Jim and Annie Whiteley both reached the quarterfinals at the U.S. Nationals with hard-fought first-round wins, middling qualifying performances, and disappointing second-round defeats. Annie, a three-time Indy finalist, trounced Christine Foster to win an all-female first-round match for the second race in a row, and Jim, the 2013 Alcohol Dragster champion, upended No. 2 qualifier Bob McCosh in a weird one.
Well before Jim approached the starting line, McCosh unintentionally double-bulbed when a teammate inadvertently stepped into the beams, leaving him fully staged and totally defenseless at a dead idle. “I thought, ‘You’re in trouble now, Bob,’ when I saw both lights come on, but I left him plenty of time to back out and start over,” Jim said. “When he didn’t, I still waited a minute before I rolled up there. On the top end, he apologized, but, obviously, that was the last thing he was trying to do.”
A distracted .197 reaction time squandered McCosh’s fine 5.54 and allowed Jim to advance with a much slower 5.63. Meanwhile, Annie claimed a more conventional win over Ms. Foster, one half of Top Alcohol Funny Car’s otherhusband/wife team, drilling the Tree for a .029 reaction and driving away with her best run of the weekend to that point, a 5.51 that easily covered Foster’s distant 5.74.
It was in the second round that things fell apart for both YNot drivers. Right after Jim fell to Christine’s husband, 2012 Indy winner Chris Foster, 5.49 to 5.56, Annie found herself a car-length behind returning veteran Stan Sipos right off the line. What seemed an instant after Sipos’ pre-staged light flickered, all four staged lights were on, the Tree came down, and Annie was caught flat-footed. “I thought, ‘Oh no,’ as soon as I left,” she said. “Whenever the other car’s that far out ahead of you that soon, you know you’re in trouble.”
Annie set sail after Sipos and made her quickest and fastest run all weekend but couldn’t run him down. “I was thinking, ‘Come on, just smoke the tires,’ but he never did,” she said. “We upped my launch rpm, and the clutch pedal pushed my foot back when I went down on the throttle, and it really messed me up. I went right back down on it so I wouldn’t roll the beams, and, naturally, that’s right when the light came on. Maybe I didn’t have the pedal all the way down and maybe the air gap wasn’t enough for the increased rpm, but when I had to go back down on the pedal, I knew I was screwed.”