Jack Beckman knows the math, understands the predicament and isn’t pretending a No. 1 qualifying position in St. Louis suddenly fixed everything.
What it did was give Beckman exactly what he needed Saturday at World Wide Technology Raceway: points, position and another reminder that his John Force Racing Funny Car is plenty good enough to win races. The problem is Matt Hagan has been doing enough winning of his own to make Beckman’s road considerably tougher.
Beckman powered to a 3.866-second run at 332.59 mph during Saturday’s first session to secure his third No. 1 qualifier of the season and 36th of his career. He will face Dale Creasy Jr. in Sunday’s opening round of the NHRA Midwest Nationals.
The run came after Beckman looked at a hot racetrack that had climbed above 111 degrees and figured there wasn’t much chance of making a serious run at the top spot.
Then his PEAK Chevrolet SS delivered one anyway.
“Well, most of them I have my eyes closed and I’m screaming like a child,” Beckman said. “So yesterday we ran 3.88 and we were points in both sessions and I thought, ‘Okay, weather forecast for Saturday looks good. I think we can run even better Saturday.’
“Then we show up and it’s a beautiful day. It’s like picture perfect, but there’s no clouds. So it’s just sun on the racetrack and the temp goes up above 111 degrees. I said, ‘Okay, well, we’re not going to push for number one here.’ And we go 3.86.”
Beckman called it one of his team’s best runs of the season relative to the conditions. More importantly, it came at a time when every qualifying point has become increasingly valuable.
Beckman entered the weekend fifth in the Funny Car standings, 126 points behind Hagan. With St. Louis marking the third of six Countdown races, Beckman understands there is considerably less racetrack ahead of him than behind him.
“We’re six rounds behind them and we’re one third of the way through the Countdown and they’re probably not going to stink the rest of the Countdown,” Beckman said. “We got beat first round last race. We got beat semis at the first race. And we got a car that’s basically good enough to win all the time.
“Now it slowed down a little in Q4. Those are the runs we have to avoid. In the first round at Rockingham against Wilkerson, we were already ahead at 60 foot and pulled away and it burned three pistons. Those are the runs that we have to avoid. So it’s just about eliminating that small stuff, that hundredth of a second, that five-thousandths of a second that can eat you alive.”
Beckman has never been shy about questioning whether drag racing is particularly suited to a playoff format. His reasoning becomes especially relevant when one early-round loss can erase a sizable chunk of championship opportunity.
“The reason I’ve maintained that drag racing should never be a Countdown sport is if you lose first round, you don’t get to come back second round, right?” Beckman said. “Football, baseball, NASCAR, you can have something go wrong early. You got a whole lot of game or laps ahead of you. Not in drag racing.
“So we can’t lose early. And unfortunately at this point, we’re going to have to hope that Hagan loses early.”
That makes qualifying points more than window dressing. Hagan took one more point than Beckman in each of Friday’s sessions before Beckman answered Saturday by moving to No. 1 and collecting three session points. Beckman isn’t in position to surrender many opportunities, even when the payoff is measured one point at a time.
“Every qualifying run matters,” Beckman said. “We go out there and we get points the first session. Hagan got one more than us. We get points the second session. Hagan got one more than us.
“We come back on Q3, go to the top spot so we’ll get the most overall points and took the three points that goes with that session. We got to keep doing stuff like that.”
Alexis DeJoria qualified second, while Hagan was third and Austin Prock fourth after all three recorded identical 3.882-second elapsed times. DeJoria earned the higher position based on speed.
For Beckman, Sunday’s assignment isn’t complicated. Win rounds, hope somebody gets to Hagan early and squeeze every available point out of a championship chase that has already stopped offering much margin for error.
“Could we run our way into the championship? Maybe,” Beckman said. “But Hagan stretched out a six-round lead. Right now, two, three, four, five and six in points, we’re all within a round. Hagan’s checked out.
“We got to have him have some of the negative luck that we had and we got to capitalize on that.”
