to run a complete female team. I like it a lot better.”
Gerda Joon spoke a bit wistfully about those early days with the alcohol car: “The crew chief had already walked away [after backing him up], because that way I was always the last person he saw.” Lex Joon said, “That’s the same in the morning when you’ll leave [for work].”
Gerda Joon dismissed the sentiment, teasing, “Now he sees Travis.”
5 – MYSTERY MAN FROM MONTREAL – Monday will mark Dan Mercier’s 20th start, and the multi-business owner from Quebec might not be well-known yet to NHRA fans south of America’s border with Canada.
But the Montreal-area racer is more than the driver who anchored the quickest Top Fuel field in NHRA history here at Indianapolis Raceway Park in 2022. (Brittany Force led with a 3.640-second elapsed time, and Mercier was 16th qualifier at 3.758.)
Mercier is more than the part-time racer who bounced around in the bottom half of the field this weekend before settling into the No. 10 slot for Monday’s runoffs.
He’s more than the driver who this weekend is wheeling the dragster in which Terry McMillen won the 2018 U.S. Nationals.
For starters, Mercier is the only team owner-tuner-driver in drag racing’s modern era other than Funny Car veteran Tim Wilkerson. And he’s the only team boss whose entire crew is French Canadian and speaks French.
By trade, he’s an engineer. By nature, he’s analytical, precise, methodical, and solutions-driven. And by his hard work, he has found himself owning and operating three engineering firms, an international race-car team and employing more than 900 workers.
He owns Groupe ABS Inc., a civil engineering company. He also owns ADS Signalisation (ADS Signalling), which produces signage for road-construction projects. And his Solum Environment centers on renewable energy semiconductor manufacturing. All this is in addition to the former boat racer’s 11-man motorsports team, which sports a handful of other vehicles.
“For my business, maybe I work 40, 40 hours and maybe 20. My race team, so it’s 60. So normally for a good life it’s 40 for have fun, 40 for work, and 40 for the family,” he said. “So 40, 40, 40. When I talk with my team, with my business, I say the best in your life is 33 percent, 32 percent, 30 percent,” he said, sharing his work-life balance plan.
Mercier is building his racing team, growing from two full-time crew members to three this year. “Next year, maybe between eight or nine. So me, I won’t work my business another two or three years,” he said, guessing he’ll expand after 2026 to “maybe 14, 15, around 12 then.” He said he’s serious about chasing points in the short term, and with Brent Legasse and Serge Blanchette shouldering a lot of responsibility at the shop, Mercier certainly will become more and more mainstream and competitive in the near future – and his performance wasn’t at all unimpressive this weekend on the sport’s biggest stage while a startling number of series regulars struggled mightily.
6 – HOW DOES TRIPP TATUM DO IT? – Like T.J. Zizzo, who came out to the dragstrip for the first time since he was top qualifier in May at Joliet and qualified third this weekend, Tripp Tatum has emerged as a legitimate “superpart-timer,” to borrow Zizzo’s phrase.
Tatum attributes that to “firstly, just good people, very qualified people, very knowledgeable people that have helped me with this whole thing together from the beginning. The Laganas, Capco, they’ve helped me instrumentally. And then we make sure everything is as good as it can be for us.
“And then, of course, financially, it takes an awful lot to run these things. And I’m 100-percent self-funded at this point, working on things. So I just pick and choose what [races] I feel like because I won’t come out here unless I know I can do the best I can or the best we all can together,” Tatum said.
Top of his mind, too, is making sure “to give the guys the right parts and pieces to put together a car that they can run as hard as they need to. With the older, worn-out stuff, you try to run hard and bad things happen.
He said supply-chain issues have “gotten better, but it’s still not easy. Nowadays, things have been gotten more expensive. Parts are harder to get, too. So that’s another part of it. That’s why I’m not out here quite as much.”
Donnie Bender, Tatum’s only full-time employee who works every day at the Brownsburg, Ind., shop, gets help from Tony Shortall here and there. “And then all my guys,” Tatum said, “they’re like ex-full-timers that don’t want to do it all the time and love to come to a good situation.”
Bender was a crew chief with the legendary Dick LaHaie for Larry Dixon when he was going head-to-head with “the other Indianapolis dominator,” Tony Schumacher, in the early 2000s.
“Donnie is invaluable,” Tatum said. “Donnie is responsible for 85 to 90 percent of getting us this far. But it’s all funding, but that’s not easy. If it were easy, there’d be a lot more people out here trying to do this.”
7 – JASMINE JAZZED – This isn’t her first U.S. Nationals, but it feels like it, Jasmine Salinas said. She was a crew member for her father Mike Salinas’ Top Fuel efforts with his Scrappers Racing dragster. And she said, “I raced here in Top Alcohol Dragster, but racing in alcohol versus racing Top Fuel are two totally different things. So we can definitely say this is my first Indy, for sure.”
