DSR ready for Maple Grove!
– Antron Brown will be racing for a cause this weekend at Maple Grove Raceway and fighting for a chance to defend his NHRA Top Fuel world championship.
For the second consecutive year, his Don Schumacher Racing dragster will be wrapped in pink and black to help the Matco Tools’ “Tools for the Cause” campaign benefitting the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation to raise money and awareness for the fight against breast cancer.
And for the second straight year, Brown hopes that his trip to Maple Grove can at least be as good as the one last year and maybe a little better.
He needs all the points he can muster. The Matco Tools for the Cause team will arrive at Maple Grove ranked sixth in points and 102 out of first place with three events remaining in the six-race Countdown to the Championship playoff.
“Our goal from here on out is to go to every race like it is the last race out here, and we are going to push really hard,” he said after winning the title Sunday at Gateway Motorsports Park near St. Louis.
“We want to qualify in the top half of the field at Reading and then we’re just going to take it one round at a time. If we can creep up to gain some points here and there we can go into the last race at Pomona (Calif.) with a shot, and that’s all we want.”
After winning two of this season’s first seven events with crew chiefs Brian Corradi and Mark Oswald, the Matco team went into a slump. Before winning Sunday, Brown had lost in the first round at four of the eight previous events and did not qualify for another.
But the team produced one of its best weekends of the year. Brown qualified sixth with a time of 3.796 seconds and defeated three Countdown contenders – Clay Millican, DSR teammate Tony Schumacher and Khalid alBalooshi – en route to his 40th NHRA title. The Matco dragster ran in the 3.7-second range twice on Sunday including a 3.788 to beat alBalooshi in the final. Brown also surpassed 320 mph on each run in eliminations.
“We have been working our tails off, and it has been no secret that we have been struggling a lot more than what we hoped to,” Brown said after his third win this season. “We hoped we could have had it turned around a little bit sooner, but we are not going to go out without a fight.”
– Jack Beckman is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force but he’s in the midst of a march that would make any foot soldier proud.
While he continues his battle to win the first NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series title of this season for Don Schumacher Racing’s Odyssey Battery team, his aim is focused on defending his 2012 Funny Car world championship.
When Beckman arrived at Gateway Motorsports Park near St. Louis last weekend for the third event of the Countdown to the Championship he was ranked sixth in the standings and trailed points leader and DSR teammate Matt Hagan by 102 points.
But along with crew chiefs Todd Smith, assistant Terry Snyder and the Odyssey team, Beckman advanced to the championship round and eliminated Hagan in the second round.
That moved Beckman to third in points and narrowed the gap between him and the lead to 44 points.
“Had Hagan beat us at Gateway and won nothing more than that we would be 104 behind him going to Reading,” Beckman said of this weekend’s event at Maple Grove Raceway near Reading, Pa. “You do not want to be five rounds out with 12 rounds to go.
“When people say there are 12 rounds left it’s not like baseball and there are 12 games left; in our sport, if you lose in the second round of a race you just lost three rounds because you can’t get to the semis or final.”
It was the second consecutive event when Beckman took out Hagan in the second round.
“After Reading there will only be the potential of eight rounds of racing left. You better be within two rounds of the leaders if you want to win the championship.”
A year ago at Reading, Beckman started second in points and trailing DSR’s Ron Capps by 30. Beckman eliminated Capps in the second round en route to advancing to the semifinals. Beckman also earned 20 bonus points for setting the NHRA national record with a run of 3.986 seconds in opening round.
Beckman left Maple Grove with a 23-point lead over Capps and won the championship by a record two points.
“If we win this championship again then I’m going to probably say that St. Louis was the turning point,” said Beckman, who points to last year’s event at Maple Grove as his 2012 turning point. “We’re back to where we know what the car wants, and Todd and Terry are able to give it that.”
Beckman expects his year-old national record could be surpassed.
“When the track temperature is down in the low 80s and the track surface is good we can give it almost all the power it will handle out there. It can be the perfect convergence of conditions for us.”
But Beckman and his team plan to focus more on earning between one and three bonus points in each qualifying session that the record.
