Antron Brown said he virtually couldn’t see his way down the Maple Grove Raceway 1,000-foot course Sunday in the Top Fuel final round of the NHRA Dodge Nationals near Reading, Pa.

That’s a perilous proposition, considering his Matco Tools / Toyota/ U.S. Army Dragster is a 10,000-horsepower beast that jets down-track on an unholy mixture of nitric acid and propane and zips from start to finish faster than anyone could say, “Antron Brown retains his Mello Yello Drag Racing Series points lead.”

Brown has won two of the first three playoff races. So imagine how wickedly dominant the reigning Top Fuel champion is when he can see where he’s going.

Even with an untimely fogged-up helmet visor blocking out just about everything in his line of vision, Brown cut an .066-second light and scored a holeshot victory over Brittany Force and her Monster Energy Dragster. They had identical 3.721-second elapsed times, and he won with a slower 317.34-mph speed against her 324.67. She was an eye-blink slower on the Christmas Tree at .069 of a second, giving him a 0.0033-second margin of victory, or approximately 19 inches.

With the victory, his milestone 60th overall, Brown stretched his lead in the standings over No. 2 Doug Kalitta to 77 points as the Countdown to the Championship action heads in two weeks to the Southwest, at Ennis, Texas, near Dallas.

“I’m not going to lie to everybody – all the credit goes to my team. The Good Lord Above was driving that car in that final,” he said.

The Don Schumacher Racing driver, who combined with Funny Car’s Tommy Johnson Jr.to give the boss a second straight and 60th overall double-nitro triumph, flipped his helmet visor down into place just before he lit the staging light. That’s when he received the shock: “I couldn’t see nothin’. It was pitch white.”

He figured he could navigate the right lane if he could see the blue light atop the tree at least faintly. He lifted the visor for a split-second and thought better of it, taking no chances of some freakish accident that could cost him his vision permanently or worse. So he put it back down, figuring, he said, that “I like to keep my eyes, you know what I mean?”

Brown said, “So I took a chance on it and we went down the racetrack. I just tried to keep it in the center of the groove.” He felt the car drifting to the left but corralled it. “I overdrove the car a little bit. We just cut a good enough light to get that win. That was my worst light of the day. We had some lucky breaks go our way today. We kept our heads down and kept fighting the whole way.”

He was doubly blessed Sunday, for he already had ugly-pedaled his way past a struggling Shawn Langdon in the semifinal for his 10th final-round appearance and sixth in the past eight races. Brown also advanced past JR Todd and Clay Millican.  

“This is a hometown race for me. And my grandma and my family are all here, and it felt good to get that win,” he said. “The competition is at an all-time high, and I’m enjoying it. With all the boys working hard, with [crew chiefs] Brian Corradi and Mark Oswald and all these Matco / U.S. Army / Toyota boys, they did a great job all weekend – for having one round of qualifying and to come up here for the car to perform like it did.”

He and Johnson joined Vincent Nobile (Pro Stock), and Eddie Krawiec (Pro Stock Motorcycle) in the winners circle.

Brittany Force reached her fifth final round of the season. She edged Larry Dixon by nine-thousandths of a second, won when Doug Kalitta red-lit (although she didn’t know it at the time and pushed her engine past its limits for a considerable clean-up delay), and rocketed away from mechanically troubled top qualifier Leah Pritchett.