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Sustained by a cadre of family and longtime friends at the Texas Motorplex, where she’s tasted more than her share of success in a distinguished nine-year Top Alcohol Funny Car career, Annie Whiteley absorbed a grating second-round defeat at the 2020 NHRA Fall Nationals. The YNot/J&A Service driver, part of the quickest side-by-side race in Top Alcohol Funny Car history in the 2017 final here, scorched the quarter-mile with a 5.426 at 274.00 mph under the lights Friday night – top speed of the session by nearly 6 mph and 1/250th of second from low E.T. of the entire event.

“I always liked this track,” the onetime Texan said following a booming 5.47 at 272.01 mph (top speed of that session by 2 mph) Saturday in the only other qualifying session under the stilted two-shot pandemic qualifying format. “We usually do pretty well at this race, there are usually a lot of people here, and it’s just always felt like home to me.” Entering eliminations in the No. 2 position, Whiteley, who established top speed here for the third time in the past four years, trounced surprise Winternationals winner Aryan Rochon in the opening round, 5.52/269 to the Florida driver’s distant 5.89/247.

The wheels came off in the quarterfinals when Whiteley, who won the Central Regional here last year with low e.t. and top speed of the meet, was nipped by two-time NHRA national event winner Kris Hool despite running slightly quicker, 5.50/270.27 (top speed of the round) to 5.54/260.91. In the lights the cars were separated by just 14-thousandths of a second, about five feet.

“I think this is the first time I’ve ever pouted after losing a race,” Whiteley said with a laugh. “It sucks. I just didn’t feel right up there. I’ve been holding my foot differently to get a better light, and that time I just didn’t have a good one.”

In her first official outing since the COVID-19 pandemic brought NHRA drag racing to a standstill, defending event champ Annie Whiteley just missed back-to-back titles at the Texas Motorplex, dropping an ultra-close final-round bout against the toughest possible opponent, 2018-19 Top Alcohol Funny Car world champ Sean Bellemeur.

“It feels like it’s been a year since we were at the track,” Whiteley said, “and I’ll admit it – I was a little nervous. The whole routine … ‘Am I going auto remember everything?’ You don’t know till you do it. But once they started the car, it was like, ‘I got this.’ ” She definitely did, qualifying No. 2 with a 5.52 at 268.60 mph en route to yet another final-round appearance on the all-concrete Motorplex surface.

Masked like everybody else in the oppressive Texas heat, Whiteley’s YNot/J&A Service team, led my crew chief Mike Strasburg, headed to the line for the first round against former national event finalist Steve Burck. They slowed to a still-good 5.58/267, but it was more than enough to subdue Burck’s 5.70/259 and set up a semifinal showdown with early season points leader Doug Gordon.

That one went much easier than expected when Gordon got caught looking at the tach as his car inched from the pre-staged beam to the staged beam while he was trying to figure out why the throttle pedal wouldn’t move. (The blades froze up in the injector.) Gordon was still looking down when the tree came on, and Whiteley was long gone with her quickest run of the weekend to that point, a 5.51/268, for a surprisingly easy round-win, her fifth in a row at this event. “He went to bring the RPMs up and was trying to get the blades to open and didn’t realize he’d bumped in and lit the light,” she said. “When he looked up at the Tree, it was already on.”

A couple hours later in the final, Whiteley cut her best light of the day and made her best run all weekend but still fell just short of the vaunted Bellemeur/Boggs/Bartone juggernaut, which got the best of by far the best race of the entire event, 5.494 to 5.496. “The tire was just stuck to the track or we would’ve run better,” she said. “It was a good race. We both had .960 60-foot times and when I got down there – I never look over in the other lane – I was saying, ‘Come on. Did we, did we?’ We came so close to winning – I never saw him – but even though we didn’t quite win, it was still nice just to be back at the track.”

After sitting around staring at each other for days, Annie Whiteley and the J&A Service/YNot team sprang into action when the call to the lanes for the first qualifying session, finally, mercifully, went out and ended up winning the race with a dominant performance. Half of the quickest side-by-side race in Top Alcohol Funny Car history at this track a year and a half ago – 5.37-5.38 opposite Doug Gordon in the 2017 Fallnationals final – Whiteley qualified No. 1 with a 5.52 at 269.40 mph, top speed of the meet by more than 5 mph to that point.

“We all knew going in that the weather was going to be a problem this weekend,” said Whiteley, who had to jet back to Colorado in the interim to help keep J&A Service running smoothly. “They kept moving the schedule around because the weather kept changing. Originally, we were going to qualify on Friday and race on Saturday, but, naturally, everything changed, so our first qualifying run was Thursday night at 7:00, which meant that we had to be there on Wednesday to test. Then we sat and sat and sat and it would rain just enough to keep us from running. [Top Alcohol Dragster team owner] Randy [Meyer] was kind of running everything, and he’d stop at every pit when the weather let up run and ask, ‘You guys ready?’ and we’d wait till everybody was ready to run and then go up to the lanes. We all just wanted to get this done.”

