Steve Torrence skipped last week’s test session here at Indianapolis.

And it didn’t hurt him one bit Friday during the opening day of the Chevrolet Performance U.S. Nationals.

The Capco Contractors / Rio Ammunition Dragster driver used a track-record 3.702-second pass at a class-best speed of 328.06 mph on Lucas Oil Raceway’s 1,000-foot course to seize the tentative No. 1 qualifying position in the Top Fuel class.

Torrence was two-hundredths of a second quicker than closest rival Tony Schumacher, who’s bidding to become the most successful racer in the history of this event with a 10th victory in the U.S. Army Dragster.

Four others – Antron Brown, Brittany Force, Shawn Langdon, and Morgan Lucas – also surpassed Langdon’s four-year-old elapsed-time standard at the suburban Indianapolis venue.

Most importantly, Torrence’s blast right out of the gate gave him what he called “a leg up” on his competition in the Traxxas Top Fuel Shootout, which starts with Saturday’s second overall qualifying session. At stake is $100,000 for the winner. Torrence, the first to secure a berth in the bonus race, is seeded third and will face No. 6 Langdon in the opening round.

“We just got a new Morgan Lucas Racing car for our spare car. We were just giving the guys an opportunity to rest, to get that car together, not pressure them for the entire week of putting a spare car together and come out here and run two full days,” Torrence said, explaining why his Brownsburg, Ind.-based outfit bypassed two days of open testing. “I think that the car was running well enough that we didn’t have anything we really wanted to try.

“There’s a big advantage to having the same [clutch] disk pack every race. And we don’t want to waste those,” he said. “Another issue we were running into was the blower belts. We had trouble with some current batches of blower belts not lasting. So we scoured all over the U.S. [for surplus belts] and built up an inventory. We kind for wanted to save all that and use it for the Countdown.”

He said, “It’s always pretty crucial to come out and run well the first lap, to have good data to build on the rest of the runs. This one is so late in the evening you afford yourself the ability to go out there and throw everything at it and see if you can knock it out of the park. And that’s what we were able to do.”    

Eighteen of the 20 entrants made passes, with Terry Haddock and Chris Karamesines opting out of this first of five qualifying sessions.