After winning his fourth consecutive NHRA Top Fuel world championship in 2021, Steve Torrence had yet to qualifying No. 1 or win a race so far in 2022.

Torrence checked the first box when he blazed to a track record 3.693-second lap at 323.66 mph in the final qualifying session at Houston Raceway Park Saturday.

This is Torrence’s 32nd No. 1 qualifying position in his Top Fuel career. He just edged Brittany Force’s 3.695-second pass on Friday night for the top spot.

From the Ripley’s Believe It or Not files, there’s this late entry.

About three weeks ago, when Kenny Voss and son Cory pulled out of their south Florida home base of Live Oak, the plan was to take their Pro 632 Corvette to a buyer who was meeting them near Dallas, Texas.

But rather than returning directly to Florida with an empty trailer, they bought another race car – and had to make a 2,000-mile detour to get it home. And the transaction that occurred – from start to finish, with a third party who initiated the purchase with a simple suggestion – took all of five minutes.

When the NHRA Camping World Drag Racing rolls into to Houston for the SpringNationals April 22-24, a familiar face will be competing in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class.

Veteran rider Michael Ray will be piloting a second motorcycle – an Erik Buell Racing bike – for Ryan Oehler.

“We put a deal together for a whiskey company out of Texas, Bahnbrecker Whiskey and they are going to sponsor for Houston,” Ray said. “Ryan Oehler has a second bike he’s been trying to get ready to debut and I talked to him, and he felt comfortable, and it was ready, so we are going to debut his second bike.

Don Garlits has never been one to easily swallow being told he has to play by the rules.

Necessity has taught him to conceive, engineer and construct cars far ahead of the competition. When a clutch explosion in a front-engine dragster took half of his right foot in 1970, he came back the following season with a rear-engine version that flipped Top Fuel racing on its head. He built dragsters with canopied cockpits, mono-strut rear wings, sidewinder transmissions – and most recently, an electric dragster. 

And even with a combined 17 championships in AHRA, IHRA and NHRA Top Fuel competition, Garlits has to keep an NHRA competition license up to date. The most-current license in his wallet limits him to Super Stock-division and slower classes.

When John Montecalvo saw his race car roll out of sight of his Long Island, New York, shop February 6, he thought his days as a professional drag racer had ended.

That absence lasted a little more than a week.

Turns out he wasn’t really ready to hang up his firesuit.

“I think a lot of people thought I was getting out. I think I thought I was getting out,” Montecalvo said prior to eliminations at the PDRA’s season-opening East Coast Nationals at GALOT Motorsports Park.

The Holley NMRA Ford Nationals has announced the return of the All-Female True Street category to the upcoming Ohio event. 

Presented by Baer Brake Systems, All-Female True Street will take place during the NMRA Ford Performance Nationals at Summit Motorsports Park the weekend of June 9-12, 2022. Summit Motorsports Park is a world-class facility located in Norwalk, Ohio, and is the fourth stop on this year’s NMRA national event tour. 

Well-known drag racing patriarch Virgil Hartman has died. He was 75.

The former drag racer, who passed on his love for the sport to his children Richard and Rhonda, battled serious illness for the past three weeks in the ICU due to complications with his diabetes and heart. 

“Blessed to have such a wonderful man as my father; someone I always admired, looked up to, received the best advice from, guided and supported me in everything I did,” said Rhonda Hartman-Smith. “His opinion meant the most to me; I always strived to make him proud and will continue to do so throughout my time on this earth.

Wes Distefano didn’t expect to be the dominant force in his PDRA Pro Nitrous debut that he was the past two seasons in Pro 632 competition.

Nor did the 2020-21 title holder plan on being a spectator Saturday when the East Coast Nationals eliminations got underway. 

Of the 20 Pro Nitrous cars on the grounds for the PDRA season opener, Distefano qualified 19th. While that was a mere 13/1,000ths of a second slower than the No. 16 qualifier, that flash of time kept him sidelined Saturday except for a test pass.

Pro Stock driver Rodger Brogdon was searching for just the right words to describe the loss of longtime drag racing announcer Bob Unkefer to the drag racing world. He wasn't the only one, as many members of the drag racing community were also searching for adequate words to describe what the 68-year old Unkefer meant to them.