Al-Balooshi used a better reaction by almost a quarter of a second to beat teammate Jenkins. In that race Jenkins had his worst RT of the race, a .068, while Al-Balooshi had his best, using up teammate Jenkins with a .040. The holeshot and a 3.894/191.46 lap were enough to hold of the “Iceman’s” 3.880/192.44 charge and put Al-Balooshi in the finals against Jim Halsey. 

It was a classic match up between serious rivals. Al-Balooshi has a Tim McAmis-built carwith Reher-Morrison power. Halsey’s car was built by Jerry Haas and has a Gene Fulton powerplant. Fulton uses NOS nitrous components  while Al-Balooshi has, of course, Speedtech nitrous.

In the final it was all Halsey as he had a .029 RT and then ran a 3.900/193.38 lap to easily beat Al-Balooshi to the stripe. Al-Balooshi had a .074 light and ran a respectable but losing 3.908.

Extreme Ten-Five 

In the ADRL’s XTF class there’s the race for enough points to qualify for the “Battle for the Belt” race at the end of the year. Then there are the ones to see who will be the first XTF driver to make a sub-four-second lap, and the first over 200 mph.

At Virginia, Chuck Ulsch came close on the latter two and made up some ground for the former during qualifying. In a brand new supercharged Camaro that hadn’t been raced prior to this event, not only did Ulsch lower the XTF ET record to 4.010 and raise the speed mark to an unheard of 195.73 mph, he then went on to also win the XTF title and take home his first National Guard “Minuteman” trophy.

Ulsch ran the table at VMP like few have, re-setting all of the class records, qualifying in the pole and winning the event.

XTF racer Spiro Pappas burned the front end off of his Jerry Bickel-built 2009 Pontiac again but now he knows why. The oil system had a glitch that allowed blow-by oil to get sprayed on the turbo exhaust headers, apparently causing the fires the team has had its last two outings. The team found the problem after a thorough post-fire examination at VMP. The sleek Pontiac is back at Bickel’s Troy, MO, shop and Pappas says it will be ready for the St. Louis race Aug. 7-8. 

Gary White (Chris Simmons photo)

XTF final eliminations saw the qualifying leaders rolling through the staging lanes to the starting line Saturday night. The two finalists represented the variety that is XTF racing: Chuck Ulsch in his an American muscle car ’68 Camaro with an alky burning supercharged V-8 Hemi powerplant and number two qualifier Gary White in the Titan Motorsports, turbocharged Toyota inline 6 cylinder-powered sport compact Scion tC.