It’s the new venues — or at least new to the current NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series — that keep getting Ron Capps’ attention. Friday night at Rockingham Dragway, Capps returned the favor by getting theirs.
Capps blasted to the provisional No. 1 qualifying position in Funny Car with a 3.860-second run at 330.40 mph, putting the three-time world champion on top after the first two sessions of the NHRA Nationals at The Rock.
And if there was any question whether bringing NHRA back to Rockingham would generate interest, Capps didn’t need a marketing survey. He could see it from the cockpit and throughout the pits.
This season has taken NHRA into South Georgia Motorsports Park in Valdosta, U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Michigan, and now Rockingham. They aren’t cookie-cutter national-event facilities, and Capps believes that is part of their appeal.
There is history here. There are quirks here, too, and nobody is pretending otherwise.
But people are showing up.
“The reward was, I can’t tell you how many of our partners and sponsors, people came today that would have probably not gone to Charlotte on Friday,” Capps said. “In fact, they wouldn’t probably. A lot of them. Not picking on Charlotte, pick any other national event, Commerce, any of them, they would have made … It’s just this place has had a buzz about it.”
Capps said some drove hours to get there, and they weren’t waiting for Saturday or Sunday. They came Friday because Rockingham’s return had become something they wanted to see for themselves.
“So my point is it stirred up a lot of buzz in all a good way,” Capps said.
Capps knows Rockingham from another lifetime in nitro racing. He was here the last time NHRA raced at the facility in 1998, reaching the Funny Car final while driving for Don Prudhomme.
Crew chief Dean “Guido” Antonelli has his own Rockingham memories from his days with John Force Racing. Friday gave both men a chance to revisit them, only this time with a Funny Car capable of sitting atop the qualifying sheet.
“Guido and I, we’re like these two OG dogs,” Capps said. “We were talking about, we were pulling up the first run, I said, ‘Man, I’m having flashbacks from this left lane because you have to pull up around the tower, a hard left and get it over in the left lane for the burnout.’”
The memories are old. The racetrack underneath them isn’t.
Capps praised the condition of the racing surface after Thursday’s heavy rain forced considerable work before qualifying began. His opening run put him second at the time, and his second shot moved him to the top.
“This is a completely different track,” Capps said. “And it used to be pretty bumpy. I had one parachute come out on that run. We had an issue with one parachute and the old Rockingham, I would have been for sure in the sand, if not the net.”
Instead, Capps found a smooth shutdown area and a racing surface considerably better than some expected after Thursday’s weather.
“They did a great job,” Capps said. “Track, everybody worried a little bit after the rain on Thursday. It’s got some transitions that everybody was talking about, and I went up and watched, actually Guido did, he watched the first car and Funny Car go down and it hardly moved at all. So we were like, ‘Wow.’”
Rockingham also has something modern drag strips largely engineered out of the experience: grandstands practically sitting on top of the racetrack.
Capps remembers spectators getting an education in nitromethane from only a few rows away.
“We used to sneak up there after Funny Car and we would sneak up for Top Fuel, and if you sat in the first one or two rows, you for sure felt like your eyebrows were getting singed by the Top Fuel headers,” Capps said. “It is by far the coolest grandstand to sit in for a Top Fuel race.”
NHRA has blocked off the closest rows for safety, but the concrete grandstand remains one of Rockingham’s unmistakable features. Capps called it “legendary.”
There is also unfinished business on the championship side.
Capps led the Funny Car standings for much of the regular season before entering Rockingham fourth, 63 points behind leader Matt Hagan. Friday’s qualifying performance gave Capps an opportunity to start cutting into that deficit.
Back-to-back defending champion Austin Prock sits second provisionally at 3.893 and 326.80 mph, with Jack Beckman third at 3.911 and 327.03. Hagan ended Friday sixth with a 3.935.
Capps is chasing his fourth No. 1 qualifier of the season.
