Hollywood couldn’t have written a better script.
Antron Brown, who had been among the top of the testing teams from Tuesday until Thursday morning, was on what appeared to be a strong Friday qualifying pass during the Q-2 session at the PRO Superstar Shootout when the car moved around on the top end. Then a slick exploded, sending rubber shrapnel into the sky and his three-wheeled dragster to a screeching stop in the Bradenton Motorsports Park shutdown area.
Immediately, the Antron Brown Motorsports, led by Brian Corradi and Brad Mason, began taking parts off the bruised new dragster and moving them over to the championship-winning dragster, hoping at least to make a check-out run in the final session.
Brown, who is excellent at making time for the media and fans, politely asked for a timeout as he processed what had happened.
As difficult as this was to understand, an hour later should have really had him scratching his head.
Brown was scheduled to make a half-pull and coast to a stop, but instead, he kept the pedal to the metal and delivered his best run since he made his first run in Tuesday’s private testing. In fact, the 3.644 second elapsed time at 322.11 was his best run since joining the Top Fuel ranks.
“My hats off, man. I’m going to be honest with you, brother. Just kept the faith, brother,” Brown said. “Lord knows that hard work always pays off, and we got the right group of people, and that right there proved to me and everybody else, like I always said, that we have this group. We’ve been fighting all last year. We won the championship. And we’ve been looking for those runs to run in the 3.60s.”
Brown believes the new car will be good once they get it broken in, but in a pinch, “old faithful” has always seemed to deliver the goods for him.
“We’ve been pushing really, really, really hard, and to bring out our car from last year, we had a new front half on it, and we’ve been running our brand new race car out here, and then we had that mishap where something just got into the tire, or the tire let go on us, and we tore that new race car up,” Brown said. “We have our work cut out for us to go back home and get it back, to have our PBRCs ready to go.”
Brown admitted that making the “hero” runs race fans clamor for in testing was low on the priority list as he and the team were trying new parts and pieces. He had little indication the hero run would come following one of his darkest moments in the event.
“We were just planning to run to half-track; we weren’t going to lean on it a whole lot,” Brown said of the replacement for the Q-4 session. “But then, knowing how Brian is, he tells me, “Do what you want to do. Now, if it feels good, don’t shut it off.
“It was one of those times when that thing was getting after it, then I was like, ‘This thing’s on a mission.”
A driver knows when a car is cooking, and Brown knew whatever came up on the scoreboard, his hot rod had more to deliver.
“It still shut off just a little early. It shut off probably at 850 feet,” Brown admitted. “That’s why it ran 322, and we ran a 71 back half. That’s a low 3.63. I should have run. So, all in all, that .64 popped on the board, and that was our quickest pass by far. We went 298 miles an hour in a half-track. So with that being said, is that now we’ve been pushing. We’ve got our clutch pack together. And we actually finally get something that we always wanted to do, is run that hard and that fast.”
Brown has never been shy about professing his faith, was quick to point out he felt protected from the moment the tire let go.
“God’s always there. God is great all the time,” Brown said. “He takes us through certain lessons that make us wake up and go the direction that He wants us to be in. At some point, He puts us in places that we don’t want to be, but you’ve got to embrace it and move forward. So, I’m definitely here. I have a great, great team that makes unbelievable things happen, and that right there told me that we’re ready to go out here and race hard this year and try to defend this championship.”
