Then came the race itself.

“We unload Friday with Low ET for the first session,” Murphy continued. “After that, it all went downhill. We hurt two pistons and had hurt the # 4 journal. We put the other motor in and had contact with the new pistons—that took six hours to finally discover the problem. We had the engine apart and back together at least a dozen times because the new head gaskets were wrong and had to be reworked, etc. etc.”

It gets worse. “We installed the other pistons and had no oil pressure—it took several more hours to find the oil galley had a crack in it. During this time, they had run the second and third qualifying sessions. We end up # 3 qualifier and are trying to get ready for the first round. We take the short block out of Frank Ousley's Funny Car and put it in the dragster. We are ready to start it. We try about eight times and there is no spark. We change out the mag, the box, the coil wire, the coil. No luck.

“They start running first round of Top Fuel and we are still in the pits with no juice. Daniel (Wilkinson) gets an idea and reaches over to the safety box—this activates when you backfire a blower and pops the chute, pulls the fuel shut-off and kills the mag—and he cuts the wire. It was grounding out the mag. All right, it fires up on alcohol. We rush the car to the line just in time, I jump in and my brain is fried. I red-light—for the second time in my racing career of forty years. We did not hurt much, but it was the MOST challenging weekend of racing I have ever, ever experienced. It was difficult for me to understand all this as we are typically really prepared.”

Famoso is fickle. And its whimsy can go either way. Ask Tony Bartone, the AA/Fuel Dragster record holder at 5.56 seconds, but a Bakersfield bridesmaid ever since he began racing the front-engine Top Fuelers out of Long Island City, New York. Bartone’s victorious final round performance against Rick White exemplified the domination T-Bone held over the rest of the class. As reported on aafd.tv, against White, Bartone “posted a peerless 5.623 at an insane 262 mph to White’s second-best, 5.71, 252. With that pass and those numbers, Bartone scored the Top Fuel hat trick: Top Eliminator, Top Speed and Low ET. In other words, utter domination and the first March Meet Top Fuel victory from a racer east of the Mississippi since Indianapolis driver Paul Romine won in 1996.”