U.S. Army NHRA Racing 36th Annual NHRA Nationals at Brainerd Final Qualifying Report
The U.S. Army driver duo of Tony “The Sarge” Schumacher and Antron Brown locked down the fourth and seventh 
spots on the provisional ladder after the final two rounds of qualifying Saturday for this weekend’s 36th annual NHRA Nationals at Brainerd (Minn.) International Raceway.
Schumacher and his U.S. Army Dragster team for Don Schumacher Racing (DSR), who debuted their brand new racecar Friday by laying down the team’s best run since May, closed the weekend of qualifying Saturday with the second-best run of the final session – an effort of 3.779 seconds at 325.22 mph. Schumacher’s car spun the tires at halftrack in his first run today and crossed the finish line in 5.247 seconds at 132.87 mph. He’ll face No. 13 qualifier Troy Coughlin Jr., for the second event in a row in Sunday’s opening round of eliminations. Schumacher beat Coughlin in the first round at Pacific Raceways near Seattle two weeks ago to up his record career total of round wins to 799.
“It was a great run to finish the day with,” said Schumacher, who’s chasing his fourth career Brainerd event title this weekend. “That new car of ours just ran second-low and there’s all kinds of room in it. The new car is great. It’s only four runs in and we’re going for a big accomplishment tomorrow – our 800th round win, a big win here at Brainerd, a lot of things going on. Safe to say we’re heading to Indy (for the regular-season-ending U.S. Nationals) with a car capable of winning. I liked that last run a lot. That run was in conditions we’ll be facing tomorrow. We weren’t low for the session, but we were awfully close. I’m not going to talk about what’s different and new about this car, but safe to say that new iron wins races and we certainly hope that’s going to be the case here tomorrow.”
Brown and his Matco Tools/U.S. Army Dragster for DSR laid down the fastest run of today’s opening qualifying session, an effort of 3.749 seconds at 325.06 mph. He closed the day with an uncharacteristic tire-smoking episode at the starting line and coasted across the finish line in 14.245 seconds at 45.40 mph. Brown, will look to add to his lone Top Fuel event title at Brainerd and four Pro Stock Motorcycle wins here Sunday beginning with his first-round matchup against No. 10 qualifier Shawn Langdon.
“Q3 today, we knew what we were doing there and it was a nice run,” Brown said. “That last one, we were actually just trying something different getting ready for race day tomorrow. We’re still trying to assess what happened, but that was just uncharacteristic for what it did. We’ll use the first run we made today and go off of that for a good setup for tomorrow. Last night, we were on a 70-flat (3.70) run and just dropped a hole at halftrack. That’s why the speed was only 320. In hindsight, that was supposed to be a 3.70 flat to make sure we had a good spot in the show. But we still accomplished that in No. 7, so we’ll have lane choice, we’ll pick our battles. Brainerd has always been good to us, so we’ll see if it’ll be good to us one more time tomorrow. It’ll be like the track conditions we saw all day today. We’ll just keep trying to get better and better each time we go down the racetrack.”
Highlights from today’s qualifying action will be broadcast by FS1 at 10 EDT tonight. Elimination rounds are set for noon Sunday with live television coverage on FS1 beginning at 2 p.m.
