An Early Exit and a Near-Miss at Sonoma

Schumacher Out in First-Round, Fellow U.S. Army Driver Brown Reaches Final

It was another up-and-down day for the U.S. Army duo of Tony “The Sarge” Schumacher and Antron Brown during Sunday’s elimination rounds of this weekend’s 30th annual Toyota NHRA Sonoma Nationals.

Schumacher and his U.S. Army Dragster for Don Schumacher Racing (DSR), who qualified No. 5, dropped his opening-round matchup against No. 12 Scott Palmer Sunday, one week after showing signs of breaking out of the Army team’s recent struggles by reaching the Top Fuel semifinals in the Mopar Mile-High NHRA Nationals in Colorado. Schumacher smoked his tires at the starting line and coasted down the track in 8.417 seconds at 79.45 mph while Palmer’s modest run of 3.871 seconds at 312.58 mph earned him his fifth round win in 15 events this season.

“I can’t give the most detailed answer on this, but something is definitely wrong,” said the eight-time Top Fuel world champion who is a two-time event titlist and four-time runner-up at Sonoma. “What we have is not a simple adjustment thing, but they’ll fix it. Every time we go through this, we change something and it goes down the racetrack. Something just isn’t right. I can’t even guess at it because right now the crew chiefs can’t even guess at it. It’s something they’ll ponder over the next day or so and make changes and we’ll go to Seattle and go down the racetrack. That’s why we have great people on this U.S. Army team. They can look at stuff and evaluate it and make decisions. I had a good light, did my job, staged the car right. There just isn’t any way to win something like that. This just wasn’t our day. We’ll go on to Seattle, where we’ve had a lot more success than we’ve had at these first two races of the Western Swing combined.”

Brown, meanwhile, was looking for his second consecutive event title and the fifth of his career at Sonoma after he and his Matco Tools/U.S. Army Dragster for DSR hoisted the Wally trophy in the kickoff event of this year’s three-event Western Swing at Bandimere Speedway in the Denver suburb of Morrison, Colorado.

From his No. 4 qualifying position, he opened with a strong run of 3.763 seconds at 327.19 mph to beat No. 13 qualifier Troy Buff, who red-lighted at the starting line. That set up his second-round matchup against Palmer, who he disposed of with a run of 3.783 seconds at 326.24 mph. Palmer crossed the finish line in 3.839 seconds at 324.98 mph.

Brown’s unlikely opponent in the semifinal was No. 9 qualifier Terry McMillen, who upset No. 1 qualifier Leah Pritchett in the second round. Brown got down the track in 3.792 seconds at 325.37 mph to easily beat the tire-smoking McMillen and earn his sixth final-round appearance in the last events and his eighth final of the season. The opponent was Top Fuel points leader Steve Torrence, who Brown beat the first two times they met this season, including the final round at Heartland Park Topeka in Kansas in May but had lost to in consecutive final rounds at Englishtown, New Jersey and Chicago.

Torrence made a clean run down the track today in 3.784 seconds at 329.42 mph while Brown’s racecar began dropping cylinders at halftrack and crossed the finish line in 3.974 seconds at 281.83 mph. It was Torrence’s sixth event title of the season and the 14th of his career.

“We’re having a great (Western) Swing,” said Brown, the two-time-defending and three-time overall Top Fuel champion. “We would have liked to have won here and kept the sweep going but, getting the runner-up, we can’t hang our heads. This week, we started off a little rough on Saturday but we still had a great qualifying – we qualified No. 4. Going into race day today, our Matco Tools/U.S. Army boys were steady, smooth and consistent. We just did what we needed to do to win each round. In the final, we thought we had to step up there but, at the step of the throttle, we had an ignition problem where the car was literally operating not even on the full ignition system because we had no power. Then it lost a hole going down the racetrack while Steve (Torrence) and those boys did what they needed to do to win, so hats off to them. We’re looking forward to getting to Seattle. We’ve got one more race in the Swing. We want to give it all we’ve got. And hopefully we can take it one round at a time. We love winning here at Sonoma and that hurt bad losing that final round. They’re definitely the car and the team to beat this year, but we’re not done, yet. We’re just getting warmed up, just getting started. We’ve been to eight finals this year and six of those in the last eight races, so we just want to keep the momentum going and to where we want to be.”