“Forget the national record and those 20 points, that run was the quickest in that session and worth three points and we won the championship by two points.”
– Spencer Massey and the Battery Extender Powered by Schumacher team are happy it’s a new week.
At last weekend’s NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series event, the Battery Extender team had an “off” weekend where they qualified No. 14 for the 16-car event at Gateway Motorsports Park and suffered a rare first-round loss.
After the event near St. Louis concluded, the team traveled back to Don Schumacher Racing headquarters near Indianapolis to hit the reset button before traveling to the fourth consecutive NHRA event this weekend at Maple Grove Raceway near Reading, Pa.
The Battery Extender dragster team has had success in the past at Maple Grove Raceway, including 2011 when they won the event title.
“I love going to Maple Grove,” Massey said. “It’s a great facility and it’s surrounded by trees and my dragster loves the air there. It’s about horsepower there and Phil (Shuler) and Todd (Okuhara) know how to make horsepower.”
The St. Louis event will be far from Massey’s mind when qualifying begins at 2 p.m. (ET) on Friday.
“We just had an off race last week,” he said. “We used some of our luck up that day because although we went out first round, we didn’t lose too much ground in the points chase. We are less than two rounds (33 points) behind (Shawn) Langdon and only two points back of No. 2 (Doug) Kalitta.
“We need to have a strong qualifying effort in Reading, get some bonus points and go rounds on Sunday. It’s that simple. We know what we have to do. We just can’t beat ourselves.
“I’ve said that all season long, and it’s winding down now. We can’t have mistakes from here on out. We have to turn on four win lights on Sunday to stay in this Countdown to the Championship fight. It’s tough. But it’s exciting. I love this part of the season. It’s what it’s all about.”
It isn’t an easy one, but one he wholeheartedly believes is within the reach of the NAPA Dodge Charger R/T team at Don Schumacher Racing.
“We have three races left, and we have to win all three,” said Capps, who has won three Mello Yello Series titles this year through 21 events and 41 in his career.
“Any team might say that, but what makes it fun for me to see is that our NAPA Dodge is very capable of doing that. That is something that not every driver can say. It’s a challenge and we’ve been posed challenges like this in the past.”
Capps ranks sixth in championship points midway through the six-event Countdown playoff and trails points leader and DSR teammate Matt Hagan by 111 points. That gap makes it a tougher row to hoe for Capps.
“We’ve seen drivers lose bigger points leads than we’re face with,” Capps said. “We are only worried about controlling what we can do.
“Our Funny Car category is as tough as it’s ever been. We’re confident we’re taking a car to Reading with a great chance to win, make up points and to try to set a record.”
An NHRA record for elapsed time pays a 20-point bonus for the driver able to leave the event with the new mark. A year ago, another DSR teammate, Jack Beckman, earned that 20-point bonus that went a long way toward him overtaking Capps for the 2012 Funny Car world championship by two points.
Beckman trailed Capps by 97 points with four Countdown events left while DSR’s Antron Brown was in the Top Fuel points lead by 104 after Reading. Beckman was able to edge past at the season-finale at Pomona, Calif., where Brown had to hang on to win his championship by seven points.
Capps said, “At Reading last year, we lost the points lead and left trailing Beckman by 23 points. We went to the next race at Vegas and had to win, and we did just that. Unfortunately, Beckman went to the final round with us so we only gained 20 points on him when we beat him.”
A year ago at Reading when championship eliminations were delayed by rain and cold from Sunday to Monday, Beckman set the national record with a time of 3.986 in the first round and advanced to the semifinal round. Capps conversely didn’t qualify for eliminations until his fourth and final run and then lost to Beckman in the second round of eliminations.
“We had a terrible weekend there last year, and it probably cost us the championship,” said Capps, who has advanced to the final round twice (1999, 2000) at Maple Grove but it is one of the few tracks where he has not won a title.
“The list is short. Maple Grove is one of the oldest tracks we go to and the fans are great, and I want to win there.
“When we drive through the gates at Maple Grove this week we know we will have to be near the top of the qualifying charts. Yes, we are more than 100 points out but stranger things have happened many times.”
