TAFC – CHARLOTTE
After perhaps the most consistent three runs any Alcohol Funny Car driver ever made anywhere and an even better one first round, Annie Whiteley blew the tires off second round. And it wasn’t just a barrage of E.T.s with the consistency of a metronome; it was all the progressive times, too. Thousands of horsepower to control and varying, ever-changing track and weather conditions to account for, yet every run looked exactly like the last one: smooth.
“I knew we were consistent,” Whiteley said, “but I didn’t realize we were that consistent. I never paid attention to the little numbers [the thousandths of a second]. You look back on it, and it’s like, ‘How did we do that?’ “
At each increment down the zMax Dragway quarter-mile, Whiteley’s times got infinitesimally quicker and faster as the race went on: 2.497, 2.491, and 2.490 to the 330-foot mark; 3.679, 3.673, and 3.668 to the eighth-mile; 209.98, 210.64, and 210.97 mph half-track speeds; and 1000-foot times of 4.683, 4.676, and 4.671 led to increasingly quicker E.T.s of 5.530, 5.522, and 5.520, the last of which left her No. 3 in the final lineup.
After progressively better reaction times of .077, .054, and .033 in qualifying, Whiteley left on first-round opponent Chris Foster, the former U.S. Nationals winner, by more than a tenth and got the best of a 5.50/266.58 (top speed of the meet) to 5.575/261.83 decision not nearly as close as the E.T.s alone would indicate.
In the quarterfinals, Whiteley, who scored here in 2018, faced three-time national event champion D.J. Cox, who won this race in 2016. That’s when the J&A Service/YNot team’s unerring consistency vanished, tire smoke billowed from behind the car, and the weekend ground to a premature, unceremonious halt.
“This car has kicked our ass a couple times now, hasn’t it?” she asked. “It takes the tire off and you think, ‘Why did that happen? There’s no way that should have happened.’ “
Now Whiteley and crew head west, where they’ve traditionally been at their best, ranked fourth in the national standings heading into the home stretch, just behind Bob McCosh and ahead of veteran Brian Hough.
“Fourth? That’s nice, but I never want to know where I am in the points,” Whiteley said. “I remember one year at Pomona [2015], right before we ran they told me, ‘If you win this round and the two other guys [Jonnie Lindberg and John Lombardo Jr.] lose, you win the championship by one point.’ I never want to know stuff like that. Who needs the extra pressure?”