​If only Matt Hagan could have seen from the outside of the car the show he and Ron Capps put on for the race fans at World Wide Technology Raceway during qualifying for the NHRA Midwest Nationals.

For two days, the defending NHRA Funny Car champion and his Don Schumacher Racing teammate put on a speed clinic with 3.8-second runs, and after running 332s in Saturday's final session, upped the ante to 333.25.

The age-old quote dictates that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Luck has nothing to do with Top Fuel racer Mike Salinas' Friday 3.652 elapsed time in Friday's Q-1 session at the NHRA Midwest Nationals. 

Tuners Alan Johnson and Brian Husen had the Salinas Scrapper dragster running on mean. 

"Alan has been working on a few things and the guys have been working on stuff," Salinas said. "So I think with where they're headed and what they're doing, we've got some great stuff coming our way. It was fast. It was very fast, to say the least. The impressive numbers are the 330 numbers. Those are the impressive numbers that we were really watching. 

Don’t say that Greg Anderson didn’t offer a fair warning. He just didn’t allude that he’d be the one the competition had better look out for. 

After running a 6.536 to take the provisional top spot, Anderson counseled, “It’s not safe, and we’re going to have to come out and give it all we got tomorrow to get those three points and try and keep that pole.”

Anderson upped the ante with a 6.519 in Saturday’s Q3 session at the NHRA Midwest Nationals outside of St. Louis, Mo. 

​In baseball, there’s a term called an upper deck shot. An upper deck shot is when a batter hits a baseball as far as possible without going entirely out of the stadium. 

When it comes to Top Fuel racer Mike Salinas Friday night during the opening qualifying session at the NHRA Midwest Nationals, upper deck shot seems such an inadequate description. 

Consider Funny Car racer Ron Capps to be the reluctant No. 1 qualifier.

Capps, who ran a 3.888-second elapsed time at 332.59 miles per hour to secure the provisional No. 1 spot at the NHRA Midwest Nationals, is grateful for the top spot, but given his druthers would have been satisfied with being second on the qualifying sheet. 

One might think Greg Anderson wants to win the NHRA Midwest Nationals to secure his place in drag racing history as the winningest driver in the Pro Stock division. 
 
And one might be wrong. 

Veteran motorsports writer and nitro crew guy Brad Littlefield said it best. 

On his Twitter feed, the son of the supercharger expert Mert Littlefield wrote, “Godspeed Chris Vandergriff. Thank you for always being a kind, fun, generous dude. The lights dimming at the PRI Show meant it was time to beeline to the Hedman Hedders booth and watch you hold court.”

In one post, Littlefield said what thousands of Chris Vandergriff’s friends were thinking following his unexpected death following complications from a major heart attack on September 21, 2021. He was 51 years old. 

On Wednesday at the NHRA U.S. Nationals, long before any nitro or Pro Stock vehicles have either unloaded or even arrived, the Stock and Super Stock community prepares for the annual ritual of determining whose car is the best in class.

Following the pandemic-shortened format of 2020, the 2021 event returned to a bit of normalcy with the Class Eliminations format. With the event shortened by a day, the battle for class was moved up a day to Wednesday.

In this video feature, you see the sights and sounds of the A/Stock Automatic classification, the top of the food chain for the traditional Stockers dating back to the 1960s.