She relocated to the Indianapolis area, “so this is my home track. It’s exciting. I got to do the Sonoma race earlier this year, and that was my first time really racing there. Had family and friends for the first time out watching me getting to do that in Top Fuel, and now all the crew guys, everybody has their family and friends out. All of my family and friends out as well that I’ve made out here in Indy, they’re all coming out. So it’s pretty exciting experience, and I don’t know, I just love it. It’s awesome feeling,” Salinas said.
Mike Salinas said Jasmine talked him into coming out from their Bay Area home in California. “This is the Big Go. This is the biggest race of the year right now. We’re really fighting our way to really secure ourselves in the Countdown to the Championship,” she said, “and I think having my parents back in Sonoma made me realize just having that little extra support, knowing that they’re standing behind me when I’m taking off in the car, that’s just that extra little motivation. So this is a big race for us. It’s a big race for our crew guys. They’ve really put in so much work this year. And it’s something that this was his team and that I have now taken over. So it was really important for both of us to show up here and try to see what we can do together as a team.”
She didn’t make the field at Indianapolis or the Countdown.
“And then there’s a lot going on at the Big Go here, but I think it’s a little environment-wise, hospitality, it’s a little more relaxed pace for my dad,” she said. “So we can spend a little more time together, and I’m really enjoying it. Having my mom out here, too. I know she misses being out here and watching us.”
9 – GOING ALL OUT – For Rust-Oleum dragster driver T.J. Zizzo, the U.S. Nationals is the site of arguably his most significant effort in the more than two decades he and his family have raced in the Top Fuel class. He was runner-up to Justin Ashley in the 2020 Lucas Oil Summernationals that played out its final round at this event. And he earned his first competitive round-win at the 2004 U.S. Nationals, beating Doug Herbert. Since then, the second-generation racer from Lincolnshire, Ill., has posted more than two dozen round-wins. Earlier this season, in May at his home track of Route 66 Raceway at Joliet, Ill., Zizzo scored his first No. 1 qualifier. Zizzo landed the No. 3 spot Sunday for Monday’s eliminations.
“This is the biggest race of the year on the biggest stage. The U.S. Nationals is rich with history and this year there will be so many legends in attendance and special events surrounding the race. I am proud to be a small part of the race and look forward to making our mark with the Rust-Oleum Top Fuel dragster, for sure,” he said.
“We have had a great season so far and we are looking to build on that success. We are looking to maintain that level of success,” he said. The Mike Kern-led team has built more engines so it would be well-armed for this event. And that made Zizzo say, “I feel like we have an amazing chance to have some success. My Rust-Oleum crew has been working their tails off to give us the best chance to win.”
While the drag-racing world said a public good-bye to former megateam owner Don Schumacher in May at Chicago – Schumacher’s hometown, too – Zizzo indicated he’s feeling Schumacher’s spirit as he’s racing at the track that’s just two miles east of the Don Schumacher headquarters. Schumacher was a neighbor and mentor, and Zizzo hasn’t forgotten that.
“Don Schumacher was a legend, and the support I personally received from him, as well as the support his organization provided Zizzo Racing, is immeasurable,” he said. “We lost Don [in December 2023], but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him and appreciate everything he did to help me on and off the track. He won the 1970 U.S. Nationals Funny Car title, and it was his first NHRA national-event win. I would love to honor his legacy by winning my first race this year at the 70th U.S. Nationals.”
10 – ON TAP FOR TODAY – Eliminations will begin at 10 a.m. ET Monday.
SATURDAY NOTEBOOK – FORCE’S LAST STAND GOING STRONG, ASHLEY WINS BONUS RACE AGAIN FOR YEAR-LONG HONOR, SOME SURPRISING NAMES ON UNQUALIFIED LIST, TOP FUEL WOMEN COULD MAKE HISTORY
1 – FORCE STILL HOLDING HER OWN – Two more qualifying sessions remain at the Toyota U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis before the fields are set for Monday’s eliminations and the Countdown to the Championship lineup and reset points are in place. But so far, Brittany Force is on track at least to retain her No. 10 spot in the standings. She remains the provisional top qualifier after two Saturday sessions (and three overall) with a 3.693-second pass and a top speed of 334.32 mph.
If Force were to slip below 10th place in the order, she would not be eligible to contend for her third Top Fuel championship, on two counts. She would not be among the top 10, and she would not be able to use the “perfect attendance” rule. So it’s critical that she earns as many points as she can, making this points-and-a-half system work to her advantage.
“There is a lot on the line this weekend, so to be able to improve and step up … our No. 1 spot was taken from us in Q2, and we knew we had to step it up. That was already David Grubnic’s plan, so to go from a .74 to a .69 was pretty awesome for this team,” the driver of the Chevrolet Accessories dragster said. “We’re very proud of that and very happy. We’re moving ahead, and we’re going to try to grasp as many points as we can get.
“The momentum is building for the entire team. We’re excited to be here, it’s the biggest race of the season. We’re sitting 10th, and there is so much coming this weekend, so much pressure,” Force said. “But having three good runs down the racetrack really amps us up that much more. We’re excited to be here, but we’re waiting to get to Monday.”
Force joined John Force Racing Funny Car teammate Austin Prock atop their respective leaderboard. Other quickest qualifiers were Greg Anderson (Pro Stock) and John Hall (Pro Stock Motorcycle).
