Tony Pedregon raced to his second straight Funny Car win, beating Ashley Force Hood in the final of the United Association NHRA SuperNationals at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park.
Pedregon powered his Chevy Impala SS to a 4.246-second run at 260.56 mph for his 42nd career win and second in Englishtown. Pedregon also moved past points leader Ron Capps to take the top spot in the Funny Car points standings.
“I never thought I’d be afraid of a girl,” Pedregon said about the finale against Force Hood. “Fear of losing was in the back of my head. I knew we had a good race car. It ran good in the heat, and it ran good with cloud cover.
“Before the final, I just knew that Dickie (Venebles, crew chief) was making a lot of adjustments and I had a feeling it would be a close race. I heard her for a while. My car was revving up, spinning the tires. We got after it because we had to. I could feel the G’s falling off, and I was worried. If the track was 1,320 feet, I’d be in big trouble. I didn’t get off throttle. I just hung on. It was just enough. You don’t know how relieved I was to see that win light.” USA Today
Some things come natural for NHRA Top Fuel racer Larry Dixon, like winning at Englishtown. Dixon won his fifth NHRA SuperNationals title in the past eight seasons at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park.
Dixon’s history at Raceway Park predates his driving days when he worked as a crew member on his father’s Top Fuel dragster in the 1970s.
“This is a great track with so much history,” Dixon, of Brownsburg, Ind., said. “I just love looking at this track and remembering back in the day when there were no guardrails and just grass everywhere. All my heroes used to race here.” Spartanburg Herald Journal
“There’s never a bad win,” said Dixon. “I’ve had a lot of great losses, so you hope they just balance out. I really don’t know what happened with Antron, but as a driver, you’re human. That stuff happens. You do it. I’ve done it, this year even. I thought I hit the Tree good, but I already heard him leave. So at that point, you’re trying to look at the Tree as you drive by and see if he went red, but it went by too fast. Then, I looked down at the scoreboard and saw our win light on, and it was a relief that I wasn’t dead late. I was going to run it out just to see what it would do, and then it got out there probably 300 feet and pulled the tires loose. We were fortunate with what happened, but at the same time, you don’t know what his car would have done.
“We’ve had a lot of success at this race. The race used to be Father’s Day at Columbus, and we won out until they moved the Father’s Day to here. I was like, ‘Wow, I haven’t won Englishtown in a long time. It would be cool to do that,’ nonchalantly saying that at the beginning of the season. And then all of a sudden, you get to go to a bunch of finals and win here. This is a great track, and there’s so much history here. Racing on the same track as ‘Jungle’ and Garlits and Shirley and all my heroes that I grew up watching race is a great deal.”
As was the case one week age, when Edwards red-lighted against Coughlin in the Chicago final, the Pro Stock final was again decided on the starting line, this time on a holeshot. Coughlin showed why he is known for his starting-line prowess when he grabbed a clutch .025 to .038 reaction-time advantage that gave him just enough of a lead to score his 46th Pro Stock win. Edwards ran a better 6.58, but it wasn’t enough to move him around Coughlin’s Jegs-backed entry, which crossed the finish line .002-second in front with a 6.59.
“It’s taken some craftiness on our part,” said Coughlin, of his two wins over Edwards, who had the better performing car in both instances. “In the pits, the guys have been doing a fantastic job. We qualified eighth, which was not where we wanted to be, but when the weather mixed up Saturday, we just wanted to make sure that we got down the racetrack. Ideally, we wanted to be in the top eight for lane choice first round, and we finished eighth. We knew we had a lot to work with. We figured we could get within a hundredth and a half or two-hundredths of Mike Edwards and could probably pace with anybody else out there, and as it turned out, that’s about the way it turned out.
“This was a huge, huge win for us to beat Mike on a holeshot there in the final. We both had good lights, and I just stayed in front of him by two little one-thousandths of a second. It was huge for us. I felt confident we could run every bit of a low .59 based on what we just did in the semi’s. We’ve kind of been sneaking around like that all weekend, and I knew we just needed to get a hundredth and a half or two-hundredths jump on Mike, which isn’t easy to do because he’s a world champion Sportsman driver and as good as they come. We were fortunate to get the hundredth and a half on him and stay in front of him by two-thousandths.”
As has been the case through most of the season, Coughlin didn’t have the quickest car on the property, but it was fairly consistent with high-6.5 and low-6.6 runs. He posted his best time of the day, a 6.588, to get past Jason Line. Coughlin then ran a 6.60 to defeat low qualifier Ron Krisher and a 6.626 to get around Allen Johnson. All three of Coughlin’s opponents leading up to his 75th Pro Stock and 93rd overall final had troubles on their run and ran 6.77 seconds or slower. NHRA
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