TOPEKA, Kan. — Pro Stock winner Ron Krisher, who won Sunday’s Pro Stock final at Heartland Park Topeka, said not to pay any attention to the fact that he waited 111 races between victories.  
“If I ever came out here with the thought I’d never win again, then I’d quit,” Krisher said. “We’ve won this one, and we’re going to win some more this year, you wait and see.”
The Valvoline Chevy Cobalt driver’s previous victory came at St. Louis in June 2003, and his last final-round appearance was last July at Denver.
“We won here at Topeka a long time ago (2001), and we have a lot of respect for this race track,” Krisher said. “I think we know a lot about how to race it. We have a good crew chief (Tommy Utt), good people, good sponsors, Valvoline, Chevrolet — you can’t beat them. They’ve been with me a long time, and I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate them for staying with me through the drought. But we’re over it. Nobody beat us out there today — we took every round.”
 
• John Force and daughter Ashley met again, this time in the first round. After he defeated her with a holeshot with a victory margin of just .0119 second, she said, “Good for him. He has the energy today. I don’t — I’m sick.”
Eventual winner Force, who reacted to news Saturday that he would face Ashley by saying, “Bring ’er on!” said after that first run, “I told Ashley today, ‘I’m gonna go after you, baby.’ At the end of the day, winning is what it’s all about. I know every driver says that, but when you’ve won like me, you begin to take it for granted. And then I got slapped (with the accident) and I don’t take it for granted no more.”
Force said he had debated about returning driver Phil Burkart, his fill-in after last September’s crash, to the seat of his Castrol GTX Ford Mustang.
“You watch these kids (his crew members) work around the clock and you think it just ain’t fair,” he said. “If you can’t deliver as a driver, it’s not fair to them (to stay in the seat) just ‘cause I own it.’”
He and crew chief Austin Coil debated whether to put Burkart back in the cockpit to give Force time to heal.
“Coil held me to a verbal contract we had,” Force said. “He said, ‘You always told me, Force, that if we go down, we go down together. If I suck, you’re staying with me and if you suck, I’m staying with you.’ So he said, ‘there ain’t nobody else driving this car but you, unless you just ain’t got the strength to get back in it.”

• John Force’s Mustang had trouble firing during warm-up for the final, but he said he knew what to do when it kept backfiring.
“We changed the mags. The cam was wrong in it. The timers were all screwed up. I couldn’t do anything about that, so I told them to go to work and I was going to go to Eric,” Force said. “Eric Medlen (his late teammate) always gets my heart right. He’s always with me. I know I’m beginning to sound like an ol’ preacher, but you been through my stuff, you get religion.”

• Frank Hawley drives a limited schedule and serves as consultant to the Mike Ashley-Melanie Troxel Funny Car team. But urgent business drew defending event-winner Ashley back to New York at the last minute Friday, and Hawley found out that he would substitute, arriving less than 20 minutes before making his first qualifying run in the Dodge Charger.
His experience showed, as he qualified third in the 16-car order and lost by a mere eight inches — 0.0015 second in the opening round to eventual runner-up and points leader Tim Wilkerson.
 
• Top Fuel runner-up Larry Dixon was No. 1 qualifier and drew a bye for his first-round run because the field was a car short at 15 entries. It was only the second time in Dixon’s 13-year dragster career that he had a solo pass.

• Joe Hartley, the Top Fuel class’s darkhorse low qualifier here last season, was No. 12 this year. But he continued to surprise, beating No. 5 Doug Kalitta in an opening-round thriller that saw both cars blow up. Kalitta’s came at about 400 feet down the quarter-mile, and Hartley’s was much later, allowing him to coast across the finish line first. Antron Brown and a loss of traction ended Hartley’s day in the quarterfinals.

• Pro Stock’s Greg Anderson’s 14-7 record this season and two victories in the first four races belie the recent frustration the one-time dominator has experienced recently. He lost the points lead he had regained at Bristol, Tenn. He got the jump on Kurt Johnson in the opening round, but faded and lost by about a foot. Johnson took the lead, and Anderson fell to third place.
“I don’t think I’ve been more puzzled. Apparently something’s wrong under the hood,” Anderson said. “We know we have the power. We just didn’t show it here.”

• Pro Stock rookie Rickie Jones is 21, class icon Warren Johnson 64. Jones had six races under his belt, WJ 532. Jones had one elimination round-win, WJ 846. Jones had no victories, WJ a class-record 96. But Jones cut a .009-second light to WJ’s more-than-respectable .045 reaction time and won on the holeshot. He ran a 6.772-second pass at 202.82 mph to WJ’s quicker and faster 6.741/205.44.