JOLIET, Ill. — A full moon didn’t hang in the sky. But something in the cosmos must have been out of whack this past weekend.
The National Hot Rod Ass’n’s Torco Racing Fuels Route 66 Nationals featured plenty of results that just didn’t seem quite right.
Three of the top eight in the Top Fuel standings, including leader Brandon Bernstein, missed the lineup. Bernstein, who had captured the point lead from Rod Fuller with his Topeka victory in the Budweiser/Lucas Oil dragster the previous weekend, missed out by one-thousandth of a second. Another thousandth back was Whit Bazemore, who qualified in the top half of the field in seven of the previous eight races.
Both nitro winners from Topeka failed to qualify. So did Funny Car’s Mike Ashley. Morgan Lucas missed another Top Fuel lineup, with his third DNQ since a crew-chief change and third in the past four events.
Robert Hight, No. 2 in the Funny Car standings, couldn’t get his normally dominant Auto Club Ford Mustang in the field and took the first DNQ blemish on his record.
That left top-qualifier Gary Scelzi with the longest active qualifying streak in the class — at a relatively undistinguished 28. And Scelzi, though he was low qualifier with a 4.736-second pass and the class-best speed of 330.96 miles per hour in the Mopar/Oakley Charger, said the Route 66 Raceway surface was not in its usual superior shape.
“Something’s going on here that’s not consistent. We need to fix it, and we need to fix it now. Someone needs to start looking, and they need to start looking yesterday,” Scelzi said.
“We can win. I just don’t like not knowing what we’re coming up against. It’s a crapshoot, and I don’t like racing that way. It’s always an educated guess, but this time it’s a gamble.
“NHRA needs to bring back Chad Head. There — I said it.”
(Head, son of Funny Car privateer Jim Head, is the Indy Racing League’s manager of operations.)
In one of Saturday’s qualifying sessions, low-budgeted part-time racer Luigi Novelli had the quickest elapsed time of the round — and he wasn’t qualified.
For the first time in 54 races, not a single John Force Racing Castrol Ford Mustang Funny Car advanced to the second round.
“I believe you make your own luck,” said Force, who’s 17th in points. “But it seems like you’d win a round every now and then just by accident. It’s all about consistency. When you have it, you win championships. When you don’t, you don’t.”
And some drivers got tough with their cars. Warren Johnson, the so-called Professor of Pro Stock, said, “We’ll just keep beating and banging on this GM Performance Parts GTO, knowing that sooner or later, it will come to its senses.”
Funny Car leader Ron Capps’s rebound from his DNQ at Topeka started with him hugging crew chief Ace McCulloch Friday night.
“Just qualifying is a major, major feat. We were real worried,” Capps said. “We didn’t say so last week. We did have a new chassis, but we didn’t want to blame it on that, so we were a little apprehensive. And I’ve never seen Ace as nervous as he was Friday before the first run. I gave him a hug Friday night. I knew he felt better after that run Friday night.”
 Maybe the whole season has been wacky. Or, as driver Dave Grubnic, one of the Top Fuel notables not to qualify, said, “It is one of the most bizarre seasons I’ve ever seen, and we’re not even halfway through.”
Scelzi is the only nitro-car driver who has won from the No. 1 slot. He did it Sunday and at the season-opener in February.
His teammate, Jack Beckman, said the upcoming schedule “is the acid test, this next six-race swing after this weekend. Can’t wait.”
Same here.