2 – ASHLEY ACES ANOTHER CHALLENGE – Justin Ashley burst quick-starting Top Fuel rookie Ida Zetterström’s bubble Saturday afternoon, defeating her in the Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty Challenge final round. It was Ashley’s fourth victory this year in the bonus race and his 10th overall in the two seasons of the program. Neither Ashley nor Zetterström had a glittering run, as both lost traction downtrack. He won in his SCAG Toyota dragster with a 4.085-second elapsed time to beat the 4.541 she coaxed from her JCM/VP Fuels/Edelbrock/COMP Cams/Dodge dragster. Other #2Fast2Tasty Challenge winners Saturday were J.R. Todd (Funny Car), Dallas Glenn (Pro Stock) and John Hall (Pro Stock Motorcycle).
“We take the Mission Foods Challenge very seriously,” Ashley said. “It’s important for a number of reasons. Obviously, we want to run well because it’s a part of qualifying, and [to] help position ourselves well for race day. But it’s also points that are going to be added on before the Countdown starts, which is super-important to us.
“Anything that we could win, we want to see win lights whether it’s the Mission Challenge or even in qualifying, then of course on race day. I’m super-happy for the team, happy for the guys and everybody at SCAG Power Equipment.”
3 – SOME SURPRISING ABSENCES – Part-time driver T.J. Zizzo said before this event began that “the level of competition in Top Fuel this season is off the charts. And then you look at the field for the U.S. Nationals, and it is a ‘Who’s Who’ of competitors. I truly believe there are teams that can win the race that will not make the field.” His prediction was spot-on through Saturday, through three sessions of qualifying.
Surprisingly unqualified after Friday’s lone session were Josh Hart, Doug Foley, Steve Torrence, and Justin Ashley. Saturday provided two more qualifying chances, but that wasn’t enough for the formidable Kalitta Motorsports duo of Doug Kalitta and Shawn Langdon, as well as Krista Baldwin and Lex Joon.
Kalitta improved in the third overall session but bumped teammate Langdon in the process. Hart finally moved into the top 16, and he used his 3.772-second E.T. to knock Kalitta out. Langdon, in the Kalitta Air Careers dragster, lost traction early in his Q3 run and closed the day with a best time of the weekend at 3.849. Kalitta then took advantage with his 3.823-second pass. But Hart finally figured out how to power his R+L Carriers dragster to a 3.772-second, 326.63-mph run that embedded him into the field at No. 12 for now.
9 – PLAYING THE GAME – Tony Schumacher, who’s in the top half of the tentative Top Fuel with two more chances to improve Sunday, leads the class in victories with 87.
But for the eight-time Top Fuel champion, there’s much more to the challenge of victory than simply hanging on to a dragster at 330 mph.
“I enjoy the wins, but I enjoy the figuring out how to win, which is part of the game. I don’t enjoy being angry when I lose. I enjoy figuring out what was the cause, what was the problem, what happened, and then changing it so that we can win and enjoy the game. And the game includes bad moments. It includes crashes. It includes fire and parts breakage — but wins, victories, and pulling it together also. So I’m thankful for it. I’m thankful. I’m a positive guy.
“I probably got a lot of that from my dad,” he said, referring to the late Don Schumacher, who built a multi-car empire. “If it wasn’t from him, it was my Uncle Ron and all the people that I was surrounded with every day. It’s the choices of the people you put yourself around that gets you to where you’re at.”
In a post-race interview following a victory, Schumacher acknowledged that he had won, at that point, about 80 trophies. However, he acknowledged that he has “lost hundreds.” He said this week, “That’s just part of the deal, part of playing the game. And I get disappointed when I hear people trying to make everyone the same. I’ve always said that we’re not born the same. We’re not born with those same talents. My son Anthony is phenomenal at math. I’m terrible at that. Whatever it is, we’re born differently. But I can play sports and I can do certain things.
“Find what you’re good at and make it your passion,” Schumacher said.” And I think if you do that, it’s never work. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked a day in my life. I’ve put in a lot of hours. I’ve sweated a lot, a lot of blood tears, all that stuff. But calling it a job, no. I’m glad I get paid for it, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve made it where it’s flat-out my passion. When I’m done with one, I can’t wait to get to the next one. The hours in between at home are just waiting for the next race. That’s what it is. In between racing, we’ll prepare for the next race. We’re always thinking about racing.”
10 – PAIR OF SWEDES GO FOR ROOKIE OF YEAR – They have a surprising number of mutual friends but never have met, NHRA drag racer Ida Zetterström and IndyCar racer Linus Lundqvist. But the Swedish drivers are vying for Rookie of the Year honors in their respective series.
With his first podium finish on an oval and second of the season last Saturday at St. Louis, Lundqvist leads the rookie competition by 71 points with four races to go, including the doubleheader at Milwaukee this weekend. Zetterström joined the season just two races before the Countdown to the Championship starts, making her American debut at the Lucas Oil Nationals at Brainerd, Minn.
