Sonoma Nationals: Speed to burn for NHRA stars

SONOMA - To win at the NHRA Sonoma Nationals, at least this year, you had to have the proper qualifications.

The No. 1 qualifiers in drag racing’s four premier categories - Antron Brown in Top Fuel, Jack Beckman in Funny Car, Chris McGaha in Pro Stock and Eddie Krawiec in Pro Stock Motorcycle - all wound up winning their events Sunday. It was the 379th NHRA event featuring all four of those divisions, and the first time ever the low qualifiers had swept the finals.

Team owner Don Schumacher, whose cars took both “nitro” classes (Top Fuel and Funny Car) for the 50th time, credited the warm, breezy raceway in the hills of Carneros.

“Very seldom do the No. 1 qualifiers win the race,” Schumacher said. “And for all four of the No. 1 qualifiers to win this race out here is a tribute to the facility also. It means you can go out and you can push your equipment as hard you can push it, because the track’s such a good surface.”

And this is supposed to be the one event at Sonoma Raceway that doesn’t put a lot of stock in qualifying. The twists and turns and elevation changes of this venue make it highly risky to pass in the road-course races here, including NASCAR and IndyCar, so where you line up at the start of those events tends to have a significant bearing on where you finish. Not so in the drag races, where every qualifier - No. 1 through No. 16 - must win four head-to-head runs down the strip.

But Brown, Beckman, McGaha and Krawiec proved that the fastest vehicles on Friday and Saturday just might be the ones to beat on Sunday.

Of the four winners, the most preordained might have Beckman, who is simply crushing his division lately. Friday, “Fast Jack” made the fastest run in the history of Funny Car, landing in 3.921 seconds. Thanks to NHRA’s esoteric recordkeeping, it would not have counted as a record if Beckman hadn’t come within a 1-percent margin of that mark during Saturday’s qualifying, but he did it.

After all that, Beckman lined up for his first race Sunday and momentarily feared it was about to go awry.

Checking his linkages as he rolled into position, Beckman noticed that the reverse-gear lever was loose. The car went into reverse after he performed a burnout, but it didn’t feel right when he put it back into forward gear.

“And if you know anything about these cars, the reversers, all 10,000 foot-pounds of torque goes through ’em,” Beckman said. “And they don’t look that beefy. And they can explode on you. And I thought, oh God, I don’t know if it’s in the correct gear. When I step on it, it might disengage that gear.”

Beckman cleared his mind as best he could, and the car responded well. When they got it back to the pits, though, the cable looked ready to snap.

“Sometimes you don’t catch things like a cable. They don’t look bad until they go bad,” Beckman said. “So we could’ve been done first round. Boy, did it turn out just fine, though.”

In the second round, Beckman caught a break when Chad Head destroyed his tires off the line. Beckman outpaced Robert Hight in the semifinals, running his record against the John Force Racing team to 12-0 this year. And he survived a wobble near the finish line to outlast Tommy Johnson Jr. in the final, securing the 20th Funny Car win of his career and his fifth of 2015.

Beckman won at Denver last week, too, and heads to Seattle with a chance to sweep NHRA’s famed Western Swing. Only seven drivers have ever done it, the last being Brown in 2009, and John Force is the only person ever to do it in a Funny Car, back in 1994.

The victory capped a nearly perfect weekend for Beckman, who garnered 147 points in the Mello Yello Series standings, including bonuses for top speed in three of four qualifying sessions, the overall qualifying standard and setting the elapsed-time record. The total tied the NHRA record set by fellow Funny Car driver and Don Schumacher Racing teammate Matt Hagan.

Beckman’s victory was the 11th this year in Funny Car for DSR, the sport’s dominant team.

Brown’s victory wasn’t exactly a shock. He had won here three times previously, in 2009, 2011 and 2012. He entered the weekend with the Top Fuel points lead, and emerged as the top qualifier. The former Pro Stock Motorcycle racer got his 50th NHRA win at Englishtown, N.J., in June and shows no signs of letting up.

McGaha, who builds his own engines in-house for Southwest Performance & Machine, which supplies his Harlow Sammons team, scored his first NHRA victory. And he worked hard to get there. McGaha had the fastest reaction time of the day, .004 seconds, in edging Jeg Coughlin in a semifinal, and he got Jonathan Gray by a hood length in the final.

“Thirty years in the making,” said McGaha, who father, Lester, drove in NHRA for more than 15 years without a victory. “So many times, leaving the house and thinking, ‘Will this be the day?’ … I finally got it done, and it’s really special.”

Krawiec is more used to this sort of thing; this is his 30th Pro Stock Motorcycle win, and he currently enjoys a fairly comfortable lead in the series. Still, it was relief he felt after nipping Jerry Savoie, an alligator farmer from Cut Off, La., by about 2 feet in the final.

“The alligator almost ate us,” Krawiec quipped.

But on this day, a 15-foot reptile with sharp teeth and snapping jaws wasn’t the scariest thing at the raceway. A fast qualifier was.

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com.