For a period of 30 minutes during the PRO Superstar Shootout testing phase on Wednesday, the consensus floating around the starting line at Bradenton Motorsports Park was the 340-mile-per-hour barrier was close to falling. Then reality hit.
Bob Brockmeyer, the founder of the Compulink timing system, has been called many things over his career, but “reality” has likely never been one of them. Thursday morning, Brockmeyer became reality.
Since Antron Brown’s 339 mile-per-hour run and Shawn Langdon’s 338 were done in the unofficial confines of testing – there’s no disallowing the runs. There is, however, legitimizing them.
Brockmeyer’s expert opinion determined the speeds were not legit.
“The splits on top were not legit, and I just double-checked everything this morning,” Brockmeyer confirmed. “We’d set all the beam highs, the beam sensitivities, everything up on a tune-up, and they were all right. But we’ve seen times in the past where everything is right, but you get that because the track got a little bit of a dip here and there on the top end.”
Brockmeyer explained the dragsters likely “walked” the beam, which tripped the front tire and not the front wing. He estimated the runs should have been in the 332-mile-per-hour range.
“The fix to that is to raise the beam half-inch, turn the sensitivity down a quarter of a turn, and compensate for whatever the car is actually doing,” Brockmeyer explained. “So even though it was ‘right,” that’s what you have to do.”
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