“We have had so much fun with that when we came out with the Rookie of the Year campaign,” Zetterström said of her patriotic posters and stickers. “We know we are late coming into this year. We have a lot of the Rookie of the year candidates that are running the full season [with] a lot more events than me, so we know that coming in late might make it harder for us to have a chance on that. But that was also one of the reasons why we thought it was even more fun to do some big marketing around it. The Rookie of the Year award comes down to who performs best at the track and who shows best.”
The JCM Racing team driver said she knows “there’s so much more than the marketing part” and said she is serious about “show[ing] on track that we are someone that’s here to stay and be here to chase wins and championships.” However, she said her rookie-of-the-year campaign, with its “little spinoff on this year’s election is something that’s extra fun for me. I’m not American, but this is about me getting to live my American dream. So that’s also why we choose to have the car in the red, white and blue and the stars and the stripes. All this shows that I’m very honored to come here and race in the American NHRA series, and this is kind of our way to show what we’re here to do.”
For Lundqvist, driver of the No. 8 American Legion Chip Ganassi Racing Honda, “it’s been a season of some pretty good highs, but also some pretty low lows,” he said. “I also think that this is kind of how a rookie season can go. I think I made some rookie mistakes. I expected more of myself in the beginning. I was thinking, ‘I’ve done three races [in 2023]. I know what this is about,’ and then realized quite quickly I was in for a bit of a shock. There’s been a lot of learning to do. Some of these tracks you’ve never been to. One of the biggest things that I think I’ve learned across the year is energy management: what to do, what to focus [on], when to relax. That’s been a big learning curve for me.
“I learned many, many things, about the series, about myself, about the team – I think more so about myself,” he said. “Every now and again you kind of need to decompress and not think about racing for a little bit. I think the biggest thing was, the feeling that I had almost across the season was, like, you left one race weekend and it was straight into the new one. You could never take a bit of time to reflect and digest everything that you learned, try to apply it in the next race weekend.”
Recently, he said, “I actually had time to go through all my notes, all the notes that the team made: This was good, this was bad, this is a setup change in the car – things like that. You had a little bit more time to sit down [in a] relaxed environment to focus. That was one of the things that helped us going into this [past] weekend as well.”
FRIDAY NOTEBOOK – FORCE TAKES EARLY TOP FUEL LEAD, ZETTERSTÖM NOT JUST ‘FUEL GIRL,’ BILLY TORRENCE MENTORS AUTUMN HIGHT, BROWN CHERISHES RACING WITH SON,DIXON FONDLY RECALLS BOUTS WITH SCHUMACHER AND PRAISES BROWN
1 – REGULAR-SEASON RECAP – As the Toyota U.S. Nationals ramps up at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park, the Top Fuel scorecard is looking a little bit streaky. Heading into this 14th and final regular-season event on the Mission Foods Drag Racing Series schedule, Doug Kalitta leads the pack. He’s atop the leaderboard, paces the category in No. 1 qualifying positions (five), and is tied with Justin Ashley and Antron Brown in victories with a class-best three.
Shawn Langdon has won twice, and Tony Schumacher and Steve Torrence have one victory apiece.
The Top Fuel category had five different No. 1 starters in the first six races and six in the first eight.
What counts most is who’s leading the standings, and that’s where Top Fuel has had its swings. Langdon led through the first three events, and Ashley took over for the next four races. Kalitta gained control June 9 at Bristol, Tenn., and has led through the next six.
2 – HOW THINGS STACK UP FOR COUNTDOWN – Five top-10 drivers (Doug Kalitta, Shawn Langdon, Justin Ashley, Steve Torrence, Antron Brown) have clinched sports in the Countdown. The other five spots, of course, will be filled by the end of Labor Day, with Josh Hart and Shawn Reed expected to receive free passes via the “perfect attendance” provision.
However, Hart has a chance to earn his way into the Countdown on his own merit. He’s in 11th place, just 55 points behind 10th-ranked Brittany Force. She’s 56 points behind No. 9 Billy Torrence – and the two-time champion is not eligible for an automatic berth because she missed the Norwalk race to be with her injured dad following his Richmond crash. So if Hart buzzes through eliminations and wins the race – he has done it twice in the Top Alcohol Dragster class – he could bump Force from the playoffs.
This race awards points and half for round-wins and 20 possible bonus points through five qualifying sessions. Fresh off what he called “some of our best runs of the season” at a test session at Brainerd, Minn., Hart said he’s realistic but optimistic. And he knows he can tap into his seemingly magic knack for pulling off improbable performances. (“I have to remind myself sometimes that we have recorded some amazing wins,” he said.)
Number-crunching and strategic scenario-plotting are rampant at this time of the season, but it’s mathematically possible that Hart, with a shiny performance this weekend, could enter the six-race Countdown in seventh, maybe even sixth place. The sanctioning body’s policy is to reset the points, bunching up the title-eligible drivers for added, if socialistic, drama. So if Hart’s wildest dream came true, he could find himself 70 or 80 points out of first place. Naturally, that’s … well, supernatural, perhaps. Hart would need the stars to align perfectly.
