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“It got pretty exciting down there at the end,” Wilder recalled. “He didn’t want no black paint and I didn’t want no yellow paint. I was going to cross the line if I hadn’t have lifted and he came back at me off the guardrail. We had our hands full down there, ‘cause we were door handle-to-door handle.” Barfield said he thought his day was over when his car took a hard turn to the right, but after he lifted and got back in the groove, “I saw Blake’s headlights bouncing off me, so I thought, ‘Brother, it’s about time to get back on this thing.’” The car apparently got back on the wheelie bars a little too hard and unloaded the left front wheel. “We were lucky to get past that one, but we’ll take it, make a few changes in the front end, and move on,” Barfield said.

The left side of Bobby Cole’s Nova wasn’t quite so straight by the end of the night, after driver Gene Wright bounced it off the guardrail in the quarter finals. Wright did a good job, though of bringing the car to a safe stop after what looked like a much worse accident than it turned out to be.

Miller’s march to the final round included a first-round bye, followed by a win over Gene Wright in Bobby Cole’s 1970 Nova after Wright sideswiped the left guardrail about mid-track. Fortunately, Wright was uninjured and most of the damage was cosmetic, but some of the front suspension did take a beating, Cole said. “We can fix it, though. There’s no major damage.”

Miller then eliminated Marcus Birt in the semis after Birt had nearly taken Miller’s 4.834-secs track record away from him with a 4.836 in the previous round. “I think I was a little crooked from the start, but you know, that’s racin’, man” Birt said. “The car just went for the center line and we smoked the tires.”

Craig Miller fell one round short of defending his 2003 event win at Savannah Dragway.

Before the final, Miller said he expected to use his third stage of nitrous for the first time all day. “Actually, it’s on always; it’s just a matter of when you want to use it.” He added that the track was “perfect” after being pretty slick during the heat of the day. Over in Barfield’s camp, no changes were made to the tune-up, Barfield said, but “we’ll just tighten up the front end a little bit to keep it going straight.”