“ I thought I had him beat,” Dunn said afterwards. “I saw that long black nose just move ahead of me at the last second.”

The final round was the fourth of the day for the Bowen and Romine teams. Both crews, who had turned their cars around every two-three hours since 5 p.m., came into the final just before midnight running mostly on adrenaline.

The ambient air temp had dropped to 57 degrees, track temp to about 70 degrees and the corrected altitude was less than 1300 feet above sea level. Conditions that were great for making gobs of nitro horsepower but not so good for traction. The track surface was dry despite the cool temp and closeness to the Mississippi River. It had been subjected all night long to a series of oildowns and crashes, with some of them being historic, and only a Herculean effort by the Cordova track crew kept the track safe. But even they couldn’t make it have the “teeth” it usually has. A walk on the track before the last round showed the surface at 200 feet was cool to the touch and, while not slick it, certainly wasn’t sticky.

Romine had lane choice in the final round and, despite winning the previous race in the right lane, chose to run the left putting Bowen’s “Violator” in the right lane. Bowen got a big holeshot advantage with a great .056 R.T. on Romine, who had just an average .159 light. Both cars started spinning their tires early but nevertheless Romine’s “Man O’ War” appeared to be winning the race when it started drifting towards the left guardwall with no signs of stopping and he was forced to lift.

“ I just had to make a decision if I should crash or lift. I didn’t see him, so I lifted,” Romine explained afterward.

In the other lane Bowen, who had lost the Indy DRO series final round to Romine, evened the score and literally drove his car until the engine quit making noise. But it ran long enough to deliver a 6.355/230.49 win over Romine’s 6.528/215.31.
Bowen told DRO later, “When I got it stopped there was no (supercharger) belt on the motor and oil everywhere. We’ve been burning four or five pistons out of this (Fontana) engine every pass today, but we came here to race.”  And race they did.

In four races the DragRacingOnline.com AA/FC Challenge has had four different winners. That’s called parity in sports!

The next race is Sept. 11-13 at historic Kansas City International Raceway and the final race of the DRO AA/FC Challenge will be held Oct. 16-18 during the Goodguys Nostalgia Nationals in Bowling Green, Ky.

The Kansas City race, like the St. Louis race last May, qualifies six cars but will have three rounds of eliminations with the quickest loser in the first round coming back for the semifinals. Also there will be $500 in tow money for the seventh and eighth qualifiers. The schedule is one qualifying round on Friday, a qualifying round and first round of eliminations on Saturday, and the semifinals and finals on Sunday.