ENGLISHTOWN, N.J. — If the average man wrecks his car, he might not get it back from the repair shop for several months, not to mention be inundated with insurance red tape and aggravating paperwork.
But National Hot Rod Ass’n driver Tommy Johnson, Jr. knows his Skoal Racing Funny Car can burn to the ground, be rebuilt in 75 minutes and perform better than before.
It’s a phenomenon drag-racing fans take for granted. But even to the Old Bridge Township Raceway Park fans at Sunday’s final eliminations of the ProCare Rx SuperNationals, what crew chief Mike Green and his mechanics did with Johnson’s Chevy Impala SS after a first-round inferno was nothing short of astonishing.
“It caught me off guard. Usually there’s a warning and you’ll hear the motor going away, or something like that,” Johnson said after riding out his flaming pass against Gary Densham. “I had to pedal it, which is a cardinal sin in a Funny Car on the top end, but I pedaled it and it took off, and I thought, ‘This is going to be all right.’ Our car just doesn’t blow up. We haven’t oiled the track in three years, but all of sudden, out of nowhere, before the lights, no warning at all, it just ... ka-boom! I saw a little fire, threw the chutes, grabbed the fire bottles, but it didn’t want to die.
“Then the smoke started, and I . . . decided it was time to get out. Finally I said, ‘OK, — it’s getting a little warm, getting a little smoky, can’t see, lock ’em up, let’s get out of here.’” He said he knew that at that time that “the body’s pretty bad” — he climbed out through the escape hatch in the roof and ran around in front to lift the body. When he did, a wall of thick, dirty smoke roared out and the body collapsed. But Johnson said he had confidence “the rest of that stuff can be replaced with some new computer cables and a new body. We’ll be ready to go.”
And he was, eliminating Jack Beckman with a 4.914-second pass that was the low elapsed time of the day. He beat Jeff Arend to advance to the final, where he defeated Tony Pedregon.
Johnson said the fire “was hard to take after the first round, because we were the No. 1 qualifier, finally got the thing running and we had to rebuild it in 75 minutes. To take such a good running car and do that can completely mess up your combination, so it was a little disheartening,” he said.
 “To then come out second round and run low e.t. of eliminations after burning the car to the ground in the first round was amazing,” he said. “When I saw them loading the car on a flat bed on the end of the track I was pretty nervous, but midway through the process, I thought we were going to be OK. “I told Snake (team-owner Don Prudhomme) I couldn’t let the guys down after all that work.
“To show how good the guys are on this team,” he said, “we fired up our car before one of the other Funny Cars did that round. That was how fast the guys worked and how good of a job they did. Mike Green, Scott French, they got their act together. We’re back on track.”
In the end, he said, “This trophy is for the guys on my team. They earned it the hard way. All year we’ve been struggling and they’ve been working, but today, I put them to the test and they delivered.”
Johnson said when he qualified No. 1, “I feel like Rocky Balboa. I’ve taken every big body blow” and sloughed off each one. He took another in the first round Sunday, but nobody could so much as stagger him.
 And Dixon, who has nearly more victories than anyone who ever has raced a Top Fuel dragster, said he was proud to be Johnson’s teammate.
“It was nice to win on the same day as Tommy . . . What those guys did . . . I’m just proud to be part of it. He drove his tail off. He won first round on his driving. He won in the semis on his driving. To be able to close the deal, I felt great for him. There isn’t anything that ain’t cool about winning.”
Except maybe being on fire.