The “War Hose” may look about the same, but most of it is new.

Next up were Steven Densham and Roger Garten. Garten with his new look Mustang back after a huge explosion at the March Meet. Densham was lucky just to make the call as during the warm up oil started pouring out of the clutch can, as a rear main seal decided to fail. So both Densham’s and Rupert’s teams dove in and changed the seal and put in a new rack of pistons and a new clutch in record time to make the call.
 
After all that, Densham ran into traction issues and Garten made it down the track until about 1100 feet and clicked it to run a 6.85/209 to Densham’s 8.95/85.29.

Rupert (near lane) and Macklyn.

The next pair up would be Steve Macklyn and Jason Rupert. Rupert is the defending NHRA Heritage Series Funny Car Champion and Macklyn is a journeyman clutch guy for Mike Strasberg’s Top Fuel Dragster team, and a driver and winner in his own right in Big Show floppers, when IHRA ran late model funny cars.

Rupert was at the wheel of the Mert Littlefield tribute car and Macklyn driving the “Nitro Thunder” car owned by Jack Harris were scheduled to be the second pair of cars out when one of the strangest incidents happened.

Both drivers did their burnouts and started to back up towards the starting line. Macklyn started to encounter some violent front end wobble and as he tried to control it the car started to drift towards the right hand guard wall. The car then made contact and when that took place the body shifted on the chassis and partially hung open the throttle, which made the car want to climb the guard wall towards the fans. Macklyn made a hard turn with the wheel to the left and the car came off the wall and then shot backwards across the track, doing a reverse 180 and then nosing the bright red Firebird into the left retaining wall.

As this was going on, Rupert, not having the knowledge of what was happening behind him, started to back up and then he T-boned Macklyn’s disabled car, damaging both cars.