To the issue at hand, and in my best report-ese. . .there were other occurrences at San Antonio other than Mr. Densham’s waltz through the IHRA vaults. Doug Foley, IHRA’s 2005 No. 2, jumped up a notch when he pinned five-time IHRA World Champ and 46-time winner Clay Millican in the Top Fuel final. Frank Gugliotta wheeled his and Charlie Taylor’s 2005 Ford Escort to the Pro Stock win and Glen Kerunsky’s rather plain looking Atchison Chevy wedge powered ’57 Chevy looked anything but plain when it stomped booty in Pro Modified. The Alcohol Funny Car champ? Do the name Mark Thomas and Ethanol strike a familiar chord?
Of all the above, though, it was Densham and, for that matter, the whole IHRA Funny Car class that will make the San Antonio event highly memorable. It’s not hard to guess that every IHRA Funny Car record was obliterated given the 14-year-old hiatus.
Densham not only was the winner of the class, but he broke up what looked like an either Cruz or Frank Pedregon family victory party. The brothers Pedregon have serious familial ties to the city of San Antonio and word had it that the whole crew was at the track to root them on to victory. And that’s what looked like what would happen. . . .
During Friday afternoon qualifying, brother Frank slammed the Von Dutch Dodge Stratus through the San Antonio traps to the association’s first Funny Car “Four” -- a 4.842/297.16.
Later that night Der Cruiser (Cruz P) made what might’ve been, pound-for-pound, the best run of the event, a blistering 4.765/321.12, featuring a speed that held up as Top Speed for anything until the Top Fuel final.
Where was Densham during all this? Comfortably hunkered down in the third spot, and hardly out of it, with a 4.849.
Once eliminations got underway, however, the wheels fell off the Pedregon bandwagon, as in no more fours. Densham’s Rich Amoral-tuned beast, though, sat down hard on the 4.8's and never looked back. A 4.874/297.29 dumped Terry Haddock’s '05 Monte Carlo; a semi-final 4.844/309.20 set back the “Cruiser’s” Advanced Auto Parts M.C.; and a final round 4.850/300.20 dumped an impressive Paul Lee’s “Science of Racing" 2002 Camaro.
If anything stood out in Top Fuel other than the efficiency and impressive rise of the Foley & Lewis Torco team, it was the off weekend for IHRA’s Godzilla, the Koretsky-Millican-Kloeber dragster. They never seemed to get their balance in what seemed like, at least in the daytime, ideal weather conditions.
Their first qualifying run was a tire-smoking 6.44, which was followed by an improved 4.79 that Friday night. Millican logged an eventual fourth, qualifying at 4.678. Yet all the while the champs were staggering around, racers like Foley (4.610), Bruce Litton (4.655), and Rick Cooper in the Foley & Lewis number two Torco dragster (4.659) were outpacing them in a reasonably tight 4.755-anchored field.
