BROWN TAKES TOYOTA TO FINALS AT NHRA NEW ENGLAND NATIONALS
EPPING, NH –Toyota driver Antron Brown advanced to the Top Fuel finals before eventually falling to Steve 
Torrence at the NHRA New England Nationals in front of a sell-out crowd for the second consecutive day at the New England Dragway in Epping, New Hampshire, Sunday.
The final round was the first of the season for the three-time world champion as he ran a gauntlet of top drivers today. He defeated Clay Millican in round one, then knocked off reigning world champion Brittany Force in the second round with his best pass of the weekend – a 3.923-second run. That set up a semi-final against Don Schumacher Racing teammate and pole-sitter Leah Pritchett. Brown had a decided advantage at the tree (.058 to .071) on the way to winning on a hole-shot, 3.955-3.945.
In the final, Brown and Torrence left the light almost simultaneously, but Torrence was able to pull away to the victory, 3.909 to 3.948. Brown’s three best passes of the weekend came on his final three runs on Sunday.
“We’re taking one step at a time and we’re constantly getting better and better,” said Brown afterward. “Our car has been running well, we just needed to be in the right spot at the right time. We thought this was our weekend and we’re just bummed (after losing in the final). This entire Matco Tools/U.S. Army/Toyota team has just been working so hard together.
“We have the Western Swing coming up – Denver’s first and I’m just looking forward to getting back to the race track. Our team is coming together at the right time and by the time Indy comes up we’ll be hitting full swing. That’s our game plan. We had three good runs to close out the day, but we were trying to make them a little better. We just have to learn our bearings. We were able to pedal the car today in the first round and still go down the race track. We’ve got a lot of things that are positive that we’ll take out of today. We just need to keep focusing on that. We’re getting better and the other teams are seeing it. We just have to keep getting after it. We moved up to sixth today and our focus is just to keep picking away at the gap to fifth. That’s our goal to try to get into the top five. Then we’d like to see if we can move up to fourth before the Countdown.”
Both Kalitta Motorsports Toyota dragsters also won in the opening round today, before being eliminated in round two. Doug Kalitta registered a victory over Terry McMillen, but was knocked out by Leah Pritchett in the second round. Richie Crampton defeated Scott Palmer in a match with playoff implications in his first pass of the day. In round two he lost to Tony Schumacher.
In Funny Cars, Shawn Langdon had his best weekend since making the move from Top Fuel to Funny Cars after last season. Langdon registered a career Funny Car-best of third in qualifying on Saturday and then came back to advance to his fourth semi-final of the season today. Even more importantly, he registered strong passes in each of his runs today, defeating Jim Campbell in round one and then John Force in the second round before narrowly falling to Tim Wilkerson in the semi-finals.
“We’ve really done a good job the last couple of races of turning our Global Electronic Technology Toyota around and gaining consistency,” said Langdon, the 2013 Top Fuel world champion. “We’ve had a couple little gremlins that we’ve also worked out. Our test session at Norwalk really went well. I think it translated into what were able to accomplish this weekend. We have a Camry that can repeat and is consistent. We feel that now we have a pretty good base tune-up that can go off of. Today, we were able to make three great runs – 4.15, 4.13 and 4.14 and I think we’re in the ballgame now. I think if I can fine-tune my driving and we continue to fine-tune the set-up, we’re going to have a pretty bad hotrod.”
J.R. Todd lost a close match-up with Wilkerson in the first round, while Cruz Pedregon fell to Tommy Johnson Jr. in his opening run to round out the Toyota Funny Car contingent.
The Mello Yello Drag Racing Series is off next weekend and then heads to Denver, Colorado, July 20-22, for the opening round of the three-race Western Swing at Bandimere Speedway,
