This weekend, Nov. 1-4, at the Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals, this season’s final event of the 2007 POWERade Drag Racing Series at historic Auto Club Raceway at Pomona in Pomona, Calif., native Australian Dave Grubnic, driver of the 330-mph, black and electric blue-flamed Zantrex-3 Top Fuel dragster, is looking to this weekend’s last hoorah on the quarter-mile as his final opportunity to get at least one event win in each of the past three seasons.
“We’ve had an up and down year, but to end with a win would be a fantastic lift going into the off-season, ” Grubnic, a 45-year old resident of Ennis, Mont., said. “Our Zantrex-3 team has just been great all year through all of our good times and bad. Those guys deserve to go to the winner’s circle in Pomona, and I hope I can do my part to get us all there. ”
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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