(Tim Marshall photo)

Terry McMillen, driver of the AMALIE Motor Oil “XTERMIGATOR” Top Fuel Dragster, scored the season’s first major upset when he defeated Tony Schumacher in opening round action.

“I got out of the car and I’m asking, did Tony smoke the tires?”, McMillen said after the win. “I mean he’s the champ for a reason, you just expect him to be there. I’m looking around and I didn’t see him, I didn’t hear him, but I wasn’t lifting until I reached the finish line.”

Schumacher’s Army dragster dropped a cylinder early and McMillen’s AMALIE dragster dropped a cylinder at the end of the run.

“I think we dropped a cylinder right there at the end and when we got back to the pits we found out that we lost the computer,” McMillen said. “We thought we found the issue and everything looked good when we warmed it up, but when we got back out there for the second round the computer quit again. So, we’ve got nothing. No dashboard - nothing. Rob (Wendland, crew chief) and I were doing our best to kind of guess at fuel pressure and idle RPMs and we thought we had it pretty close.”

McMillen lost to J.R. Todd in the second round.

Top Fuel dragster photos by Lewis and Marshall.