Scelzi and Todd power way to championships

The quickest funny car field in the history of the National Hot Rod Assn. had no tolerance for “Driving Force” on Sunday.

John and Ashley Force? The stars of the reality television series were gone after the opening round of the CarQuest Auto Parts Winternationals, the first of 23 events in the Powerade Drag Racing Series.

Father and daughter Force captivated the Pomona Raceway crowd for three days as they tried to qualify for the race, Ashley’s first as a professional. But once they started racing Sunday after a morning rain delay, it was every man for himself.

Under cold, dark skies, Gary Scelzi defeated a disqualified Robert Hight in funny car, and J.R. Todd ran virtually unchallenged with a 4.482-second run at 324.48 mph against Brandon Bernstein to win in top fuel dragster. Three-time pro stock champion Greg Anderson won his third consecutive race at Pomona with a victory over Greg Stanfield.

The funny car ladder was fraught with peril. Scelzi, the 2005 champion who suffered through a miserable 2006 season, nearly disqualified himself in the quarterfinals. His Dodge Hemi engine dropped a cylinder and blew a header on the same side and Scelzi drifted within a hair of crossing the center line on a 4.752-second run, almost twice as quick as Eric Medlen in the other lane.

At the end of his semifinal against Mike Ashley, Scelzi buried the front of his Dodge Charger in the quarter-mile drag strip’s sand trap after his parachutes failed at the end of his 331.69-mph run. Twenty members from three Don Schumacher Racing teams went to work cleaning the car and changing the body.

Hight, driving a Ford Mustang from the John Force stable, ran the quickest time in NHRA funny car history in the semifinals, 4.646 seconds, but gift-wrapped Scelzi’s victory when he crossed the center line and knocked out the timing standard at 1,000 feet.

Scelzi ran 4.716 seconds at 332.26 mph with Mike Neff’s tuneup. Hight, who appeared headed for a hole-shot victory, eased at the end and was clocked at 4.726 seconds at 276.35 mph.

“The car is running extremely well. I don’t know a car out here that’s going down the track as many times as we did and run as quick and as fast as it has,” Scelzi said. “These events are so hard to win.... There are so many variables. To win one is fortunate, to win more than one is a great year.”

It was Scelzi’s 34th career victory, ninth in funny car, and he joins Don Prudhomme and Kenny Bernstein as the only drivers to win the 47th Winternationals in both nitro classes.

Hight, fighting the onset of flu, had the distinction of facing his sister-in-law, Ashley Force, in the first round. He ran a beatable 5.367 seconds, but Ashley experienced severe tire shake early in her pass and limped across the line in 8.195 seconds in her first professional lap.

Ashley, 24, initially said she made a bad decision by lifting off the throttle when she did, but she received reassurance from crew chief Dean Antonelli.

“He said there wasn’t a good chance of catching him, but there was a really good chance of completely destroying the motor,” she said. “So maybe I made the right decision. If you talk to Dad, he said, ‘Blow up everything you need to get down the track,’ but everyone on the team was like, ‘Don’t listen to him, you don’t want to catch yourself on fire.’ ”

martin.henderson@latimes.com