J.R. Todd Also Fails To Qualify At O’Reilly Spring Nationals

BAYTOWN, Texas — Robert Hight, who led the Funny Car standings heading to Houston Raceway Park, was the most prominent of several drivers who failed to qualify here.
In the Top Fuel class, defending event champion J.R. Todd was last among the 19 entrants.
Alluding to the upcoming April 11-13 Summitracing.com Nationals at The Strip @ Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Hight said, “I hope we can make 15 (test) runs between now and Vegas. (Crew chief) Jimmy Prock and I are going to get this Auto Club Ford Mustang ready and we are going to test on Monday and maybe even Tuesday. We need a lot of runs, but we’ll be back.”
Todd grabbed the emotional victory here last year in honor of friend Eric Medlen just days after Medlen’s funeral. Said Todd of testing this week, “Maybe we’ll be No. 1 on Monday.”
Team leader Morgan Lucas said, “I promise everyone out there who is a fan of J.R. Todd or Morgan Lucas, we will get this problem worked out.”
Lucas, whose performance became progressively worse this season with a semifinal finish, then first-round loss and a failure to qualify, made a crew chief change midweek. He qualified 14th in the 16-car field, and lost again in the first round to Larry Dixon for the second time in as many meetings this young season.
Former crew chief Richard Hogan hooked up immediately as co-tuner with Jon Oberhofer on the Mac Tools Dragster that Doug Kalitta drives, and helped Kalitta to his best showing this year, a semifinal finish. John Stewart has taken on crew chief duties for both Todd and Lucas.
“I got to give credit to John Stewart for handling all the pressure really well,” Lucas said. “We’re going to work this out and lighten up his load a lot, but it’s going to take some time.”

• Former Top Fuel standout Melanie Troxel continues to struggle with her new Dodge Funny Car. After qualifying No. 3 and running top speed of the weekend at the season opener, she took her third straight DNQ.
“We have a combination of two things going on,” Troxel said. “One of them is a rookie driver who still is trying to learn some things on the car, learn what I should be doing and what I shouldn’t be doing and how I like the car set up.
“And on the other side, it’s the car. We’ve really struggled with the change they made over the winter to the weight in the cars and probably the nitro percentage a little bit, so it’s a combination of the two things. We struggle with the tune-up, and then when we do get one pass that’s good enough to get qualified, I haven’t been getting the job done.”

• Ron Capps hasn’t won a round yet this year in his NAPA Auto Parts Dodge Charger, and the No. 5 qualifier said what bugged him more than anything was the notion that his 4.953-second run against Tim Wilkerson “would have won a lot of other rounds.”
Said Capps, “This morning, Ace (crew chief Ed McCulloch) was Captain Intensity. He might as well have had a blue-and-yellow cape on. He was like, ‘You know what, it’s right in front of me. I’ve been missing it.’ And he changed everything completely around in the clutch department, which is a big, big move.
“John Force for years has put up with the fact that guys go up there and treat you like you’re the San Antonio basketball team. They are the champs and everybody is wanting to beat them. And they’re going to have their A game, so you have to go to bat every time with your A game. And people are really getting up to race us. It’s a great thing, but when you look at the ladder it hurts to see that guys were winning with six-second runs and smoking the tires, and here we ran 4.95 and the car was very safe.
“We went down the track. We didn’t beat ourselves,” he said. “It’s hard to hold your head up when you lose, but we have a great race car. And I’m very confident.”
He’s 15th in the standings.

• Reigning FIA Top Fuel champion Urs Erbacher of Switzerland became the first foreign Top Fuel driver since England’s Clive Skelton in 1978 to win an elimination round victory in NHRA competition. Erbacher was the beneficiary of top qualifier Alan Bradshaw’s red-light foul in the first round but lost to Doug Kalitta in the quarterfinals.
In the process, he oiled the track twice, and that cost him a total of $13,000 in fines for the weekend and 35 driver points. “We came over here to test and prepare for the defense of our FIA title,” Erbacher said, “but I think we’re proving a little more now. There are many multi-million dollar teams that were not qualified to race today, so the fact we even made the show at this level of competition was good. The car is still in need of more work and testing, but we are very pleased to get this round win today and to show our friends in Texas some good European-style drag racing.”
Crew chief Wayne Dupuy and assistant Jeff Twitchell, both Americans, have worked with  teams from Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Britain. The Las Vegas event will be Erbacher’s last in the U.S. this year.

• Pro Stock champion Jeg Coughlin’s red-light disqualification in round two against Allen Johnson gave away an easy victory, for Johnson’s Dodge had broken. But it also cost him the point lead.
Winner Greg Anderson, who led after the first two races of the season but lost the advantage to Coughlin at the previous race, reclaimed it. The red light was just the ninth in Coughlin’s career.

• Doug Herbert said before his second-round Top Fuel match-up with the red-hot Tony Schumacher that one of his sons once told the U.S. Army Dragster driver (whom some call “The Sarge”) “that he couldn’t carry a real sergeants’ lunch box.”
Herbert did defeat Schumacher in his quest to claim the first victory of his “For My Boys Tour,” but Herbert ran immediately to Schumacher and shook hands with him after jumping from his dragster.