TORRENCE OVERCOMES MISTAKE, OVERTAKES PRUETT AT SONOMA TO KEEP SWING SWEEP HOPE ALIVE
Steve Torrence still has the chance to become the eighth NHRA professional driver and sixth in Top Fuel to sweep the challenging Western Swing.
But he wasn’t patting himself on the back Sunday night after winning the Sonoma Nationals in the wine country of Northern California.
“It was way too close,” the Capco Contractors Dragster driver and points leader said of his final-round race against Leah Pruett – which he won by a mere 15 inches, or 0.0027 of a second.
Torrence blamed himself for what he regarded as a mental lapse in his staging procedure that triggered his close call and forced him to come from behind just before the 1,000-foot finish line.
He said, “I was trying to double-step and thinking of everything I could to ruin my time. But that’s what you get for thinking – you second-guess your guys and change your routine. And I just screwed up. I started to push the gas and eased off, and when the light [on the Christmas Tree] came on, I was dead-late. But fortunately, Leah, she didn’t crush it, either. (His reaction time was .115 of a second, hers .106.)
“I thought they might be able to outrun us,” Torrence said. “They had the better car all day.”
In the end, Torrence won with a 3.757-second elapsed time at 327.98 mph to Pruett’s 3.768, 323.04 in the Okuma Dragster for Don Schumacher Racing.
That gave Torrence his 46th overall Top Fuel victory and a gaudy 41st in the past 87 events in the Camping World Drag Racing Series.
The difference, he decided, was his Richard Hogan- and Bobby Lagana-led team’s preparedness.
“Those guys, they’re really good on race day,” Torrence said. “They’re really race-savvy. They race the racetrack. They race the opponent beside you. There’s a lot of factors that they take into play. I don’t know how many people knew it, but that was a brand-new race car. We brough that car out. That was the first run on it Friday night. We were testing some things on it, on top of having a new race car, Friday night and Saturday (Q2). On Saturday Q3, we put everything back [to their standard trim].”
So even with new equipment, which doesn’t always make a seamless transition, Torrence was able to grab the No. 2 starting position and win against some of his closest competitors who’ll be bunched up in the standings just behind him when the Countdown to the Championship begins in just the fifth race from now.
“Great race out there. Great race day,” he said Sunday after defeating Cameron Ferré, Doug Kalitta, and Antron Brown to ensure his 69th final-round appearance. “This place has been pretty fantastic for how the racetrack has been. The track is unbelievable, and we were able to put on a good show for the fans [who were denied a race last season because of coronavirus restrictions]. The surface is unbelievable. You can go out here and really throw down.”
He said it’s a venue at which racers really can “flex your muscles” and figured that if the traditional format of two qualifying sessions on both Friday and Saturday still were in place, with teams having an early- Friday session to prep for a nighttime run, more records likely would have fallen.
Never mind the what-ifs: Torrence was just happy to win for the sixth time this campaign.
“It’s kind of surreal to think where we’re at. It was a tough day, and really, I can’t believe I’m finding myself in the opportunity to sweep the Swing,” he said.
The three-race-in-three-weekends stretch out west – without the oxygen-rich Pacific Raceways at Seattle in the mix – will conclude this coming weekend at Pomona. Torrence has the chance to be the first driver in any class to win all three Western Swing events since Antron Brown in 2009.
Pruett – who eliminated Justin Ashley and top qualifier Brittany Force before slipping into the final round with a bye run in the field that was four cars short – has been seeking her ninth victory overall and first since the August 2019 event at Brainerd, Minn. Since that time, Torrence has won 11 times – 46 in all.
The reigning and three-time champion remains the runaway points leader, 349 ahead of Brown, his semifinal victim Sunday.
Pruett leaped from eighth place in the standings to fifth as the tour heads downstate to Pomona, for the oddly timed Winternationals this coming weekend. Drivers have four more events (Pomona, Topeka, Brainerd, Indianapolis) to qualify for the seven-race Countdown to the Championship, which will begin at Reading, Pa., in mid-September.
“I think the most impressive thing about this weekend is our progression from last weekend at Denver These Top Fuel cars don’t necessarily have a full reset button, but that’s what we did as a team this weekend,” she said. “We dug deep and found some issues and ultimately, we had great progress this weekend.
“To have such a consistent car from qualifying into eliminations and to put down what we needed to in the semifinals to get lane choice was great to see. We have a very conversational car that listens to us right now. The team is thriving,” Pruett said. “We didn’t have the start to the season we wanted, but this is a marathon of a year, and this is the momentum we’ve been searching for. For Don [Schumacher] to give us the patience and resources to do what we needed to get here has allowed us to open possibilities. It’s great to win rounds and get to the finals. It was a very close race.”
She had been philosophical this weekend, saying, “Drag racing is a sport of ebbs and flows. This is certainly not where we wanted to be at this point in the season, but the trick is to not let it get you down or get inside your own head. All of the biggest names in our industry have gone through spells where they’ve had their struggles, and they’ve always rebounded. My DSR teammates are a perfect example of overcoming adversity and bouncing back. Matt Hagan won the championship in 2011 and then didn’t even make the Countdown the year after. He’s since gone on to win two more championships. Ron Capps is one of the most decorated drivers in our sport, and he had to wait 20 years before winning a championship. Antron Brown, a three-time champ, recently experienced a 42-race winless streak and has since won two races in the last nine events and appears to be back in championship form. As Antron always says, ‘You have to beat resistance with persistence,’ and that is what we will continue to do.”
Torrence has had to fight off the women – on track, that is – all year long, as his rivalry with 2017 champion Brittany Force continues. For the fourth time this year, they qualified 1 and 2. And she’s challenging Brown, angling for that second spot in the standings.
Pro Stock Motorcycle’s Karen Stoffer joined Torrence in the winners circle on a weekend in which women strutted their skills all weekend long. Had Alexis De Joria not lost traction on her final qualifying attempt Saturday, women might have led their fields into eliminations in three classes for just the second time in NHRA history.
Brittany Force, Erica Enders, and Angelle Sampey became the first three women to earn No. 1 qualifying positions in pro categories at the same event, at Reading, Pa., in 2019.
At Sonoma, Angie Smith claimed her career-first top spot in Pro Stock Motorcycle at 6.736 seconds, 203.06 mph in the quarter-mile. Her elapsed time was just six-thousandths of a second shy of matching Angelle Sampey’s 2016 track record, and her speed fell slightly short of the national speed mark of 203.49 that Eddie Krawiec set in May at Charlotte.
Brittany Force was No. 1 in Top Fuel for the second straight weekend, the fourth time this year, and 24th time overall.
De Joria was going for her career-fifth No. 1 position in the Funny Car ranks. She ended up the No. 2 starter – for the fifth time in this season’s first nine races. She also has begun eliminations from the third-, fifth-, and six-place berths.
Ultimately, Torrence took center stage, despite one female rival besting him for the No. 1 honors and another one nearly disrupting his momentum and his shot at one of the last distinctions he has yet to earn.
The Kilgore, Texas, native might rather have a beer than any of the wine that Sonoma is famous for producing. Whatever his preference is, he earned a sip of it Sunday.