Tony Schumacher has been known to weave his magic, doing the improbable and maybe the impossible at the most implausible times. 

And his winning Top Fuel performance Sunday in the Flav-R-Pac Northwest Nationals at Pacific Raceways, near Seattle, was no different.

He had to win a race and set the national elapsed-time record in the process to win a championship in 2006. Fat chance, most said. But Schumacher did it. What’s more, he mastered similar circumstances the flowing year and surprised everyone again.

A crew chief would leave and take the entire team with him. Schumacher rebounded to win a championship with yet another group. 

He even defies the odds off the dragstrip.  In 2009, Schumacher won the championship again and chose to present his trophy to the U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Hood. But at the ceremony, he had to follow a NASA astronaut who was giving the base an American flag that flew atop the International Space Station.  How could a drag racer compete with that? Schumacher didn’t compete. The astronaut turned out to be no competition. As soon as Schumacher stepped to the podium there at Killeen, Texas, before he even spoke the first word, the crowd – his faithful U.S. Army Dragster followers – broke into wild cheering and chanting that the astronaut never came close to receiving.

t's that Tony Schumacher touch. And he applied it Sunday in the Okuma Dragster. With new team principal owner Joe Maynard watching from the starting line and co-owner wife Cathi Maynard following from home at Clarksville, Tenn., Schumacher turned four rather ugly runs into one of his most beautiful victories on the Pacific raceways 1,000-foot course. 

It erased any stigma of his 5-12 record that saw him outside of the top 10 in the standings, thanks lately to five first-round losses in his most recent races. What’s more, he turned around his luck against Brittany Force, the fiercest competitor in the class all season long. 

Schumacher posted a pair of unglamorous 3.8-second elapsed times to eliminate Scott Palmer and Shawn Langdon. He lost traction, battled dropped cylinders, and used a 4.48-second pedal job to defeat an equally challenged Justin Ashley in the semifinal round. Against Force, who smoked the tires early in her run, Schumacher also lost traction and coasted across the finish line with parachutes flying and a 3.977-second, 251.34-mph flashing unspectacularly on the scoreboard. 

But it worked. He won. His crew members, many of whom he said never had touched a Wally trophy and are totally new to all of this Camping World Drag Racing Series rat race, finally got to see their grinding work pay off. 

Schumacher remains the most successful Top Fuel driver in history, and this 86th victory simply extended his record. It also was his fifth at Seattle (after success in 2004 and 2006-08). And it pushed the eight-time series champion past Pro Stock legend Bob Glidden and made Schumacher the fourth-most successful racer in NHRA history, after John Force (155 victories), Greg Anderson (99), and Warren Johnson (97). 

What made this triumph truly special for Schumacher was that it was his first since the Houston race in the fall of 2020 – and that it capped the Western Swing and punctuated the first race with the Maynards as majority owners of the newly branded Maynard Family Racing / Don Schumacher Racing. 

He shared the winners circle in his 525th race with first-time Pro Stock winner Troy Coughlin Jr. and six-time 2022 winner Robert Hight.   

“I think I bought a winner. Cathi and I don’t have any doubt this is winning team. It just hadn’t started yet,” Joe Maynard said. “We think it started today, and we plan on it staying this way for a long time. We’ve got the best that’s ever been, so I’m going to go with that.” 

And that’s the Schumacher magic in action. 

“Coming into this race, we found ourselves 12th in points, 100 points out of the top 10,” Schumacher said. “And you get down to where there’s four races left before the playoffs start, and you’ve got to perform. 

“Early numbers have been destroying us, and we’ve been having a hard time. Made a big change, obviously, and I think we really started to make it probably in Denver. Bent a car, cut it off, have to take a spare car out. We just had a lot of awful luck. Things go right when you think you’re heading in the right direction,” he said. “This was perfect timing. Joe and Cathi Maynard buy the team with my dad, we got a group of people that are excited, it’s new, come out and qualify third. It’s the first time we earned a point. Now, I think we got three but that first run, a point, we haven’t got a point all year. 

“I’ve been doing this a long time. I know that there’s ebbs and flows,” Schumacher said. “The guys weren’t making mistakes. Things were happening, and you can look back and go, ‘I wish we didn’t do that. I wish we didn’t do this.’ But you can’t point fingers. This is a new group of people. A lot of them have never won a race before. They’re giving everything: their heart, their soul, their sweat. Some of these guys, they’re just broken. They’ve never been on the road. They’ve never been away from their family. And we’re asking them three races in a row and now we’ll go from here to Scag to do their picnic, then we have Topeka, Brainerd testing, Indy, so it’s hard on these guys. I get it. 

“The worst thing in the world, I think, for me, as a leader, is to put that kind of pressure on them when they don’t need it. They are doing their best,” he said. “I put pressure on myself, and I will take the blame for an awful lot of things in the car where I’ll get out and say, ‘That was on me.’ Let it be on me, because I can take it. I’ve been doing this a long time.’ I think over the course of a year, over the years we work together as a team, they will grow to respect the fact that the blame is not getting pushed on them, because they are going to make mistakes.” 

As the tour heads to Topeka for the Aug. 12-14 Menards NHRA Nationals at Heartland Park, Force still leads the standings and Schumacher is inching toward a spot in the top 10. He improved from 12th to 11th and is within 10 points of No. 10-ranked Clay Millican. 

Force said, “We had an awesome weekend. We qualified No. 1 and had a final-round appearance. We stayed in the points lead, and that’s the most important thing.” 

It all happened on a day in which seven of the top 10 drivers were ousted by the second round.

“We went out today and got that first-round win, and we were excited. And you look at that ladder and you’ve got Justin Ashley, [Shawn] Langdon, Brittany [Force], and it’s like, what are you kidding me? This was not an easy one, by any means. These guys are all great. They’re excellent on the starting line, and they all had lane choice. Brittany’s car right now is by far second to none So, to be able to go out there today and have a race day like we had, it’s just exciting,” Schumacher said. 

“It’s good for the sport, it’s good for Joe and Cathi Maynard, and it was good for my guys. It’s a tough sport. You’ve got to be able to overcome adversity. And when you have days like today, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.”