And they could align perfectly for Force, who has put on a brave face in emotionally traumatic and stressful circumstances and managed to win the popular “Night Under Fire” event at Norwalk, Ohio, not to mention face the media throughout the summer.
3 – BRITTANY FORCE TAKES EARLY INDIANAPOLIS LEAD – Desperate for every single point to maintain her No. 10 spot in the standings and clinch a Countdown berth, Brittany Force came out swinging at the U.S. Nationals Friday night, seizing the provisional No. 1 qualifying position with a 3.74-second elapsed time at 334 mph.
She called it a “smooth, clean run” and said, “We need to fight our way through the weekend. We’re banking on every point.”
Doug Kalitta, Shawn Langdon, Justin Ashley, Steve Torrence, and Antron Brown have filled the first half of the NHRA’s Top Fuel field for the Countdown to the Championship.
But the real drama at this weekend’s Toyota U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis is coming from the bottom of the elite-10 list, where Force is starting to shake her millstone of mediocrity.
She won’t be able to take advantage of the “perfect attendance rule,” because she skipped the Norwalk, Ohio, race in June to stay with her family at a Richmond, Va., hospital following dad John Force’s serious racing accident.
Eleventh-ranked Josh Hart (and No. 12 Shawn Reed) can make the Countdown field through his perfect attendance. But Hart – who didn’t break into the 16-car field Friday – rather would aim for a stellar U.S. Nationals and possibly vault to as high as seventh place when the Countdown begins Sept. 13th at Maple Grove Raceway, near Reading, Pa. In doing that, he would bump out Force, the two-time class champion.
With this event awarding points and half for round-wins and a maximum of 20 bonus points through five qualifying sessions, Friday’s achievement was huge for Force. Hart trailed Force by just 55 points heading into this event, and she needs 57 points to pass No. 9 Billy Torrence.
Fresh off what he called “some of our best runs of the season” at a Brainerd, Minn., test session last week, Hart said he’s realistic but optimistic. Besides, he has a seemingly magical knack for reeling off improbable performances. (“I have to remind myself sometimes that we have recorded some amazing wins,” the two-time Indianapolis winner in the Top Alcohol Dragster class said.) And with Force’s run Friday, Hart might have to pull a rabbit out of his helmet if he’s to pass her.
“We’ll have to fight to stay in the Countdown at the biggest race of the season,” Force said after losing in the first round at Brainerd’s Lucas Oil Nationals, where she had said, “Doing well is going to be critical.” She had confidence from winning the “Night Under Fire” exhibition extravaganza the week before at Norwalk, but it eroded. That left her in 10th place, a “risky position this late in the regular season,” she said. “We need to move up into a safer spot before the Countdown resets. I’m very confident in this David Grubnic/John Collins-run team. We have a lot of work to do, but it will be worth it when we get there.”
4 – MORE THAN ‘TONY’S FUEL GIRL’ – It might seem like a long time since reigning FIA Top Fuel champion Ida Zetterström announced at last December’s PRI Show that she would be joining JCM Racing as driver of its second dragster. The plan was for her to debut at Brainerd, which she did. But those eight months were jam-packed with trans-Atlantic activity – although sometimes fans mistook her for Tony Schumacher’s hired help.
No one really watched Zetterström slog through government paperwork just to resettle her. No one at the JCM Racing rope line saw her hastily selling furniture and packing her belongings to leave Sweden. No one held her hand while she adapted last February to simple American cultural norms, such as deciding what brands of foods to buy and how our grocery stores operate. None of the fans peeked in at the team shop at Brownsburg, Ind., as the crew completed her chassis, prepared seat molds, and made the most of “a trailer that needed some work.” She said, “Of course, it was without any tools, any spare parts, anything.” Juggling and adding personnel went on behind the scenes, too. “We weren’t racing a full season this year, we did not have a big, full-time crew.” Most weren’t aware that until the mid-June Bristol race that her crew chief, Jon Shaffer, had been devoting most of his attention to Schumacher’s dragster.
“Before that,” Zetterström said, “he had to pull double duty, working on Tony’s car and building my program when time permitted. So [it was] some real intense months, getting everything ready for that. And I have also been at every NHRA event. I haven’t missed one for being there with Tony’s team, getting more into routines over here, also getting a possibility to see all the tracks and do all the media, talk to all of our sponsors that have been at site, and do all that.”
What’s more, she would zip back to Brownsburg immediately after the race to do whatever needed her attention – all cramming that in around her back-and-forth trips to Europe for a lot of sponsor obligations. “I’m working closely with Dodge and especially Dodge Europe and their European programs. So I’ve been to several events over there. So it’s definitely been a hectic time.” To top it all, she unveiled her dragster at the Roadkill Nights event.
“The weekend before Brainerd … we debuted the delivery of the car and also did burnouts down the M1 Concourse together with our Dodge Gang over there,” Zetterström said. She also offered a hand wherever she could as the team prepped a spare car. “It was nonstop,” she said. “So I actually found myself sitting in the water box for the first run and Jon started up the car and in my mind I went, ‘It[‘s] too late to get nervous now. So let’s just do it.’”
