DRAG RACING WORLD FINALS : Amato Wins Top Fuel Classic Again

When Cragar withdrew its sponsorship of the National Hot Rod Assn.’s Top Fuel Classic this year, it left the drag racing all-star event without a name.

The Joe Amato Benefit Classic would be appropriate.

When the two-time world champion from Old Forge, Pa., stormed his 4,000- horsepower dragster to a split-second win Saturday over Frank Bradley of Santa Rosa, it was his fourth win on the Pomona Fairplex track since the event was added to the end-of-season program.

The one year Amato didn’t win, 1986, he lost in the finals to Don Garlits. In those five years, the Pennsylvania businessman-race driver has collected $187,500 from the all-star event only, counting the $50,000 he won with his 5.048 second and 280.37 m.p.h. run Saturday.

“About 100 feet from the finish line I was pretty sure I had Bradley by a couple of feet, but when you’re going 280 m.p.h., it’s hard to tell,” Amato said. “I was just concerned about getting to the finish line without something happening.”

The win also gave Amato a lift going into today’s Winston World Finals, last event of the 19-race NHRA season in which he is seeking to overtake Gary Ormsby of Auburn, Calif., to win his third championship.

“We’ve got to go three rounds more than Gary, it’s as simple as that,” Amato said, “but if we run as consistent as we did today, we have a chance. We may have a break in the draw, too, because if they both win in the first round, Ormsby has to meet Darrell Gwynn in the second round and Gwynn has the quickest car on the grounds.”

Gwynn ran a track elapsed-time record of 4.957 seconds for the quarter-mile during Thursday’s first round of time trials. Saturday, in the second round of the Classic, he lost to Amato but later discovered that he had a bad coil.

Curiously, Ormsby and Amato qualified at the exact same time, 5.053 seconds, but Ormsby has not had a good week. His qualifying run was the only one he completed in four tries. In Saturday’s final time trial he blew an engine in his 1990 model dragster that it is so new that it hasn’t been painted.

“I had no warning at all,” Ormsby said. “We broke an intake valve and the engine is history. It was a bad rehearsal, but we’ll be ready for a good performance Sunday. They never said it (winning the world championship) would be easy.”

It still wasn’t as bad as it has been for Ormsby on occasion this year. Twice, at Sears Point in Northern California and at Brainard, Minn., he crashed and demolished his car. Despite this, the 47-year-old automobile dealer holds a 573-point lead over Amato going into today’s final eliminations.

The margin was 572 when they arrived at Pomona, but Ormsby picked up one point by qualifying one position ahead of Amato. Although they tied with the same time, Ormsby won the tiebreaker with the faster speed of the week, 290.32 to 280.37. Ormsby’s speed, incidentally, was a Winston Finals record.

Ormsby will meet Michael Brotherton of Tulsa, in the first round, and Amato drew Earl Whiting of Montesano, Wash.

The top fuel champion will receive a $150,000 bonus at the NHRA banquet Monday night.

Three-time world champion Shirley Muldowney provided some late-afternoon drama when she wheeled her pink dragster to the line for her final qualifying attempt with the possibility of not making the 16-car field. She had smoked her tires in all three previous attempts.

Her last effort was good, however, as a 5.172-second run placed her No. 11. If she and hot-rodding’s other female top fuel driver, Lori Johns of Corpus Christi, Tex., win their first-round matches, they will meet in the second round.

They have met only once before, Johns winning in a side-by-side race last March in Houston.

Eddie Hill, who survived one of the most harrowing accidents in Fairplex history when he did a cartwheel with his 300-inch dragster during the Winternationals, was bumped from the top fuel field in the final session.

Mark Oswald of Cincinnati continued his domination of the funny car class at Pomona by running a track-record 281.77 m.p.h. in his Ford Probe after setting the elapsed-time record of 5.280 on Friday. It was the third time in the last four events that Oswald, the 1984 world champion, had been the fastest qualifier.

“Things have been falling into place very nicely over the last few weeks,” Oswald said. “Now we have to capitalize on our success in qualifying and turn it into a strong performance tomorrow.

Bruce Larson, who clinched the funny car championship and its $150,000 bonus two weeks ago in Phoenix, qualified his Olds Cutlass at 5.374, good for sixth position.

Perennial pro stock champion Bob Glidden lowered his two-day-old track record but got upstaged by Larry Morgan when the Newark, Ohio, veteran drove his Cutlass to a record 7.327-second run. Glidden, who had set the record of 7.342 on Thursday, ran 7.341 Saturday.

“We ran well, but obviously not well enough,” said Glidden, a 10-time pro stock champion from Whiteland, Ind. “We’re disappointed. We had hoped the conditions of the track would have improved, but they haven’t--at least not for us. It’s upsetting because we were confident coming in that we would be number one.”