Hot Rod Takes Out Troxel In $100,000 Top Fuel Shootout

LAS VEGAS — Hot Rod Fuller earned $100,000 for his David Powers Motorsports team Saturday by winning the Technicoat Shootout bonus race for the Top Fuel class during the National Hot Rod Ass’n’s ACDelco Nationals.
And the Las Vegas resident nearly doubled the jackpot Sunday by winning the event’s Top Fuel trophy and collecting a $50,000 “double-up bonus” from the sanctioning body along with the $40,000 winner’s share of the purse.
Even so, the Caterpillar Dragster driver said he still thinks of himself as a “little Super Comp guy from Northwest Arkansas.”
He would be happy to follow the footsteps of dad Bob, who recently won the Division 5 Super Comp championship. But Hot Rod Fuller no longer is a sportsman-level racer. Stepping up to the headliner class hasn’t been comfortable in any sense. But he took a major step toward some feeling of security when he defeated Melanie Troxel in the final round of the specialty race that showcases the top eight qualifiers from the previous 12-month period.

MONEY MAKER: Rod Fuller celebrates his $100,000 Top Fuel Technicoat Shootout victory Saturday in Las Vegas, Nev. (David Allio Photo)

Then he beat Doug Kalitta to open a 52-point lead on closest rival Larry Dixon and a 61-point margin over No. 3 Brandon Bernstein. Reigning champion Tony Schumacher’s bid for a fifth series crown seems remote now, as he’s 167 points behind Fuller.
In the Technicoat Shootout, Fuller recorded a 4.527-second elapsed time at 329.99 miles per hour to cool off the red-hot Troxel, who isn’t in Countdown contention but is posting impressive speeds, including the weekend-best 331.53 mph. She countered in the Shootout final with a 4.526/326.40 in the Vietnam Veterans/POW MIA Dragster.
Troxel lost to Tony Schumacher in the semifinals but was reinstated when he failed to go through tech inspection afterward.
Fuller said the recent success, though nothing he didn’t predict for himself, is humbling. He said that’s because “this a dream I’ve had since I was a little kid. I grew up pretty modest, from a hard-working family. My dad worked hard, and my mom worked hard. And I worked hard to get where I’m at today. When stuff like this happens, I feel so lucky.”
He also feels the pinch of reality.
“Definitely financially, it’s been a really hard year. But I believe in our race team. And it has been just as hard for David Powers.
“I’ve been one of those kind of people that everything in life for some reason hasn’t come easy,” Fuller said. “I grew up hard. My dad worked his tail off to provide for us, and I owe him my life. Nothing has ever come to me on a silver platter. But I almost like that. When you win something like this, when you accomplish something like this, it makes it all better.”
The Shootout appearance was Fuller’s second. He lost to Kalitta last year in the final round. He had a significant lead before a crankshaft broke. So he made up for it all the way around, winning the bonus race and beating Kalitta in the eliminations final the next day.
“This was one of those dream-come-true races,” Fuller said of the Shootout, which awarded a Cowboy-sculpture trophy that weighs 80 pounds, almost exactly half of his body weight.
It was sweet vindication for the driver who has been teased a bit by his colleagues.
“A couple of races ago, we weren’t running that good,” Fuller said, “and one of my competitors said, ‘You’re like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight.’ And I said, ‘Good thing I live on the West Coast, because it ain’t midnight on the West Coast.’”