Motor Sports Weekly News

Story and file photos by: Drew Hierwarter

A lot of people are excited about the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship battle that will come down to the wire next weekend in South Florida. Jimmie Johnson will be going into that race with a 108 point lead over second place driver Mark Martin. If he wins, it will be Johnson’s fourth consecutive championship. Ho hum.

 

In the battle for the championship in NHRA’s Top Fuel division between Larry Dixon and Tony Schumacher, the two drivers entered the Auto Club Finals at Pomona Raceway this past weekend separated by a mere two points! Schumacher, who had won the title the previous five years in a row, was leading Dixon, who won two consecutive championships before Schumachers’s string of five began.

 

Dixon was the one holding the slim lead at the beginning of qualifying but when the dust had settled Schumacher held the number one position with Dixon qualifying number two, and that gave Schumacher the lead by two points. Qualifying in positions one and two put Dixon and Schumacher on opposites sides of the elimination ladder for Sunday’s finals and set up the potential that even a Hollywood script writer could not improve upon. Two of the biggest names in the sport, the only two who have won the championships in the last seven years, locked in a tight point battle all season, coming down to face each other directly in a winner-take-all final round of the final race of the year! It doesn’t get much more exciting than that.

 

Unfortunately, fellow competitors Antron Brown and Spencer Massey had other plans. Massey took out Dixon in the semi-final round thereby handing his sixth consecutive championship to Schumacher. Then Antron Brown followed suit by defeating Schumacher in their semi-final which earned Brown his place in the final round.

 

“That was definitely huge,” Schumacher said, “We ended up putting a round of racing between us. I can’t say enough about my crew chief (Mike Green) and my team. They stepped up and got the job done just like our Army Strong Soldiers do all of the time. It was a classic example of a bases loaded, bottom of the ninth situation. We needed to come up with the big hit and that’s exactly what happened.”

 

 

 

The race win was Brown’s eighth in Top Fuel and his 15th appearance in a final round. And it came after Massey drew a red light and smoked the tires of his Don Prudhomme dragster.

 

“We stepped it up for that final round against Spencer (Massey),” Brown said. “That’s a really strong team over there in Snake’s camp with Todd (Smith) and Donnie (Bender). We just wanted to go from A to B and not smoke the tires. We were shooting for a 3.79 or (3).80. That (3.801) was an awesome run.”

 

In the final tally, Tony Schumacher finished the season with 2571 points to Larry Dixon’s 2569 points. After 24 national events and 96 rounds of racing the NHRA Top Fuel championship was decided by just three points!