However – and it’s dizzying just hearing her recount the past few months’ activity – that was the stuff that wasn’t public. What many well-meaning and supportive fans saw was Zetterström mixing fuel for Schumacher’s dragster and pouring it in the tank.
“I’m standing by the ropes, mixing fuel and doing something, and the people are there, talking to you and [they] want to know what you’re doing. You are the closest person to the fence, and they will talk to you,” she said. “So I have had everything from, ‘Hey, can you go get Tony? Hey, can you go find Tony?’ There’s a lot of that and there’s also a lot of, ‘Hey, are you Tony’s girlfriend?’ ‘Hey, are you Tony’s daughter?’”
Zetterström laughed it off and said, “I don’t want to correct them, so I’ve always said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And I’ve also got a lot of people that are coming and they say this by being very nice, but they say, ‘Your job is so important. Fuel in the car, if you don’t fuel it, it won’t go down the track.’ I’ve heard that so many times when I’ve fueled Tony’s car. And now all of a sudden, when I’m doing it and it’s next to the rear of my trailer and there’s a photo of me so they can actually understand that I’m fueling this car for myself and not for someone else, it does have a different meaning, and it’s kind of hard to explain. It just feels like my work is more validated when I do it.
“Now, obviously, I don’t want to be known as ‘Tony’s Fuel Girl.’ I want to be known as the racer,” she said. “So it’s like a relief when you start racing. And I feel like I get to do what I’m actually good at. Obviously there’s probably a lot of people out there [who would be] a better fuel girl than I am, but as a racer, that’s what I want to do.”
So it’s no wonder that when Zetterström started making passes in her own car – as the 14th and last qualifier at Brainerd, upsetting No. 1 qualifier Steve Torrence to gain a bye round into the semifinal – she reveled in the moment. She soaked up the satisfaction of being who and where she was meant to be. She said, “Oh, it felt so good, honestly.”
And in a tongue-in-cheek moment last week, she teased that maybe Schumacher, the 10-time U.S. Nationals champion, could mix her fuel for her debut at “The Big Go.”
Zetterström joked, “I said, ‘Now, when I have done fuel for 12 races, I expect him to do mine for the upcoming eight.’ I did not see him in my pit for the last event, so I think he’s trying to get away from it.” But isn’t the NHRA all about equality and diversity?
“Don’t get me wrong on that,” she was quick to point out. “I was the one that said I would gladly do the fuel issue. If I’m at the racetrack, I would rather have something to do than to just sit around. I was there for several reasons, but for me to at least be able to mix fuel and do ‘chutes makes me feel more part of the team. So it definitely wasn’t that anyone who said I had to do it. That’s just the way I am. I would rather be hands-on when I’m there. So, no, Tony didn’t force me to do his fuel, but we can see if we can force him to do mine.”
5 – BILLY TORRENCE MENTORING AUTUMN HIGHT – Autumn Hight has a seasoned racer mentoring her as she has moved from the Jr. Dragster ranks to the Super Comp class – and he isn’t father Robert Hight, the three-time Funny Car champion, or grandfather John Force, the 16-time Funny Car champion and 156-time winner.
Top Fuel title contender Billy Torrence has provided guidance to Hight, 20, because her dad “wanted her to race Super Comp and knew that I raced Super Comp and had a lot of experience,” he said. “So we got her in a car and got her out there and started teaching her how to race and went to a few races with her. And she’s really done well. She’s got a great car.”
Hight is racing with the Prose family, from Terre Haute, Ind., also a three-generation drag-racing family that includes patriarch Gary, his son Bob, and Bob’s daughter Alison and son Nathan. Bob, Alison, and Nathan also are competing in Super Comp. Torrence said, “She’s racing with a great family, the Prose family now and having a really good time.”
Both Hight and Torrence are competing this weekend in Super Comp, along with: Top Fuel ace Shawn Langdon; Anson Brown, son of five-time U.S. Nationals winner Antron Brown; and NHRA announcer Jason Galvin.
Torrence said he has seen a number of promising qualities in Hight’s approach.
“I think she took to everything. She studies the game, she studied her car, she made her a checklist, went over and over and she’s not made a lot of mental mistakes. And she’s had a lot of success already in a very difficult class.”
Her plan, he said, as he understands it, is “to continue on in that car some, maybe move up into a Top Alcohol Dragster and eventually into a Top Fuel car.”
With aunts Ashley Force Hood, Brittany Force, and Courtney Force Rahal all having graduated from the same sportsman ranks, Hight likely has gotten a few pointers from them, Torrence said, “I’m sure that behind the scenes there – all that whole bunch is racers over there – I’m sure at every family gathering, there’s some coaching going on.”
Drag-racing legend Kenny Bernstein said that drivers always emerge to keep the sport alive. “The pipeline always gets filled.” And Torrence, who knows a few things about pipelines as owner of East Texas gas-industry company Capco Contractors, said he’s happy to do his part to encourage the younger generation as they start in the sport.
“Autumn is a sweet young little ol’ girl. I’ve enjoyed being a part of her career and look forward to her racing a bunch in the future,” Torrence said.