When former Division 2 champion Mark Billington was unable to show for the first round of eliminations three days later for the rare Monday race day start, Whiteley singled to a 5.54/268 that almost certainly would have advanced whether the veteran Billington or anybody else had been lined up in the next lane. Qualifying No. 1 in a six-car field meant that when three cars were still around for the semifinals, she’d the one with the bye into the final. Again, she pounded out a run that nobody could’ve handled anyway, a 5.49/268 (low e.t. of the meet) that afforded the team lane choice for the final against one of the more prolific drivers in alcohol racing history – Jay Payne, who’s racked up nearly 100 national and divisional/regional wins in a career that dates back to the 1960s.

For the event title, Whiteley left on Payne and screamed down the track with the second-quickest and second-fastest run of the entire weekend, behind only her semifinal numbers. Payne, after reeling off back-to-back-to-back times of 5.54, 5.54, and 5.55, pushed too hard and smoked the hoops to a nine-second time and settled for runner-up. With a 5.497 at 269.13 mph that trailed only her own 5.495 from the semifinals and 269.40-mph qualifying charge for low E.T. and top speed of the meet, Whiteley picked up her first win of the season and the 14th divisional/regional victory of her eight-year career.

Throwing the chutes at nearly 270 mph like she has a million times before, national record holder Annie Whiteley had no idea she was seconds away from a terrifying trip off the end of the track. Whiteley, who narrowly lost the Fallnationals Top Alcohol Funny Car final to Doug Gordon last year, barely lost to him again in 2018, this time in the second round, but another narrow loss was the least of her problems.

The YNot/J&A Service Camaro’s parachutes never blossoming and instead becoming entangled and flailing behind the car as Whiteley careened through the shutdown area and the sand trap grew closer and closer by the second – that was the problem. “I’ve never been through anything like that before,” she said. “The end of that track really comes up at you fast. It’s hard to make yourself let go of the brake handle, but that’s what you have to do or the brakes will lock up and the car will just start bouncing.”

The onboard data recorder revealed just how fast Whiteley was still going when she first went for the brakes: 250 mph. “I didn’t know if I won or lost; I just knew I didn’t want to get into the sand and tear up the car,” said Whiteley, who crossed the finish line at 269 mph just 34-thousandths of a second behind Gordon. “At some point I knew I was going into the sand, and I just wanted to get stopped before I hit the net, but I was still going so fast when I hit the sand there was no way I was going to miss it.”

“When I saw her come out of the [roof] hatch, I knew she was OK,” a relieved Jim Whiteley said. “The body is junk and the chassis is going to have to be front-halved, but most of the running gear can be swapped straight into the new car and we should be ready by the first Vegas race [Oct. 26-28].” Annie, currently third in the NHRA national standings and clearly in line for yet another Top 5 finish, will wrap up the season at the Toyota Nationals in Las Vegas, the Las Vegas regional a week later, and the NHRA Finals in Pomona, Calif., the week after that.

At the Texas Motorplex, where last year she became the first Top Alcohol Funny Car driver in history to hit 275 mph, Annie Whiteley landed in another final round, this time at the track’s Central Regional event. Leading the standings following a victory at the only previous regional, the season-opener in Belle Rose, La., Whiteley advanced to the final round again only to fall to upstart Kirk Williams when she lost traction not far off the line.

The perennial Top 5 driver qualified No. 1 for the fourth time in four starts this year with a 5.52 at 267.16 mph and ran nearly as quick in a first-round win over Bryan Brown despite dropping a valve as she went into high gear and losing 10 mph. “It was weird,” she said. “It dropped the number 7 valve right at the 2-3 gear change. I thought I hit the rev-limiter – that’s exactly what it sounded like. We didn’t realize at the time how much damage was done; we just swapped in another motor for the semi’s. Later we saw that the top of the valve was jammed sideways in the combustion chamber.”

On Whiteley’s semifinal burnout, the car slid to the left and she had to take corrective action to avoid disaster before the run – a bye – even began. “I stood on it in the burnout and all of a sudden I wondered if I was about to hit the Tree,” she said. “It was almost like everything was happening in slow motion – ‘There’s the Tree, don’t hit it’ – and you’re on a bye run. All I had to do to win was get down the track, so I got off the throttle, backed up, and just tried to make a normal run.” It turned out to be anything but – she barely made it off the line. “Apparently, the new motor made a lot more power than the one that was in there for the first round. It was a bye run so I couldn’t lose – I thought – and it was really hopped up.”

Everything was calmed back down for the final, but it didn’t make any difference – Whiteley’s car never made it out of low gear. She went up in smoke and coasted across the finish line at 95 while the underrated Williams drove away to a 5.57 for his 19th career divisional/regional title.