This weekend, August 16-19, The Toyo Tires NHRA Nationals is not just another NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series national event at Maple Grove Raceway in Reading, Penn. It is the most important event of the year for Native Australian Dave Grubnic, driver of the black and electric-blue flamed, 8,000-horsepower Zantrex-3 Top Fuel dragster.
This season the NHRA instituted the new Countdown to the Championship points system. Only the top eight in POWERade points after the first 17 national events will be allowed to vie for the season championship. This weekend’s event in Reading is the 17th of the season, and Grubnic and the Zantrex-3 team are in that precarious 8th place points position with a mere two-point lead over 9th place driver Melanie Troxel.
“This is it. It’s sink or swim now, ” Grubnic, a 45-year old resident of Ennis, Mont., said. “We have no options but to win the event. It’s the only we can guarantee we will stay in 8th. That’s what we’re going there to do. We have no other alternatives.
“I have the utmost confidence in my Zantrex-3 team that we will do exactly that. We have struggled of late, but our guys have been working so hard to figure out what is wrong, and we think we’ve found some solutions. I’m really looking forward to this weekend. It’s exciting for us and for NHRA drag racing fans everywhere. ”
In early 2004, Grubnic was hired to drive for Kalitta Motorsports. Since joining Team Kalitta, Grubnic has posted consecutive top-five championship points finishes. In the fall of 2004, he won the lucrative and coveted Budweiser Shootout in Las Vegas, becoming only the fourth driver in the special event’s history to win its $100,000 prize in his first attempt. Grubnic picked up an emotional first NHRA national event win in May, 2005 in Topeka, Kans., to become the first non-native North American to win a Top Fuel trophy. He has one other event victory to date, the 2006 running of the famed Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla.
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