Todd Makes Final Round Three Times With Three Different Crew Chiefs

By Susan Wade
NSSN Correspondent
TOPEKA, Kan. — Top Fuel’s J.R. Todd didn’t take home the Wally trophy or $40,000 Sunday in the National Hot Rod Ass’n’s O’Reilly Summer Nationals at Heartland Park Topeka.
But he does have the dubious distinction of reaching the final round three times this season with three different crew chiefs.
Todd began the season with a Winternationals victory and crew chief Jimmy Walsh. He bolted at the end of the next race to join Kenny Bernstein’s new and struggling Funny Car team.
 In came Johnny West, who had been with Bernstein’s team, and he stayed until the St. Louis race. That’s when he switched over to Clay Millican’s dragster in the Evan Knoll empire, making room for Kevin Poynter from the late Eric Medlen’s crew.

— Hot Rod Fuller said he’s “not disappointed about the weekend,” despite losing in the first round for only the third time this year and yielding the point lead to Brandon Bernstein.
“We raced smart all weekend long. That’s gotten us to the top, but it will get you sometimes,” he said after losing to Doug Kalitta, who had turned in the quickest and fastest lap of the round, a 4.549-second elapsed time at 325.85 miles per hour.
“If you average our reaction time in, we had the second-fastest package of the round other than Doug. It just wasn’t meant to be. We’re going to a track that we do really well at and it’s notorious for being fast. Today was just a matter of circumstances. It’s just part of racing.” Fuller, second in the standings, is winless at just two of the 21 tracks on the POWERade Drag Racing Series circuit — Heartland Park Topeka and Bandimere Speedway, near Denver.

— After underbudgeted underdog Joe Hartley, the surprise No. 1 qualifier in Top Fuel, smoked his tires immediately and lost in the opening round to Cory McClenathan, he said of his fortune, “It can only go up.”
However, he said, “We can’t get away from that No. 1 jinx.” Indeed, none of the class’s top qualifiers this year has won a race. The only nitro driver to win from the top of the order this year is Funny Car’s Gary Scelzi — and he did it at the season opener at Pomona, Calif.  In Pro Stock, the scenario is different. Three of Greg Anderson’s four victories in the first seven races have come from the No. 1 position.
 
— Morgan Lucas certainly is looking back fondly at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It was the only venue this year at which he has advanced past the first round in eight races. When he lost power Sunday against a tire-smoking Dave Grubnic, it thwarted any hopes of a big rebound from his two-consecutive DNQs. Lucas was a semifinal finisher at Las Vegas.   

— Tony Schumacher broke a string of four round-one defeats, beating Scott Palmer to open his day in the U.S. Army Dragster. This time he made it to the Top Fuel semifinals, where Brandon Bernstein won with a 4.566-second run at 319.52 mph against Schumacher’s 4.589/324.20 mph.
“It was a close race, and we just came up short at the finish line. We had our sights set on winning the race, for sure,” Schumacher said, “but I believe we took some major steps here today. We were able to get down a very challenging track with some consistency. That’s something we haven’t been doing of late. Overall, I believe this can be considered a get-well weekend for the U.S. Army team.”

— Funny Car point-leader Ron Capps failed to qualify at Heartland Park Topeka, breaking his streak of 55 races dating back to the fall Chicago race in 2004. Top qualifier Robert Hight, after turning in what he called “our best qualifying effort this year,” inherited the Funny Car class’s longest current streak at 53 events.
Hight is second in the standings.
“You can have a [bad] weekend for much worse reasons,” Capps said. “You know, John Force’s team and Robert Hight, who is second in points coming in here, missed a race. And there’s been the biggest names in the sport that have not qualified this year. Including THE biggest name in the sport [John Force, at Las Vegas]. So, yeah, it felt like somebody hit you with a baseball bat. But, honest to God, from the heart, it does not knock any of the confidence I have in our team.
“We made a decision to front-half our car prior to this race because of the Bristol postponement and the grueling six-race swing. We’ve run this car for some time. We’ve gone to a lot of final rounds and put a lot of runs on the car. And Ace (McCulloch) has a plan for everything he does. We’re behind him no matter what he does,” Capps said.

— Tom Hammonds’s Chevy Cobalt broke off the line in his first-round Pro Stock race against Richie Stevens, but Stevens had a red-light disqualification by three-thousandths of a second to hand Hammonds the victory.
But Hammonds jumped the gun in the second round and gave Greg Anderson a free pass to the semifinals.