U.S. Army’s Brown Reaches Brainerd Final
Schumacher, Pritchett Out Early; Sarge Still Second in Standings, Pritchett Fourth
On the heels of his milestone 50th career Top Fuel win, U.S. Army driver Antron Brown reached his second 
consecutive final round and came within inches of his second consecutive win Sunday, dropping a close race to first-time winner Billy Torrence at the 38th annual NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series Nationals at Brainerd (Minn.) International Raceway.
Fellow U.S. Army drivers Tony “The Sarge” Schumacher and Leah Pritchett exited in the second and first rounds, respectively, but maintained their positions of second and fourth, respectively, in the Top Fuel standings with one event remaining before the six-event Countdown to the Championship playoffs begin.
Schumacher and his U.S. Army Dragster for Don Schumacher Racing (DSR) entered the weekend vying for his fourth career Brainerd event title and first since 2008, and he appeared well on his way with a solid first-round run – 3.792 seconds at 328.70 mph – in beating Terry McMillen’s 3.803 seconds at 325.61 mph. That set up a meeting with Top Fuel points-leader Steve Torrence in the second round, where Schumacher had the better car that laid down a run of 3.771 seconds at 328.94 mph to Torrence’s 3.792 seconds at 325.69 mph. But Torrence’s reaction time of .076 of a second gave him the holeshot victory over Schumacher, who left the starting line in .098 of a second. Despite the second-round loss, Schumacher still holds a one-point lead over Clay Millican and a 27-point lead over fourth-place Pritchett, his closest pursuers, in the Top Fuel standings.
“The first round, it was a long tree. The second round, it was a quick tree and it caught me off guard,” said Schumacher, the eight-time Top Fuel world champion. “There’s no excuse, no other reason – the fact is the dude left before I did on the start line and it cost us the race with our great U.S. Army racecar that we should’ve won the race with. We’ll go to the next one, we’ll forget that happened, and we’ll get it done. In the big picture, he’s got a pretty huge lead heading into Indy, but we had a great opportunity to put a little distance between us and the people close behind us. Too many ifs and it’s just the way it goes. Sometimes it’s just fact – the dude beat me.”
After disposing of Luigi Novelli in the opening round with a run of 3.803 seconds at 326.00 mph, then scoring a holeshot victory of his own in the second round against Brittany Force – .056 of a second, 3.768 seconds at 329.58 mph to Force’s .083 of a secord, 3.746 seconds at 326.74 mph – Brown and his Matco Tools/U.S. Army Dragster for DSR put a halt to Torrence’s march toward a sixth final-round appearance this season in today’s semifinal round. Brown laid down a superb run of 3.733 seconds at 323.97 mph to beat Torrence’s run of 3.753 seconds at 330.88 mph. That set up a final-round meeting with Torrence’s father and this weekend’s No. 1 qualifier Billy Torrence.
This time, it was Brown who fell victim to the holeshot, albeit a baby one, as the elder Torrence’s reaction-time advantage of .037 of a second to .045 of a second was enough to propel him to victory over the three-time Top Fuel world champion. Brown got down the track in 3.751 seconds at 329.10 mph while Torrence stopped the clock in 3.756 seconds at 329.99 mph. It was the first event title in 27 career Top Fuel events for the part-time competitor.
“(In the final) we just did the same light we had been running and Billy stepped up and turned a good light and ran a great lap and won it by three-thousandths of a second,” said Brown, who won the Top Fuel class of this event in 2011 and the Pro Stock Motorcycle class in 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2006. “You can’t hold your head down for that. Our main focus right now is that we’ve been to two finals back-to-back, we won a race and we are definitely peaking at the right time. We’re only going to get better from here on out. We ran low ET of the whole event in the semis. We’re just going to keep building off that. We have the biggest race of the regular season coming up in Indy. We’re going to test beforehand and we are really looking forward to the U.S. Nationals. We’re also hoping to pick up some more playoff spots with points-and-a-half being awarded at Indy. Now, we just need to keep running strong and, when we get to the Countdown, we’re definitely going to be competing at a high level for that championship. I couldn’t be prouder of all my Matco Tools/U.S. Army guys for all the hard work they’ve put in. It’s great to see everything coming to fruition. I’m stoked.”
Pritchett and her Mopar/U.S. Army Dragster for DSR, meanwhile, had a winning run foiled by a mechanical glitch in her first-round meeting against Scott Palmer. The two-time event winner this weekend and finalist at Seattle two weekends ago got to the finish line in 4.068 seconds at 276.92 mph, smoking her tires two-thirds of the way down the track, while Palmer illuminated the win light in 3.837 seconds at 325.06 mph.
“This race day, we knew coming in the conditions would be different,” said Pritchett, who has scored a pair of event titles this season at Atlanta and Denver. “Essentially, we had a better track but worse air. We were already struggling with finding actual power and, knowing we had worse air today, we made some extra moves to try and make that power. The most frustrating thing about our first-round loss is that, from a numbers standpoint, things didn’t add up. We had a mechanical malfunction somewhere that basically initiated what we call a ‘high-map’ earlier in the run than it should’ve. It wasn’t like we were trying to run a 3.74, there was a miscommunication happening somewhere, mechanically. Basically, it decided to put in some sauce where we didn’t tell it to. We’ll go to Indy for testing this week and there are a couple of different physical parts we will replace inside the electronics and we will get those bugs fixed. It’s nothing to hang our head about, at all. It’s stuff that happens. We were strategizing for the day and wanted to have a solid run in the first round in anticipation of having Billy Torrence, the No. 1 qualifier, in the next round, and all of it just kind of didn’t work out. Scott Palmer – I say it before I race him and after – you misstep ever so slightly, they’re there and they get you. We need to qualify a little better – we seem to have track record of doing better when we qualify better. Coming away from Brainerd, it’s just a little blip in the momentum, just like it was a little blip on the track today. I caught traction and we were able to hook up, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do in Indy.”
After 17 of 24 events on the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series tour for 2018, the top-10 drivers in the Top Fuel class are:
1. Steve Torrence (1,332 points)
2. Tony Schumacher (1,145 points, -187 points)
3. Clay Millican (1,144 points, -188 points)
4. Leah Pritchett (1,118 points, -214 points)
5. Doug Kalitta (1,027 points, -305 points)
6. Antron Brown (1,026 points, -306 points)
7. Terry McMillen (791 points, -541 points)
8. Brittany Force (787 points, -545 points)
9. Richie Crampton (692 points, -640 points)
10. Mike Salinas (694 points, -638)
The regular season concludes two weeks hence, Aug. 31 to Sept. 3, at the NHRA U.S. Nationals at Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis. Live television coverage of Monday’s elimination rounds begins on FS1 at 1 p.m. EDT
