What if They Put on a Professional Bracket Race and Nobody Came?

Story by Dave Densmore,
captions by Chris Martin, photos by Ron Lewis

Apparently, it wasn't the Thursday-Friday-Saturday format that hurt the crowd at the inaugural Winston Showdown in 1999. The All-Star race, with its Funny Car versus Top Fuel format, didn't draw any better this year on Friday-Saturday-Sunday.

Event winner Cory McClenathan's MBNA Top Fueler is pulled into the water box area during eliminations. Cory Mac ran good enough to win on the tricky surface; unfortunately few saw it, as evidenced by the grandstands.

Bristol Dragway is a big track with lots of grandstands. However, there were big holes in those grandstands every day but Saturday (when there were lots of small holes and only one or two big ones).

It would be difficult to imagine that attendance at the two Winston Showdown events would be cause for Bruton Smith to run out and build a couple more dragstrips at Fort Worth and Charlotte.

The Bristol track was cranky all weekend for the Winston No Bull Showdown. Some drivers hooked (marginally), others didn't. Here Tony Pedregon speeds away from a tractionless Kenny Bernstein in qualifying.

The format for the Winston Showdown was radical but it's hard to imagine that Bristol-area race fans are sophisticated enough to have simply been waiting for the track to get a national event like it will in 2001. The Top Fuel dragster teams spent the first Winston Showdown weekend whining about the inequities in the system designed to equalize competition. This year, it was the Funny Car racers' turn. They argued that the .280-second spot was not enough to compensate for the advantages enjoyed by the dragsters. So what happened? Same as last year.

The two sides split the first 12 races and although there were three dragsters in the semifinals, the final paired Ron Capps and the Copenhagen Camaro Funny Car with Cory McClenathan at the MBNA dragster. Advantage dragsters.

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