Both Hight’s mother Adria, the CFO at John Force Racing and the oldest of John Force’s four daughters, and father Robert have said they didn’t direct Autumn toward drag racing or push her into it in any way. But even though she’s studying business at a college in the Indianapolis area, where she has relocated from her roots in Anaheim, Calif., she has the racing bug.
“I think she does,” Torrence said. “I think she’s going to do well. She’s really had a good time. Her parents go to the races with her some. I’ve been to the races with her some. And Robert has her racing with a good family out of Division 3. They’ve been bracket racing. They’ve been Super Comp racing. She’s running the full gamut.”
Like her mentor, Hight advanced Friday to the second round of eliminations. After defeating Madison Payne, Hight red-lit by four-thousandths of a second against Iowa driver Dave Crawford. She was in respectable company, as Anson Brown also fouled out in Round 2 against Doug Wegner, and in the same round, Nate Prose fell to Nick Smith and Langdon lost to Brad Cole. Billy Torrence advanced past John Labbous. Bob and Alison Prose and Galvin exited in the first round.
6 – FATHER-SON DUAL VICTORY NOT IN CARS THIS WEEKEND – Antron Brown’s hope of sharing the winners circle at the same event with his son Anson – like Rickie and Matt Smith and Kenny and Brandon Bernstein have done – fizzled in the second round of Super Comp eliminations Friday. Anson Brown defeated Ray Miller, then fouled out in Round 2 against Doug Wegner by six-thousandths of a second.
“Anson’s racing a streamlined Super Comp car. We just came from Bowling Green, and Super Comp is a very, very difficult category,” Antron Brown said. “I never was much for throttle-stop racing, but once you get into it’s like playing a game of chess. So I’m out there playing it, and I got a good player playing it. He cuts really, really good lights.” His son had an outstanding .015 reaction time in his victory over Miller but was a little too quick for his own good against Wegner. “He’s very inconsistent. Won some big money bracket racing,” Dad Antron had said earlier in the week that they would be trying hard to earn two Wally trophies this weekend and that “we’re going to work hard at it together.
“That’ll be a dream come true, because I got pictures with Anson here at the U.S. Nationals when I won in Pro Stock Motorcycle. He was sitting on top of the bike, and I was holding him. He couldn’t even hold his head up when he was baby. Then I got a picture of when we won the U.S. Nationals in 2011 in Top Fuel, and he’s sitting there with his ashy knees and everything. I remember that picture like yesterday,” Brown said. “And he’s got this smile on his face, and he’s got his hand on a Goodyear tire. And now to race with him in the same event, the U.S. Nationals – 70th running of it – it’s a huge, huge deal. This is something that I always dream about, and one day hopefully that me and him can line up in a Top Fuel car to race each other.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen this week, but Brown has another goal – winning a third consecutive Top Fuel crown at the U.S. Nationals, just like his Funny Car friend and fellow team owner Ron Capps is trying to do.
Brown has five triumphs here – on a Pro Stock Motorcycle in 2000 (against John Smith) and 2004 (over finalist Shawn Gann) and in Top Fuel, in 2011 (over Del Worsham in the final), 2022 (over Brittany Force), and 2023 (over Steve Torrence).
The Matco Tools Toyota owner-driver reminisced about winning his second straight U.S. Nationals last year from the No. 15 qualifying position – something that hadn’t been done in Top Fuel since the 1997 race at Englishtown, N.J.
“You have everybody from the east, west, north and south that shows up,” he said, remarking that this year the field is overflowing with 20 entrants, similar to the 2023 event, which drew 19 cars. “And last year, we almost didn’t qualify. We still were able to pull it off. It was one of those races where everything goes wrong. Electrical went wrong, we fixed one problem, had another problem. We had another problem when we came in the last session.” He made the field by about two-thousandths of a second. “So,” Brown said, “it tells you how tough it was. And then we came to race day. We had a lot of confidence. It was one of those deals where it was really, really sweet to do, and it sets you up for the Countdown.”
And his mindset is the same as it was a year ago: “We have six races. We got to race for a championship, and it’s going to be very, very hard. But NHRA Top Fuel category competition this year has been at an all-time high.”
With Toyota stepping in as title sponsor of the race this year, Brown said he has added incentive to win again.
“It is a lot of pressure, because I remember so many years this race wasn’t sponsored by Toyota, and all of our Toyota cars won it every year. So it’s a lot of pressure for all the Toyota cars right now, because it is our title sponsor now and we want to put in the winners circle and represent them.” He said he had to be careful not to talk yet about winning the race. “We got to go out here and qualify first. Our main goal is go out there and try to qualify in the top five.”
7 – IT’S THE MOMENTS THAT LED UP TO IT – Tony Schumacher has been announced as one of the Class of 2025 inductees for the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, along with Skip Barber, Miguel Duhamel, Carl Haas, Ed Iskenderian, Dale Jarrett, and Bill Stroppe. The honor will come for Schumacher six years after the induction of his father, the late Don Schumacher.
