Explosions often make great drag racing television, like when Alexis De Joria debuted her Tequila Patron Toyota Funny Car at the AAA of Texas Fall Nationals. Tempers can, too, such as Matt Smith steaming over a stuck throttle cable on his Buell.
Then there is the genuine emotional pain of failure sadly represented by the televised image of Karen Stouffer slumped over her GEICO Suzuki, raising her hands in despair, after an odd circumstance on the start led to her loss.
Heat also dominated interviews, like Cruz Pedregon explaining, "It's hotter than love out there," which won the "best description" award for the steamy conditions.
But then there are scenes that could not have been scripted for television any better, because they occur naturally. That was the outburst of pure joy as Bob Vandergriff — after finally conquering a Texas-sized streak of final-round losses in his C&J Energy Services dragster — ran back to the start line, still in his helmet and firesuit as temperatures soared near 100 degrees.
Why would anyone run back on a drag strip looking like a space alien in full race regalia when the air is so hot a sauna would be a relief? Vandergriff's draw to be with his crew and family — in the momentous moment following his smoking victory over favored Spencer Massey — overpowered any good sense or post-race protocol.
Protocol like, you park over here, you interview there, and this is the way to do it.
Vandergriff rewrote those rules in his foot-powered rendition of the Alan Kulwicki's "Polish Victory Lap" custom of circling a NASCAR track in reverse direction to celebrate a win. One could see and experience the emotion develop step-by-step as the initial shock of, "What's going on?" was replaced with a lump in the throat.
It was ESPN drag racing coverage at its best.
First, the two finalists spoke, as Massey related later, and he congratulated Vandergriff. His comment to the new winner was along the lines of "I wanted to win, but it is gratifying to see (Vandergriff) win."
The broadcast booth carried on, too, as Paul Page exclaimed, "This is a moment." His "This is cool" was a double entendre, also referencing their privileged quarters filled with air conditioning. Even their standard dress shirts and ties were gone, replaced with snazzy black short-sleeve shirts accented with white undershirts.
Any question of Vandergriff's physical conditioning needed to complete the return "run" was laid to rest when analyst Mike Dunn noted, "He's built like a brick building."
Finally, a cart drives up alongside and Vandergriff hops in. A viewer could see right on the screen the driver was about to turn around to the finish line, but Vandergriff was having nothing of that, and quickly the cart pointed to the start line.
They never made it.
By this time a crowd joining the team had moved en masse to about the 300-foot mark like a human tidal wave sweeping up Vandergriff as he crashed to shore. "I didn't want to be all the way down there by myself," he said. "I'm just so excited."
This scene of a lone drag racer wearing his full uniform, running back on a blistering hot race track, will forever be recognized infamously as the defining moment of the 2011 AAA of Texas Nationals.
The quarterfinal rounds in the second race in the Countdown to the Championship provided some of the most exciting, topsy-turvy drag racing yet this year. However, the single biggest race occurred in the opening pairing of Funny Car as Matt Hagan's Diehard Charger and Mike Neff's Castrol GTX Mustang met in the opening round.
Page made clear the result "could be the championships right here." With a lap featuring side-by-side power to the finish, the two teams did not disappoint as Hagan's holeshot win elicited this quip on television from the losing Neff: "I would have hit the gas about six-thousandths of a second earlier," when asked what he would have done differently.
Then in the quarterfinals, Hagan lost the opportunity to take over the Funny Car championship points lead as Melanie Troxel's In-N-Out Toyota surprised the cameras with her easy win. One wonders if Hagan's team might look back on the season and see this round as shades of the 2010 season-ending Pomona race when he also came up a few points short.
The "Do-or-Dunn" line displays his call on teams who still have a shot of winning it. Currently the line remains tucked behind No. 2 on the list in Pro Stock, Greg Anderson's Summit Pontiac — even after he was shockingly eliminated in the first round on a holeshot. Lewis Bloom, ESPN's "Statman," discovered the last time Anderson was eliminated with back-to-back holeshots was 2003.
