Pedregon Nearly Clinches Funny Car Title

LAS VEGAS — This weekend’s National Hot Rod Ass’n season finale was supposed to whip the drag racing world into a froth with the conclusion to the inaugural Countdown to One.
But the drama couldn’t wait.
Sunday’s ACDelco Nationals at The Strip @ Las Vegas Motor Speedway stole the show with winners Rod Fuller (Top Fuel), Tony Pedregon (Funny Car), Greg Anderson (Pro Stock) and Andrew Hines (Pro Stock Motorcycle).
Fuller won Saturday’s Technicoat Shootout specialty race and Sunday’s eliminations for a paycheck of $190,000 for his Caterpillar/David Powers Motorsports team. He regained the point lead and opened a 52-point margin over deposed Larry Dixon, as he denied Richmond winner Doug Kalitta a second-straight victory.
Pedregon all but locked up his second series championship, his first as an independent team owner, with his $40,000 victory over Ashley Force, who made NHRA Funny Car history as the first female to reach a final round.

BACK ON TOP: Greg Anderson retook the point lead when he defeated Jeg Coughlin to score his eighth Pro Stock victory this season. (David Allio Photo)

On the same track where he clinched his 2003 championship, Pedregon used a huge holeshot in his Q Horsepower Chevy Impala SS to nose Force by a half-car length. He passed Don Prudhomme for second place on the class’s career-victories list with 36.
All four Countdown drivers survived the first round in Top Fuel. Only winner Pedregon got past the opening assignment in Funny Car competition. And he got some help from brother and teammate Cruz Pedregon, who beat Gary Scelzi in round one and happened to smoke his tires against his younger brother in the semifinals.
“I would have been happy with a one round lead. It’s a huge luxury to have a 91-point lead, believe me,” Pedregon said. “But we won’t change our approach. We still need to go over to Pomona and qualify. No one has handed me a check yet.”
It was an emotional victory for Pedregon, whose earliest memory of Ashley Force was when she was a schoolgirl, selling candy and various products for school fundraisers at her father’s race shop, where Pedregon was a protégé of the Funny Car icon.

TEAM YELLOW: Jeg Coughlin (far lane) defeated Cagnazzi Racing teammate Dave Connolly. (AutoImagery.com Photo)

Pedregon said he had a “touching” word of encouragement from longtime racer/team owner Jim Dunn, which evoked memories of old-time drivers whose sacrifices were the subject of stories his own dad, Frank Pedregon, passed along to him and his brothers.
Robert Hight, third in the points entering Las Vegas, lost in the opening round to Jim Head after putting his Auto Club Ford Mustang at the top of the order with a 4.763-second e.t. at 322.58 miles per hour. New teammate Phil Burkart, subbing in the Castrol GTX Mustang for injured team owner John Force, beat No. 4 Countdown rival Ron Capps in round one.
“Tony Pedregon has pretty much clinched the deal, and now it will be a fight for second,” said Capps, a three-time runner-up who led the standings for most of this season. “This was a race we knew we had to do pretty good at, if not great, to go into Pomona and not have our backs against the wall. We didn’t get by that first round and it cost us.”
For Capps, it was added pressure, as Southern California wildfires forced his family to evacuate their home in Carlsbad days before.

EARLY OUT: First place qualifier Robert Hight lost in the first round to Jim Head and is now 99 points behind Tony Pedregon. (Ted Rossino Photo)

Ninety-one points separate Pedregon and No. 2 driver Gary Scelzi, Capps’s teammate at Don Schumacher Racing. However, all Pedregon needs to do at Pomona to clinch the championship is qualify. The only glimmer of hope Scelzi has is if he were to win the event, set a national record and watch Pedregon fail to qualify.
“We’re going to Pomona to try to set the record and who knows?” Scelzi said. “Pomona is a great race track. You can haul ass there. We’re going to go there and try to haul ass. We’re going to go there probably more aggressive than ever, because that’s what we need to do.”
The NHRA had designed the three-phase playoff format to keep the suspense until this weekend’s Auto Club of Southern California Finals at Pomona. But Hines, with his sensational 7.073-second, 187.34-mph final-round effort over No. 1 qualifier Chip Ellis, looks on-target for his fourth series title on his Screamin’ Eagle Vance & Hines Harley-Davidson as the closing event approaches.
That fifth victory gave him a 39-point edge over Ellis, who improved to second place. Ellis, riding the Drag Specialties S&S Buell, set low elapsed time of the meet in qualifying with his track-record 7.023-second pass at 189.60 mph, which held up as top speed.
In Pro Stock action, Cagnazzi Racing’s Jeg Coughlin ended teammate Dave Connolly’s sizzling streak of five victories in the quarterfinals. That might have dashed Connolly’s championship hopes — and exposed another flaw in the new Countdown format. Connolly had a 10-point lead before eliminations, but his early loss, coupled with Anderson’s victory, dropped him to third place, 48 off Anderson’s pace.
“That wasn’t the note we wanted to go out on,” Connolly said. “I thought we had the better car. I might have driven too conservative, and he [Coughlin] did a better job of getting down the track. It’s unfortunate it went down like this.”
Anderson’s performance in the resurgent Summit Pontiac GTO was the turnaround he was looking for.
“We just haven’t been A-No. 1 lately,” he said after beating Coughlin (6.731/205.04 to 6.771/204.39) for his eighth victory this year. “Dave Connolly’s been dominating this class, and everybody knows that. He was certainly the favorite coming in here. It’s been awhile since we’ve had to operate from the underdog role. We came here last week and tested for three days and made a lot of runs. I think that really was the key. The car was flawless today. The car won the race today. The driver held his own and the engine was so-so, but the car was it today.
“We couldn’t come in here and win the championship, but we certainly could come in here and lose it, and we didn’t want to do that,” Anderson said. “We kept ourselves in the game. I really didn’t like being the chaser. I’d rather be the chasee. That’s what we’ve been the last few years and I’d like to be that guy they’re all shooting for. The bigger the pressure, the better we seem to perform. I can’t imagine more pressure than what we had today.”