Someone congratulated Tony Schumacher for being tapped, and he said, “Well, and a whole bunch of other pretty special people. I can only say it one way: blessed to get that phone call. We’ve had a great career – still fighting through it – but to have the races that we’ve won, the championships we’ve won, and then to get that phone call, you go, ‘Pretty cool.’” He said he hardly can wait to see the people who “have been inducted before me. That’s really when it becomes real. My dad, a few years ago, got put in there, and that was for him a great, great moment. So to be in the same thing, it’s kind of like the Bristol wall [at Tennessee’s Bristol Dragway]. You look up in Bristol, and it’s got the champions wall up there [Legends of Thunder Valley]. It’s got you and your dad. Not too many places like that. To this point, as we continue forward and I move into different things that he’s been inducted into, it’ll be unique. But this is a big one, man. You don’t get any bigger than that. It’s what people dream of their whole life, no matter what it is to be worthy of something. So here we are.”
It’s rather rare for someone to be selected for induction when still actively racing. It happened for John Force in 2008. “John’s been doing a long, long time. Yeah, it’s unique, but our careers have been very special. John Forces was and is amazing. And again, those are blessed moments,” Schumacher said. However, he paid tribute to “all the moments that led up to it … choosing an Alan Johnson, choosing a Mike Green, choosing a Dan Olson — all the people you win championships with. It’s all those individual choices that ultimately lead up to a moment where someone calls you [from the Hall of Fame, also honoring] all the people you’ve put around you and all the groups that you’ve formed and all the wins and the championships that come from basically those little selections that paid off.”
He said finding outstanding people “and putting them together is important. Leading them from that, also important.”
Schumacher has had a chance to test his leadership performance.
“We have not had a fantastic year,” Schumacher said, “but I’ve always said something’s missing. We’re missing a part or piece. Something’s wrong, because I have Mike Neff, who’s the smartest crew chief, in my mind, out here; one of the top five. And to be struggling for this long, something’s just missing, and we’ll find it. And I believe we have, but while you’re not performing well, leading them in the right direction anyways, leading them up, building the morale, keeping it going is so important. And I learned a lot of that from my dad and I’ve learned a lot of that from watching guys in the past who’ve done it. There’s people that lead with an iron fist, and there’s people that lead through morale, pumping people up, and each person chooses his own way from what they’ve seen. And I’ve been surrounded by people that know how to lead and I appreciate that.”
8 – DIXON-SCHUMACHER SEESAW MARKED EARLY 2000s – For the first decade of this millennium, the U.S. Nationals Top Fuel competition predominantly was The Tony Schumacher-Larry Dixon Show. Dixon won the first of his four Indianapolis trophies in 1995, and when Schumacher unveiled his U.S. Army dragster in 2000, that launched his run of an NHRA-record 10 victories on the sport’s center stage.
But Dixon didn’t concede the decade to Schumacher. He twice broke up Schumacher’s streaks. Dixon won the 2001 race before Schumacher took the next three. Dixon halted the streak in 2005, and Schumacher went on a four-year tear (2006-09), beating Dixon in the final round twice in that stretch (2007, ’09). Dixon came back in 2010, outrunning Del Worsham in the final for his last September hurrah.
Schumacher returned to the winners circle in 2012 and ’16, as the Morgan Lucas Racing tandem of Richie Crampton and Morgan Lucas had a brief surge, and Antron Brown started adding to his two Pro Stock Motorcycle U.S. Nationals victories.
Dixon, who already has been inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America and will help welcome in Schumacher next March, looked back fondly on those fierce battles.
“That was a fun little run back then. When we did get halfway through the decade and it’s only us or Tony that have won, you definitely take notice,” Dixon said. “When it finally ended, I think in 2011, I think I poked Tony and told him, ‘You broke our streak.’ It was fun while it lasted.”
9 – LARRY DIXON PRAISES ANTRON BROWN – Talk about Antron Brown this week has centered on his quest for three straight U.S. Nationals victories. What might be overlooked is the realization that with one more victory, Brown will have 62, tying Larry Dixon for second-most victories on the all-time Top Fuel list. Tony Schumacher leads with 87. So with two more triumphs, Brown will take over the No. 2 spot on the list outright.
Dixon indicated he won’t be upset when Brown leapfrogs him for the distinction.
“He is a great driver and a great champion. And he is more than deserving to pass me. I think I might’ve been in the other lane when he got his first, Dixon said.
“As for me, when you are in the middle of the fight, you’re trying to win every single one of them,” he said. “But once you get out of the ring, you can say to yourself you did as much as you could while you were in there. Very fortunate and blessed to have been part of a lot of great teams to run that number to where it was.
“I am sure if you asked Antron. he is looking past me and looking at Tony and his number. And if he didn’t say that, I’d be disappointed. He is too good of a racer to not be looking further forward,” he said.
10 – OVERFLOW FIELD – With 20 entrants this weekend, the Toyota U.S. Nationals Top Fuel field is the second-largest this season. The Gerber Glass and Collision Route 66 Nationals in May at Joliet, Ill., drew the most, with 22. The Summit Racing Equipment Nationals at Norwalk, Ohio, scored the third-biggest car count this year, with 19.
