UPDATE – 130 pm –Just moments before the race was to resume, the power to Gainesville Raceway, the power at the track went out.
Rain might have been the most merciful thing that could have happened with two pairs of Top Fuel cars remaining to run in the first round of eliminations at the NHRA Gatornationals on Sunday.
After six races, all resulting in tire smoke, the combination of a crash by Trip Tatum and forecasted rain arriving put the day’s activities on hold for now.
Just getting in any racing following the weather forecast delivered on Saturday was a significant accomplishment in itself. As much as an 80-percent chance of rain existed for Sunday’s scheduled start time of 11 AM.
NHRA moved up the start time to 9:30 AM, which would have been 8:30 on Saturday, thanks to Daylight Savings Time.
There’s a saying that suggests that no good deed goes unpunished.
Such was the case on Sunday as the first pair produced a double smoker, which Clay Millican won with an off-pace 4.365 over Josh Hart.
How ironic it was that the driver, whose nickname is Smoke, was the only one who hadn’t experienced it. Tony Stewart delivered low elapsed time of the round with a 3.722, 329.91, to eliminate Brittany Force.
Then came the lane swaps with Shawn Langdon elected to move over to the right lane, but he, too, found the smoke but came up on the winning end when a quicker-reacting Justin Ashley threw in the towel.
Antron Brown swapped lanes with Krista Baldwin and smoked the tires with Baldwin. He won with a 4.664 elapsed time.
There was a total of 4 lane swaps in the first six pairs with none of them proving to be better than the other.
In a classic case of don’t ask a question if you are not prepared for the answer, a starting line announcer asked Brown’s crewchief Brian Corradi about the win.
“I have my personal thoughts on this thing,” Corradi said. “This could have been avoided by starting on this thing and dragging earlier and putting down some rubber because they know how to do. I don’t know what you want to call that, but I have a name.”
In a top-end interview shortly afterward, Shawn Langdon said that he saw rubber peeling up from the track.
Following Langdon’s interview, Trip Tatum lost control of his dragster and crashed into both walls in the next pair. The car continued down the track with the engine still under fire but eventually stopped in the shutdown area.
Then it began raining. NHRA’s Safety Safari is busy in the track, drying in an attempt to resume by 1:30 PM.
