Jim and Annie Whiteley both reached the TA/FC quarterfinals at the U.S. Nationals with middling qualifying performances, hard-fought first-round wins, and disappointing second-round defeats. Annie, a three-time Indy finalist, wound up No. 6 and trounced Christine Foster, winning an all-female first-round match for the second race in a row, and Jim, the 2013 TA/D champ, 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 beam, leaving him sitting there fully staged at a dead idle, totally defenseless. “I thought, ‘You’re in trouble now, Bob,’ as soon as I saw the Tree, but I tried to give him plenty of time to back out,” Jim said. “When he didn’t, I still waited a long time before I staged. He apologized on the top end but obviously he didn’t do it on purpose.”
A distracted .197 reaction time wasted McCosh’s fine 5.54, allowing Jim to win comfortably 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 covered Foster’s distant 5.74.
It was in the second round that things fell apart. After Jim fell to 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 like an instant after Sipos’ pre-staged light flickered, all four staged lights were on, the Tree came down, and she was caught flat-footed. “I thought, ‘Oh no,’ when I left,” she said. “Whenever you see the other car out ahead of you that early, you know you’re in trouble.”
Annie set sail after him and made her quickest and fastest run all weekend but couldn’t run him down. “I was thinking, ‘Come on, smoke the tires, smoke the tires,’ but he never did,” she said. “We upped my launch rpm for that run, and the clutch pedal pushed my foot off it when I went down on the throttle. I went right back down on it so the car wouldn’t didn’t roll through the beams, and, naturally, that’s right when the light came on.
“Maybe I didn’t have the pedal all the way down or maybe the air gap wasn’t enough for the increased rpm, but when I went to go back down on the clutch, I knew I was screwed right then. I seem to get behind when I roll in second – the quicker I get on the throttle the better my light is, and he got in there before me that time.” With a 5.48 at 266.11 mph, Annie was a hair slower than Sipos, who is making a comeback this year after more than 30 years away from the sport. “As soon I got out of the car, I asked [crew chief] Mike [Strasburg], ‘Is this going down in history as a holeshot?’ ” she said. “He said, ‘Nope. 5.480 to 5.481 – he was quicker, t