The same thing that’s plagued Annie Whiteley’s Top Alcohol Funny Car team all year struck again at the Ford Performance Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway: the clutch – or, more specifically, its periodic, unpredictable inconsistency.

“The clutch discs are wearing in the middle,” Whiteley explained. “It’s like we’re ‘clutch light’ [not enough counterweight]. We’re not. But it looks like we are. If we were, that would be something completely different. It’s not like it happens once every 10 runs – it’s more like once every five or six runs. It happened in the final round at Reading [where she blew the tires off and lost to Phil Esz after making five straight runs in the 5.40s], and it’s something we’ve got to figure out.”

Whiteley laid down one good qualifying lap after another, as she usually does, charging past the half-track mark at more than 210 mph and storming to a 5.511 at 265.12 mph right off the trailer. She followed with an unerringly consistent 5.52/264 and a steady 5.519/263.87 in last-shot qualifying that put her in the No. 6 spot entering eliminations but just a couple hundredths from No. 2.

A huge favorite in the first round against No. 11 qualifier Doug Schneider, Whiteley didn’t disappoint, trouncing Schneider, who competes infrequently and qualified with a career-best 5.59, by almost two full tenths of a second on the leave, .059 to .252. She pulled steadily away for a runaway win with a pass almost identical to her qualifying efforts, 5.52/262 while Schneider trailed with a distant 6.81/239.27.

It was in the quarterfinals that misleading clutch readings doomed the J&A Service/YNot team. It wasn’t that the car smoked the tires out of nowhere; it’s that crew chief Mike Strasburg didn’t have as much clutch in the car as he otherwise would have and that the car didn’t run what it should have. Whiteley got opponent Bob McCosh, who’s rumored to be moving to the fuel ranks next season, at the Tree with an excellent .039 light but he flat outran her, 5.49/262 to 5.54/263.

“Mike will say, ‘I think I know what it is,’ and then we’ll make a run and he’ll say, ‘That didn’t change it. That didn’t fix it,’ ” Whiteley said. “It’s bitten us several times this year, and it’s driving him nuts. It doesn’t make sense.”