When reporter Gary Gerould asked in the post-race interview what he needed to do to overcome these back-to-back losses, Anderson said only half-jokingly, "Prayer." He added that losing "just sucks."
Greg Stanfield made this suggestion for winning against the Summit Pontiac team before eventual race winner Jason Line beat Kurt Johnson in the finals: "Those Summit cars, they should have to take off a spark plug wire."
Pro Stock was a disaster field for Countdown entrants as seven were out in the first round - and another, Shane Gray, failed to qualify.
Nerves were a discussion topic of the day. Al-Anabi star Del Worsham answered the question, "Did butterflies accompany this pressure?" when describing his upcoming round against Massey: "No. These are Condors."
The Pro Stock Motorcycles have quickly become the most colorful of the four pro classes in the ESPN broadcasts. The pressure of riding one of these two-wheeled bullets at speeds of Pro Stock cars a few years ago continues to boil over like lava in a volcano.
In the quarterfinals, Michael Phillips' The Edge Suzuki "drilled Eddie (Krawiec) on the tree," stunning the Screamin' Eagle Harley rider. Dunn and Page agreed there is no love lost between these two teams.
Bloom later described Phillips' "Wally" as the 50th win for Suzuki since the comparisons began in 2004.
Next was a lap that should be a cinch for winning the closet finish of the season. Hector Arana Jr.'s Lucas Oil Buell was left on by Full Throttle Champion LE Tonglet astride his Suzuki, but Arana Jr. ran him down for the rousing one-inch victory.
Then the alligator hunter, Gerald Savoie, surprised Andrew Hines on his Screamin' Eagle Harley, and took the holeshot win on his 1985 Suzuki. Referencing back to the Charlotte race and words exchanged between these teams there, Page pointed out, "All that alligator stuff is still here."
Then came the weirdest laps of the day.
Smith's Buell was having throttle problems while Stoffer waited patiently on her GEICO Suzuki. Smith decides to stage and launch anyway; the quickness of what occurred caught Stoffer unaware. As a viewer, it appeared the light launched them the moment he pulled up. Dunn shouted, "What was that?"
The next round, now pairing against Arana Jr., Smith's bike has the same trouble, but this time the bike will not start. Arana Jr., though, was very alert to the situation and when given the direction to go, he left with Smith fuming on the line, his Buell still quiet.
Pro Stock saw monkeys removed from the shoulders of the two finalists. Kurt Johnson, resurrected with a new Mark Christopher Pontiac, gained his first back-to-back final rounds in years. Line's win removed the scowl from his jaws as he was celebrating with a "Yeah, baby!" before he ever made it out of the cockpit.
John Force Racing, suffering losses in early rounds and knocked out of contention for the day's win, could not be blamed for being down, except that's not the boss's way. He came out supercharged with, "I like a good fight."
Asked about the day's results, as the question to him implied "lousy," he barked, "You walk out of that trailer just like you've won," espousing the theory that you never let 'em see you sweat. He laid out how and why they could win the championship, right on the spot, giving clues to why he has 15 championships on the mantle.
The Funny Car class provided a satisfying win for Pedregon after qualifying strongly at a number of events. This weekend, as Dunn explained, "He went down the track in every session."
And Dunn should know, as he pays close attention to the numbers and then explains them back to the television audience in features such as the "Anatomy of a Sub-4 Second Run." In this feature, he explained every key marker of Hagen's record-breaking ET of 3.995 from the Charlotte race, including the insight that the car was setting a speed record at the 1/8th mile marker and finished with only seven cylinders.
Page noted the hectic nature of this race, the upsets and the surprising wins to Dunn several times during the day in various forms, but all were versions of, "I can't believe this day, Mike." He could have added, "And all of the iconic scenes that we're left with."
Pedregon's crew chief, Danny Degennaro in the post-winner's interview, provided the weekend's take-away, telling reporter Dave Reiff that as troubles came up, and heat was a problem, they tried to look at them in a different light.
"You always try to turn a negative to a positive."
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