BILL STEPHENS “IN THE GROOVE” 6/7/10

Hight, Force, Force Hood. The top of the NHRA Full Throttle Funny Car standings have never looked better….

The overall performance at JFR this season has been nothing short of immense and now that ten races have been completed on this year’s schedule, the handwriting on the wall is becoming a bit clearer. John, Robert, and Ashley are currently comprising the most potent 1-2-3 punch in the category and it seems that whenever one driver gets tripped up, another teammate picks up the slack.

A perfect example of that trend played out in Chicago this past weekend. The vagaries of the eliminations ladder dictated that John and Ashley race each other in Round 1 with Ashley advancing after beating Dad by 4/100 of a second. Now, with two JFR cars still on the table, things looked promising. By the end of the second round, Ashley had beaten Bob Bode and Robert had capped Tim Wilkerson with winning elapsed times within a few hundredths of a second—great consistency!

In the semi-finals, eventual race-winner Matt Hagan stopped Ashley before facing Robert in the final. With the day cooling off gradually, elapsed times dropped by around a 1/10 of a second between Round 2 and the semi’s and expectations were the payoff matchup between Robert and Matt would be a powerfest. It was.

Hagan’s 4.035 was enough to outpace Robert’s 4.069 giving JFR another strong finish and moving Robert to the top of the points. Matt’s 4.035 was only a hair slower than his low elapsed time for the weekend, 4.022 and it was a great show for all the fans, both at Route 66 Raceway and watching at home with both lanes providing sufficient bite throughout the day to avoid continuous tire-smoking, pedalfests. And, even though Robert came up a bit short in the final, you love to see great side-by-side money rounds in all the professional classes with event titles decided by strong performance, capable driving, and slim margins of victory.

Here at corporate headquarters of Ultimate Garage Productions, Inc, the big news is that the series, “NHRA’s Greatest Races” will be coming back to television in January, this time on a new network, HD Theater, the Discovery Channel’s HD sister outlet. I’ll have more details for you soon, but I’m very excited about hosting and producing the second season of the series after such a successful and well-received run on Fox Sports Net earlier this year. I can tell you that Season 2 will be focusing on races from the more recent era and will include some of the most memorable national events from the past ten years. I hope you’re one of the many folks who have HD service on their cable system and will be able to enjoy “NHRA’s Greatest Races, Season 2”, when it debuts in January.

Until then, everybody take a quick breather and get ready for Englishtown this weekend!