The NHRA is back!
Kicking the season off at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona this weekend is 3 classes Including Top Fuel, Funny Car & Pro Stock. Pro Stock Motorcycle has the weekend off.
The leaders after one round of qualifying at the Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals presented by ProtectTheHarvest.com are Justin Ashley in Top Fuel, Robert Hight in Funny Car and Erica Enders in Pro Stock.
Justin Ashley:
"You have this whole offseason, right, and it's relatively quick, it's two months, but at the end of the day, it feels like it's been forever. So it's exciting to be able to get back in the race car," said Ashley. "We were able to go down there the first run of the new season and go right to the top and run as good as we did in front of our new sponsor. It's exactly what we're looking for. It's a good way to kick off the weekend.
"I think this is the best Top Fuel field in at least a decade; to be able to qualify No. 1 here would be amazing. We still have tomorrow to go, and a lot of really good cars behind us that are going to try and improve, but our team is going to try and do exactly the same thing and even improve upon today."
Robert Hight:
"We tested well last week, and more than anything, we made a lot of really good runs down the track; not up not a lot of smoke in the tires and things like that we had last year," said Hight, "So, you know, I couldn't wait to get here and see if we could do it again at Pomona.
"My team really worked over the winter, looking at what we did in 2021 and how that went so bad. We had no consistency -- we could throw down a few times, won a couple of races, but just no consistency -- so, basically, we went back to our whole clutch setup like we ran in '19 when we just ran away from the field. And so far, so good."
Erica Enders:
“We were definitely excited considering how the year ended last year, we knew that we had to go to work on finding some power in the engine department and then getting our Rick Jones racecars tuned up,” she said. “The KB [Racing] guys had a big, big power last year, and it still came down to the wire, so our goal was to come out swinging.
“We were .971 to 60 foot and as a driver that's been in the car tens of thousands of runs you know when you're on a hit. We made it through low gear with the wheels up. I pulled second and I thought she might be pretty happy. When I put it in high gear and looked over and I didn't see Greg, so I was really hopeful that we were gonna blow the scoreboard over.”
See a full recap by Phil Burgess, NHRA National Dragster Editor
See Friday's photo gallery:
A preview for Saturday's action:
Photos: NHRA National Dragster
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