Ashley Force was disqualified in the first
round of eliminations at the NHRA Toyo Tires Nationals in Reading, Pa.

Scrambling to get the backup car ready and
working through a fuel issue Sunday morning, the Force Hood team ran
out of time to get the car to the scales before the call to the staging
lanes for the Pro categories.It was an especially devastating
turn of events for the Castrol GTX Mustang team considering they had
worked well past midnight to put a back-up Mustang together for Force
Hood after a dramatic qualifying round explosion. The resulting carnage
forced the team to pull out the back-up Mustang and begin making it
race-ready. On Sunday before the first round debris was discovered in
the fuel line forcing the team to use valuable time replumbing the fuel
system. That delay took the time normally allotted for a trip to the
scales. It was a mistake that the team will not make again.

Clay Millican is locked in a battle with Joe
Hartley for the 10th and final spot in the NHRA Countdown to 1 for
Top
Fuel dragsters.

With one race to go before the Countdown, Clay Millican watches his chances fade with a first round loss at Reading.

Millican couldn't get past Cory McClenathan in the first round, but
holds onto a slight three point lead over Hartley after Hartley lost to
Antron Brown in the second round of eliminations.

“We gave it our best shot, but the tires just got loose early in the
run,” said Millican about his close race with McClenathan. “I pedaled
it three times and the tires just wouldn’t hook up again. He was
farther down the track and able to get his car hooked up before I did.”

Larry Dixon has won a lot of races, but until Sunday afternoon in the Toyo Tires NHRA Nationals a victory at Maple Grove Raceway had eluded the driver of the Al Anabi Racing dragster.

“Great,” answered Dixon when asked just how this win felt. “This is such a historic race track and I've always wanted to win here. You know my dad won here, you know points meets, running Top Fuel back in the day, and I just love coming to this track. God, you know, for just one reason or another we've never been able to close the deal and finally, you know you're halfway down the track and you're still...I've been halfway down the track thinking you're gonna win and then you break an input shaft and lose and so like just to see the win light come on it was just, it was awesome.

Michael Phillips was ready to pack it in and go home. The weekend, as far as he knew, was over. He'd damaged
the motor in his Suzuki and with no replacement on the truck there was
no way he could answer the call for a final round run against Eddie
Krawiec.

That's when the racing community stepped in. There was no way Krawiec
was going to the line next to an empty lane. An engine was found and
put in Phillip's bike with the help of several different teams,
including Krawiec's when there was trouble getting it started.

The clock was ticking. The curfew at Maple Grove Raceway is 9 p.m., and the hands on the clock were already past the witching hour.

It was dark, cool and the air was not yet full of moisture, near perfect conditions for Jeg Coughlin to simply outrun Johnny Gray in the final round of Pro Stock competition in the Toyo Tires NHRA Nationals. For Coughlin it was all horsepower as he cut a .012 light to Gray's nearly identical .013.

“It did feel fantastic,” said Coughlin when asked about his sixth win of the season and near lock on the No. 1 spot in the Countdown to 1. “We struggled in the two qualifying rounds we had here, ended up eight. We knew we had a lot under the hood and knew we had the car to do it. We just tried to give it what it wanted.”

It was no easy trip for Bob Tasca, III as he collected his second win of his career, and second this year, beating Mike Neff in the final round of the Toyo Tire NHRA Nationals at Maple Grove Raceway.

Tasca had to get past Ron Capps, Robert Hight, John Force, and Mike
Neff to collect the Wally his mother had earlier predicted was coming
his way.

“My mom's my biggest fan, team photographer,” Tasca said in his post
race interview. “Very fortunate to have a lot of wonderful people
around me. My guys, you know...if you see what goes through a race
weekend, when you're throwing rods out and almost burn a car down and
fixing a body...it is an unbelievable amount of energy and
concentration. You hate to see something happen to Mike, I mean
obviously he doesn't cut point two lights, I mean obviously something
happened, he got distracted, it's happened to me, on more than one
occasion. But it does come down to every little thing means so much in
what we do. The guys gave me a hot rod that put me in a position to win
and I did my job and the rest is history.”

It felt as if the Toyo Tires NHRA Nationals at Maple Grove Raceway
would never end, and as of this posting the event is not complete.
Several sportsman classes are set to run Monday morning.

The
problem came from both rain and sunshine. Rain saturated the ground and
whenever the clouds parted, allowing the sun to heat the track, water
would come seeping up through surface. It was a no win situation for
the Safety Safari and track officials. After multiple delays on Friday
and Saturday it looked like Sunday would be perfect. It wasn't. It
didn't rain again but the sun kept peeking through the clouds drawing
the water up through the racing surface. Run after run, the day was
delayed as track workers tried to keep the track dry. Finally, with one
round of Funny Car and Top Fuel dragster eliminations complete and half
a round of Pro Stock in the books, officials were forced into another
delay that lasted over four hours.

ADRL Pro Nitrous racer Pat Bennett was uninjured in this encounter with
the wall during the recently-completed ADRL Ohio Drags in Columbus,
Ohio. Bennett was attempting a qualifying run during Saturday's session
when he made contact with the retaining wall and crossed over into the
oppsite lane and impacted the wall. See the Roger Richards photo sequence. 

Chassis builder Gary Naughton looked over his client’s 1970 Chevelle assessing the
damage from an incident in the National Trail Raceway shutdown area on
Friday afternoon at the ADRL Ohio Drags in Columbus, Ohio.

Kenny Doak’s Extreme 10.5 entry qualified 13th in the field but,
because of the damage sustained, was unable to make the first round
call.

According to witnesses, the Wellston, Ohio-based Mustang, driven by
Jason Wilson, had a parachute snag the wheelie bars of Doak’s car. The
wheelie bars were ripped from the rear of the car and forced through
the quarterpanel of Doak's Chevelle.

“Spin it any way you want, the bottom line is John Force Racing “did exactly what I told them to do”, said Graham Light, NHRA Vice President of Operations during a break in the action in the Toyo Tires Nationals at Maple Grove Raceway Saturday afternoon. “I think it's unfair for anyone to be critical of John Force.”

Light has already accepted the criticism for a mistake made on January 21, 2009 which led to the confusion coming out of events on August 17th at Brainerd Int'l Raceway.

The error, a changing of words, should have been caught in January.  It wasn't. Not by Light or any others responsible for ensuring press releases concerning policy decisions are accurate. Those facts change nothing. They don't change the intent of the testing policy applied to Top Fuel and Funny Car teams by the NHRA and how it has been applied, according to Light.