Top Fuel’s Leah Pruett, like every other NHRA racer, fan, official, and Summit Racing Equipment Motorsports Park employee, waited out a day-long rain delay Friday.

And shortly before the late-night news came on the TV, she got her own big news that it soon would be time to fire up her Direct Connection Dragster for the long-awaited lone qualifying session of Day One of the Summit Racing Equipment Nationals.

That’s when, she said, she started to “kick into high gear” and feel her adrenaline start to surge.

But she and her Tony Stewart Racing team had no idea what to expect, with all the condition changes. She could tell that the Safety Safari had done its best to give the racers a suitable surface on which to compete. “They didn’t let the track go away,” she said. Usually crew chief Neal Strausbaugh predicts before they approach the starting line what the car likely will run. But this time he was stumped.

All Pruett had to go on was the eight-word directive she received at the last minute: “It’s going to haul ass. Don’t pedal it.” 

She didn’t. She knew what to do. Besides, she said she “was ready to go fast.”

And she laid down a 3.684-second elapsed time at 333.08 mph on the 1,000-foot Norwalk, Ohio, course that was the quickest and fastest of the weary-turned-wired day.

Pruett’s performance was four seconds better than that of the provisional No. 2 qualifier, Steve Torrence. He  clocked the only other 3.6-second E.T., at 3.688 and 332.10 mph in the Capco Dragster.

The Nos. 3 through 6 racers – Doug Kalitta (3.700 seconds), Josh Hart (3.707), Justin Ashley (3.708), and Brittany Force (3.709) – were bunched together within nine-thousandths of a second.

“It was definitely the most exciting part of our day and the last two weeks,” Pruett said afterward. It capped a day that she described as “a lot of highs and lows.” 

She’ll enter Saturday’s schedule of two qualifying sessions seeking her second consecutive top-qualifying berth and 15th of her career. Leading the intensely competitive Top Fuel field is “one of my favorite thigs to do.”

Pruett, who is tied with Antron Brown for fifth place in the class standings, gave thanks to Joe Fitzpatrick and Dan Murphy at Precision Built Race Cars for completing the front-halving of her dragster sooner than scheduled after a last-minute change of plans.

But she attributed to her improvement this season to the fact her team has “been more aggressive.”

She said that last year the prevailing strategy for her new team was along the lines of “We don’t have a baseline. And we’re going to do, and we’re going to learn along the way.”

That’s no longer the plan, Pruett said. “Ingenuity,” she said, is the difference, “now that we have that baseline.

“Instead of just taking what we have and ‘Let’s try to make it a little bit better,’ it’s taking what we have and being smarter about it and reading it different ways and being able to apply it in different ways that are more [conducive] to going fast on tracks like this,” she said.

Pruett said the rain, which has been all too frequent this year, is making some folks jaded, “but you never really do [get used to it]. And the fans don’t get used to it – but they got a great show tonight.” 

They did, as she and Funny Car’s Ron Capps took the early leads in the nitro classes Friday.