NITRO FUNNY CAR
Not Since Garth Widdison’s NHRA Top Fuel foray a few yeas ago has a nitro racer from Utah made the national scene. Now comes IHRA rookie fuel coupe driver Steven Macklyn. Macklyn qualified his ’06 Monte Carlo on the bubble and then drove around the field, defeating defending and two-time IHRA Nitro Funny Car World Champ Dale Creasy in the finals to become (as far as DRO can determine) Utah’s first ever national event winner in a fuel class.
Macklyn wasn’t seriously challenged on his way to the win, defeating each of his opponents by an average of nearly three-tenths of a second!
While Macklyn was making history, Creasy had his own historic type of race. He had a .001 reaction time in his second round match-up with low qualifier and tequila connoisseur Bob Gilbertson. Fuel car drivers don’t have intentional .001 lights but Creasy did cut a light that got him off the stripe over a tenth of second before Gilbertson moved.
In the final round Creasy again left before his opponent, but this time his RT was a more reality-based .113 to Macklyn’s late .124, but Macklyn’s 3.74 more than covered Creasy’s troubled 4.034!
PRO MODIFIED
The Pro Modified class at San Antonio, like Top Fuel and Funny Car before it, was full of surprises. Perhaps the most surprising was that total number of entries was only 18! For, I believe, the first time in history of the class the NHRA had more entries at one of their events (24 at Houston the week before) than the IHRA. Another first of sorts was that for the first time since 2005 a pair of nitrous oxide-injected racers, Jim Halsey and Billy Harper, met in the final round of Pro Mod despite the fact that supercharged entries outnumbered nitrous cars by a margin of 3-1.
“I think the eighth-mile really helped the nitrous cars today,” Halsey said. “We were able to get down the track. The track was hot and a little tricky at the end but we got the job done.”