Championship Drag Racing

Fram Autolite NHRA Nationals
Sonoma, Calif.
(July 25-27)

EVENT HOME
   Event Info
   Tickets
   Event schedule
   Results
   Team Reports
   Audio Broadcast
   Photo Galleries
   Video highlights
   Entry List

Driver Profile

Antron Brown Matco Tools dragster

Sonoma, Sunday: Antron Brown raced his David Powers-owned Matco Tools dragster to a semifinal finish Sunday afternoon at Infineon Raceway. The two-time Top Fuel winner remains second in the NHRA POWERade Top Fuel standings.

After racing to his third No. 1 qualifying position of the 2008 season on Saturday with an elapsed time of 3.805-seconds, Brown defeated No. 16 qualifier Steve Chrisman and two-time series champion Larry Dixon before falling to popular racer Hillary Will in close semifinal battle.

Racing out of the right lane, Brown scored the wire-to-wire win in the Matco Tools car. The No. 1 qualifier used a Lee Beard tune-up to cruise the bright blue Matco-backed rail to a performance of 3.887 seconds at 313.44 mph to advance to round two. Chrisman’s rail lost traction and slowed to a pass of 4.273 at 276.13.

Facing off against Dixon for the third time this season, the ultra-quick leavers used nearly identical reaction times at the start. Dixon’s silver and blue dragster lost traction almost immediately as Brown raced the Matco dragster to the win. The Matco Tools car lost traction on the pass as Brown pedaled to a run of 4.428 at 233.32. The Don Prudhomme-owned dragster slowed to a run of 9.686 at 80.19.

Squaring off against the 2008 Topeka NHRA winner, Brown used a solid starting line reaction to race the Matco Tools rail to the lead. Brown built on that lead until the Matco car spun the tires near the finish line allowing Will’s black dragster to creep on by for the narrow win, 4.011 to 4.042. Brown now has 25 elimination round wins this season.

“To be honest, I don’t know what happened on that pass,” Brown said. “We had a big lead and the car just started spinning the tires. It was going to run a low 3.90. There must have been something on the track that didn’t get cleaned up because our car and the Army car spun the tires in the same spot on the track.”

“We had a good Western Swing. We built on (Larry) Dixon and now lead those guys by 65 points. We want to maintain the No. 2 position for the Countdown (to the Championship). We would have liked to have won, but it didn’t happen. We’ll try our best at Brainerd.”

E-mail this article   Print this article