| In the final round Scott Whipple recorded a 2.44 in his Amos Satterlee-tuned Top Fueler to beat Charlie Brown Jr.’s 2.664. Brown tossed the blower belt early and coasted through as you can tell from the raw fuel coming out of the pipes. |
Our advance apologies for not listing racers’ hometowns, makes of race car, and other info. We simply didn’t get that info and since it is our first ASDA event we didn’t know the cars and drivers, and the results we received from the ASDA officials didn’t have that info. We’ll do better next time. --JB
The American Sand Drag Association’s Fall Nationals may be called the Fall Nationals, but every racer that I talked to said that this race is the equivalent of the U.S. Nationals for those racers who distain racing on asphalt for the 300-ft tracks of the World of Sand Drags. Just like the U.S. Nationals the Fall Nationals, held annually in the Primm Valley area of Nevada about 40 miles west of downtown Las Vegas, is an endurance test for drivers, cars, the teams and their wallets. They started making laps on Wednesday, Oct. 18, and didn’t run the last final until the sun was going down Sunday night.
Just how important and historical is winning this race to Sand Drag racers? Here is just one example: a rival sanctioning body had a race on the same weekend that paid Top Fuel cars $3,000 to win and $1,500 for runner-up and attracted only a couple of cars while the ASDA Fall Nationals paid Top Fuel cars $1,000 to win and had seven nitro burners in attendance. They weren’t racing for the money they just wanted the title and the big honkin’ trophy that went to the winner. In the end, the main motivation for most of the winners who came to the stage Sunday night to get their trophy and money was getting their name in the record books as a winner at the ASDA Fall Nationals.
TOP FUEL
According to the racers that we spoke with there are just about a dozen active Top Fuel teams in sand drag racing and seven of them were at the Primm, Nevada, track for the Fall Nationals. The ET record for the class is a 2.35 which is slightly slower than the 2.20 elapsed times fuelers used to record before dual rear tires were outlawed. A combination of atmospheric conditions and the track surface just didn’t allow for those kinds of elapsed times.
When the ASDA team arrived at track to prep it for the event they found out that the track had flooded and it was a testament to their hard work that they got the track in shape to run on at all. What began as a track full of huge rocks on Thursday was worked into a track that was capable of delivering record performances by Saturday and Sunday. |
