Schumacher Speeds Up His Coronation

In a sport that measures wins and losses in fractions of seconds, Tony Schumacher displayed a massive power surge in his top-fuel dragster Friday with a 327.03-mph run during qualifying for the 35th Auto Club NHRA Finals at the Pomona Fairplex.

His speed is the fourth fastest in drag racing history--Schumacher also had the three faster runs--and virtually assured the Park Ridge (Ill.) driver of his first Winston Drag Racing championship when the season ends Sunday.

Schumacher set drag racing’s all-time speed record, 330.23 mph, at Phoenix in the second National Hot Rod Assn. event of the year. That put the little-known driver in the spotlight, but for most of the season he struggled with half a dozen others to catch early leader Mike Dunn. When the series reached Brainerd, Minn., for the Colonel’s Nationals, Schumacher was fifth in points.

He qualified 10th there, in the bottom half of the draw, and had to race Dunn in the first round.

By less than the blink of an eye, .002 of a second, he sidelined Dunn. In the next event, the U.S. Nationals, the draw brought Schumacher and Dunn together again in the first round. This time Schumacher’s margin was .012, but it enabled him to move into first place for the first time.

“First rounds are the toughest thing on Sunday,” Schumacher said after his track-record run Friday. “If you lose, you can get buried and you have to watch the other guys pick up 20 points a round. What has saved me is the consistency that Dan Olson, my crew chief, builds into the Exide dragster.

“We have not failed to qualify in 22 events this year and that consistency has paid off with the lead. When you’re as consistent as we have been, you put pressure on other people to push, and pushing can lead to mistakes.”

Schumacher, 29, needs only to make Sunday’s 16-car eliminator field to clinch his first top-fuel championship. He has a 109-point lead over defending champion Gary Scelzi, who ran a 4.570-second elapsed time Friday to take the No. 1 provisional starting position, just ahead of Schumacher’s 4.574.

“You’ve also go to be lucky, although Dan adheres to that theory that hard work makes luck,” Schumacher said. “At Memphis, where we pulled ahead of the field, we only had two qualifying rounds because it rained and we didn’t get a time in the first round. If we’d missed there, it would have been a diaster, but we got a strong run and qualified second.

“Unless you’ve been through something like that, you can’t imagine what it’s like. Little things like that have to all add up, and if you’ve had enough of them, you have a good year. We’ve been very fortunate, but the way I look at it, it’s all because of Dan and his crew.”

Although Tony’s father, Don Schumacher, was a champion funny car driver, winning the American Hot Rod Assn. championship in 1973, he didn’t push his son into the sport.

“I was only 5 when he retired, so I didn’t hang around the guys,” Schumacher said. “When I was 16, I had a [Pontiac] Trans Am street car that I took to the local tracks. I still wasn’t hooked until I went to Frank Hawley’s drag racing school in Florida and he became a great influence in my career.”

Hawley later moved his school to Pomona.

“When I told my dad that I was planning on becoming a drag racer, he told me there are a lot better jobs, that it was very difficult and you have to give everything else up to succeed,” Schumacher said.

After 10 years in racing’s minor leagues, Schumacher moved into NHRA top fuel in 1996 with the Peek Brothers’ team, but like so many teams these days, it folded last year in midseason.

“We had 21 days before the [U.S.] Nationals and my dad put together a deal with Exide and we formed a team in time for the meet,” Schumacher said. “He had done a lot of business with their CEO and talked them into becoming a sponsor.”

A side effect of this year’s winning season for Schumacher will be his entry in today’s 15th annual Big Bud Shootout, a showdown among the eight best top-fuel qualifiers this season, the winner taking home $50,000. Schumacher will race Larry Dixon of San Diego, who will be in Don Prudhomme’s top fueler.

Other pairings for the noon event are Scelzi-Kenny Bernstein, Joe Amato-Dunn, and Doug Kalitta-Cory McClenathan, who replaced the injured Eddie Hill.

Schumacher’s father is still involved with the Exide team as the car owner. As Tony explains it, “Dan orders the parts, dad pays for them, the crew assembles them and I drive them.”

Sounds like a winning combination.