NHRA in Las Vegas, NASCAR in Atlanta, pressure in both!
Friday, October 26th, 2007By: Drew Hierwarter
NHRA photos
The list of hopefuls who can win the 2007 NHRA Drag Racing Powerade Championship has been cut to four in each of the professional categories. They must compete this weekend in Las Vegas before heading to Pomona, California, and the final event to decide it all. And every race is important now as just one small miscue could ruin the entire campaign. There are no more easy rounds.
Tony Schumacher could easily win his fifth Top Fuel title this year in his U.S. Army sponsored dragster. What would be amazing about that is he would do it with 12 first round losses this season! That’s only one less than he has in all four of his other championship seasons, combined!
Over on the Funny Car side, Gary Scelzi is in nearly the same situation. Scelzi has gone down in the first round nine times this year and even failed to qualify once. This is the most first round losses in any of his championship years and he has never won a title with a DNQ on the books. Robert Hight is still looking for his first championship and he could do it this year in spite of failing to qualify twice and not racing in Houston following the death of teamate Eric Medlin. No one else has missed races and still won the Funny Car championship since 1990.
In Pro Stock, Dave Connolly will be trying to continue is late season domination of the class. Connolly has won five straight events coming in to Las Vegas and a total of eight for the year. He is being chased by three time World Champion, Greg Anderson. But when the dust settles in Pomona, and the season is over, you can be pretty sure that none of these guys will care how they did it, as long as they can lift that trophy over their head in victory.
This week in the Chase for the NASCAR Nextel Cup, the teams travel to Atlanta Motor Speedway. They come from the slowest track on the circuit, Martinsville where they raced last week, to the fastest. Atlanta typically produces speeds hovering right around the 200mph mark and engines will be stressed to the max as they must sustain constant high rpm for three hours or more. With championship leaders Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson separated by only 53 points, the pressure is on the Hendrick Motorsports engine department to make sure these guys have the power and stamina to get the job done. A good finish here this weekend could put the title completely out of reach for third place driver Clint Bowyer. On the other hand, a broken valve spring, burned piston, or other calamity on the 24 or 48 team could tighten things up and make the final run to the title very interesting. Bowyer is 115 points behind and is at a point now where he really needs one or both of the Hendrick drivers to start having some trouble if he is to have any hope of winning his first Nextel Cup. The bad news for Bowyer is that the Johnson and Gordon teams usually get stronger as the season closes out, and there has been no indication so far that this year will be any different.
With the seasons winding down in the two major race series in the country, the pressure is ramping up. As the saying goes, check your local listings for some exciting and pressure packed racing this weekend.