The first round of pro qualifying at zMax Dragway on Friday brought a lot of firsts in official NHRA competition. But it also brought drag racing’s first blue light special.

The first four-wide qualifying sessions brought along a set of blue lights atop the NHRA’s christmas tree, adding to the confusion of many drivers here. With normal two-lane runs, staging is fairly simple. A driver focuses on the tree and the next lane.

But for four-wide racing, there is essentially another two-lane drag strip. NHRA added a tree to the second two lanes of track, and the blue lights indicate the pre-stage and stage progress of the two opposite lanes.   The first round of pro qualifying at zMax Dragway on Friday brought a lot of firsts in official NHRA competition. But it also brought drag racing’s first blue light special.

The first four-wide qualifying sessions brought along a set of blue lights atop the NHRA’s christmas tree, adding to the confusion of many drivers here. With normal two-lane runs, staging is fairly simple. A driver focuses on the tree and the next lane.

But for four-wide racing, there is essentially another two-lane drag strip. NHRA added a tree to the second two lanes of track, and the blue lights indicate the pre-stage and stage progress of the two opposite lanes.

So many drivers got in trouble on the start Friday watching lights and trying to figure out what they meant.

“My head’s in a cluster out there,” 14-time Funny Car champion John Force said. “I talked to my drivers, and I always joked in driving schools, the women do good. They drive their race cars like they’re going to market and they always seem to beat the men. It’s because they’re not all jacked up, and the men are thinking they know everything, and they’re trying to cut lights.

“That’s what I said to my drivers. Ashley said right off, ‘Dad, I do what you taught me: Amber, step. Doesn’t matter what everybody else is doing.’ And she’s right … to a point.”

Drivers spent the first qualifying session learning the starting system for the four cars, and clearly some didn’t have it figured out.

One driver that may have been confused was Funny Car’s Ron Capps, even as he set low ET for the first round in his NAPA Dodge..

“Capps said, ‘Well, Force, I was waiting for you to go in but the blue bulb didn’t light up,’” Force said.  “Well, the blue bulb’s for the other end. He got caught in it.”

Capps admitted as much, saying he was waiting for the traditionally long-staging Force to get to the line.

“I expected him to be last to roll in there,” Capps said. “He wasn’t. He was already in next to me, and I’m wondering why lights weren’t coming down. Jack (Beckman) and (Bob) Tasca were (to my left), so I was having a hard time seeing the little blue light.”

Capps said he planned to switch from an amber-colored face shield to a clear one to help see the lights better.
The blue lights were only one of the issues drivers faced Friday in a session Capps described as “hectic.” Force compared trying to understand running against three other cars to untangling a Rubik’s Cube.

Top Fuel driver Larry Dixon said he tried to block out the blue lights atop the tree.
“For me, those lights are a mile away from the ambers, which is what I’m looking at once you stage,” Dixon said. “You almost block it out. You just go up there like I’m racing (one guy).

“How I am and how I drive in the race car, the more I think about, the worse I am. Simple is better.”

That, Capps said, is easier said than done.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Just worry about the guy next to you,’” Capps said. “But to be honest, if a driver told you that, he or she would be lying. You’re constantly thinking about, ‘What’s going on over there?’”

The drivers who figure out the lights likely will be ones who do well this weekend. But there will be plenty of drivers who won’t figure them out.

“We have really got to focus on what we’re doing,” Force said. “You’re going to see red lights, you’re going to see people being dead late, you’re going to see a lot of confusion.

“I did it last year, and I thought, ‘I’ve got it figured out.’ But then they changed it with the two outside bulbs.”

And remember, this is after one round of qualifying. There are three left – and three more lanes to get used to.

“I want to make sure that when I go up there, my brain doesn’t start reading the bulbs backwards,” Force said.

Top Fuel driver Antron Brown also noted that the gamesmanship of staging won’t really start until Sunday.

“Everybody’s staging nice and lovely out there right now because it’s qualifying,” Brown said. “But when race day comes … it’s going to get real exciting. You guys might need to have some bodyguards at the other end to pull drivers off of each other because it’s going to be a battle royale at the other end of the track.”

But isn’t that what most fans want?