EXTREME TEN-FIVE ELIMINATOR
With a limited contact patch, the narrow tire-equipped XTF racers faced a daunting challenge. The first qualifying session yielded but one car under 4.60 seconds, (Kenny Kneece’s South Carolina “Joker” nitrous-aided ‘63 Stingray), and simply leaving the starting line proved a difficult task. By the second period, six different cars hit sixty-feet ETs under 1.09 seconds and the final qualified field featured the top five qualifiers within six hundredths of a second led by Florida’s Gary White, (4.42/165.33), at the wheel of the infamous turbocharged inline six-cylinder Scion tC of Nero Deliwala and Titan Motorsports.
The finalists of the 2007 Battle For the Belts weighed heavily in the first round results. Michelle Wilson, whose nitrous-aided ‘00 Trans Am fell in the ‘07 World Championship final round, improved drastically to a 4.36/168.16 in the very first eliminations match and dropped the quickest of all 10.5 combatants, Mike Hill’s jade green ‘63 Stingray, by a scant twenty-six thousandths of a second. Steve Gorman, against whom Wilson’s Firebird would not fire in the BOTB final, took his “War Dog” Grand Am nitrous racer to a great 4.35/163.16 over Todd Moyer’s twin-turbo’d “Nitro Fish” ‘00 Trans Am. Bill Jewett’s ex-”Doctor Moon’s Rage” supercharged ‘04 Mustang had ripped to 172 and 173 mph speeds in qualifying and dropped a 4.41/176.42 bomb on David Sangster’s crowd-favorite (and now nitrous-injected) ‘65 Corvair and White pushed the Scion to a 4.36/170.73 over “Mad Man” Frankie Taylor’s supercharged ‘92 Camaro.
ADRL Norwalk ‘07 champion David Janes joined the “Thirty Club” with his Drag Illustrated Magazine-sponsored nitrous Grand Am in the second round with a 4.38/171.03 over Cory Wheat’s slick new Texas Cavalier and Gorman stepped up to a 4.34/163.81 over Shane Gray’s New Mexico-based nitrous ‘67 Nova. Wilson won a pedal fest against White and Kneece stopped Jewett with 4.46/167.24. In the semis, Gorman his second 0.004 RT of the event (!) and spun his way to a 4.68/120.04 against Kneece’s 4.37/170.21 but the Carolina ‘Vette redlighted by five thousandths of a second. Wilson’s contender status evaporated when her Pontiac again failed on the starting line against Janes’ 4.43/169.42.
In the final round, both teams were forced to take power out of their rides to compensate for what was guaranteed to be limited traction on ten and a half inches of rubber. Incredibly, both Janes and Gorman set up for nearly the same performances; the scoreboards in the final round flashed 4.411 seconds for both drivers. It was Gorman’s 0.012 RT which made the difference, placing thirty-nine thousandths of a second between the Texas and Missouri Grand Ams at the finish. Gorman has now won two of the last three ADRL events, both of which events were held in the Lone Star state!