TOPEKA, Kan. (MAY 31, 2009) At the O’Reilly NHRA Summer Nationals at Heartland Park Topeka, Larry Dixon snapped his “mini slump” and got back to winning ways with the Toyota-supported Al-Anabi Racing Top Fuel team of drag racing icon Alan Johnson.

“It’s great to do it again,” said Dixon, who last won six races ago, in Gainesville. “You might say that getting through the early rounds has been a little tough lately.”

Appearing in the semifinals for the first time since March, Dixon found himself a huge favorite to progress. No one else left in the competition – Toyota-supported Shawn Langdon, fellow rookie Spencer Massey, nor veteran Clay Millican – had ever won a Full Throttle Drag Racing Series event.

“This is such a great team that I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to do well, and, obviously, I haven’t been getting it done under pressure,” said Dixon, who set the Bristol track record two weeks ago, yet lost by car-lengths to Langdon with the worst reaction time of his career. “A lot of things you still worry about because you’re always trying to do everything perfectly, but after my little display a couple weeks ago in Bristol, Alan himself has ‘reprogrammed’ me this weekend, and just gotten me a little looser.”

Dixon, a four-time runner-up at this race and the 2003 winner, sailed through the preliminary rounds with unerringly consistent times. The former Top Fuel world champ, who established low e.t. and top speed here last year, posted a 3.98-second run against Steve Chrisman, a 4.00 opposite rival Cory McClenathan, and another 3.98 against young Massey, who has the ride in the Don Prudhomme/Snake Racing dragster that Dixon himself occupied from 1995 to 2008.

In the final, Dixon unloaded his best run of the day – a 3.97 for a come-from-behind decision over Millican, who owns six IHRA championships but has never won an NHRA event title.

Millican got a break in the semifinals when Langdon’s car failed to smoke the tires on the burnout, overheated the clutch and refused to go into reverse. In round one, Langdon had called on the reflexes that made him a world champion in Super Comp for an outstanding .032 reaction time and a holeshot win over Terry Haddock. In round two, he survived an all-Toyota showdown with red-hot Antron Brown in one of the closest races of the weekend, 4.03 to 4.04. The margin of victory was just three-thousandths of a second – that’s less than a foot and a half.

“That was close,” Langdon said. “Antron’s up there in the points and good on the Tree, and those guys have been hauling all year. I was in the other lane when he ran his 3.84 in qualifying, and it was plenty impressive.”

As it has for much of the 2009 season, Brown’s Toyota-supported Matco team outperformed everyone in qualifying. His 3.841 opposite Langdon in the Friday night session held up all weekend for low e.t., and his speed on the run, 315.71 mph, also topped the charts. Brown smoked the tires on every other qualifying attempt but rebounded with a 3.98 on his first-round single.

For the first time this year, there was a short field at a Full Throttle Drag Racing Series event, and, as the number 1 qualifier, Brown received a first-round bye. “High 3.90s are all you’re going to get out of this track,” Brown said. “Everybody knows it’s tricky this weekend. It’s the hottest, slimiest track we’ve seen all year, and if you try to run much better than that, you’re just going to smoke the tires.”

Not a single three-second run was made in all of Saturday qualifying. The oppressive heat and little cloud cover made tuning even more of a crapshoot in Funny Car, where all three Toyotas were out after two rounds of eliminations.

Defending world champ Cruz Pedregon, who once won this race three times in a row, red-lighted for his sixth straight first-round exit here. DHL/Kalitta Motorsports driver Jeff Arend, making the 100th start of his career, qualified higher than he has all year (a stout 11th) and had one of the better reaction times and quicker runs of round one, but still dropped a close one to “Fast Jack” Beckman, 4.25 to 4.32.

Even Del Worsham, Dixon’s Al-Anabi/Alan Johnson Racing teammate, didn’t get out of the quarter finals. Worsham, the hottest driver in drag racing with back-to-back victories in St. Louis and Bristol, made one of the best runs of eliminations in round one, 4.23, but lost traction almost immediately in round two opposite Tim Wilkerson, snapping a nine-round winning streak that’s the longest in the Funny Car class this year.

TOYOTA RESULTS, TOPEKA
TOP FUEL
LARRY DIXON, Al-Anabi/Alan Johnson Racing
Q2 3.859 sec./308.99 mph
R1 WIN (.071 sec.) 4.009 sec./285.71 mph
R2 WIN (.069 sec.) 3.983 sec./302.89 mph
R3 WIN (.080 sec.) 3.988 sec./302.01 mph
R4 WIN (.064 sec.) 3.971 sec./301.74 mph

SHAWN LANGDON, Lucas Fuel Treatment
Q8 3.952 sec./302.62 mph
R1 WIN (.032 sec.) 3.998 sec./299.93 mph
R2 WIN (.057 sec.) 4.034 sec./297.29 mph
R3 LOSS broke on burnout

ANTRON BROWN, Matco Tools
Q1 3.841 sec./315.71 mph
R1 WIN (.072 sec.) 3.981 sec./303.71 mph
R2 LOSS (.050 sec.) 4.044 sec./297.22 mph

MORGAN LUCAS, Geico Powersport/Lucas Oil
Q7 3.909 sec./301.40 mph
R1 LOSS (.081 sec.) 4.090 sec./251.06 mph

FUNNY CAR
DEL WORSHAM, Al-Anabi/Alan Johnson Racing
Q13 4.320 sec./277.37 mph
R1 WIN (.084 sec.) 4.237 sec./290.07 mph
R2 LOSS (.057 sec.) 6.268 sec./117.08 mph

CRUZ PEDREGON, Advance Auto Parts
Q5 4.194 sec./288.21 mph
R1 LOSS (foul) 4.367 sec./219.61 mph

JEFF AREND, DHL/Kalitta Motorsports
Q11 4.249 sec./291.82 mph
R1 LOSS (.066 sec.) 4.320 sec./285.77 mph

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