Ron Krisher vividly remembers his fiery crash in the 2005 Northwest Nationals, and it flashed through his consciousness Sunday as he ran against Warren Johnson in the second pairing of eliminations.
 
Krisher eliminated Johnson, but he swears it's only by grace that neither one of them crashed. Rookie-of-the-year Shane Gray started the class' opening round by defeating V Gaines, but winning to him was less the issue than escaping without injury.
 
“Don't put the rest of them cars down that frickin' racetrack without doing something. It's just not right. You're going to hurt somebody. I won, but it's not right. I promise you -- you're going to hurt somebody,” Krisher pleaded. “Stop what you're doing. Stop the race. Do something with the racetrack.
 
“The first two cars were really in trouble,” he said, and continuing added, “was beyond dumb.” The track, he said, “looks like a hole-y road of some kind. The tires are just slappin' and bouncin' and spinnin' -- it's stupid. They need to spray the track. Don't just say there's nothing' wrong with the track. You put four cars down it, and everybody almost killed themselves.”
 
After top-end protests and calls for a halt to racing, starter Rick Stewart ordered Kurt Johnson and Jason Line, the next drivers in line, to shut off their engines. The remainder of the Pro Stock qualifiers towed back to the pits and waited until the Top Alcohol Funny Cars and Top Alcohol Dragsters ran and slipped into the program after the nitro classes' quarterfinal runoffs.

Ron Krisher vividly remembers his fiery crash in the 2005 Northwest Nationals, and it flashed through his consciousness Sunday as he ran against Warren Johnson in the second pairing of eliminations.

 
Krisher eliminated Johnson, but he swears it's only by grace that neither one of them crashed. Rookie-of-the-year Shane Gray started the class' opening round by defeating V Gaines, but winning to him was less the issue than escaping without injury.
 
“Don't put the rest of them cars down that frickin' racetrack without doing something. It's just not right. You're going to hurt somebody. I won, but it's not right. I promise you -- you're going to hurt somebody,” Krisher pleaded. “Stop what you're doing. Stop the race. Do something with the racetrack.
 
“The first two cars were really in trouble,” he said, and continuing added, “was beyond dumb.” The track, he said, “looks like a hole-y road of some kind. The tires are just slappin' and bouncin' and spinnin' -- it's stupid. They need to spray the track. Don't just say there's nothing' wrong with the track. You put four cars down it, and everybody almost killed themselves.”
 
After top-end protests and calls for a halt to racing, starter Rick Stewart ordered Kurt Johnson and Jason Line, the next drivers in line, to shut off their engines. The remainder of the Pro Stock qualifiers towed back to the pits and waited until the Top Alcohol Funny Cars and Top Alcohol Dragsters ran and slipped into the program after the nitro classes' quarterfinal runoffs.
 
“I got out of the car. I heard Warren screaming before I was even out,” Krisher said. “I was mad and I was shaking. I was absolutely shakin' when I got to the other end - I'm still shakin' . . . but he was out before me. He had everybody [officials] treed. He wasn't wrong. It would have been real damn easy to have somebody piled up out there -- I'm telling ya, really easy.”
 
Kurt Johnson, after chatting with his father Warren Johnson, assessed the conditions as “We're running on bee bees out there. There's absolutely no traction.”
 
At the center of the problem was track prep, more precisely the lack of it.
 
The normal procedure is for the track-prep personnel to spray traction compound on the racing surface after the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes run, but evidently that didn't happen to the fullest measure.
 
“You can see if they spray it. They didn't spray it,” Krisher said. “They just ran everybody out after the Funny Cars. We all know after the first round of (Top) Fuel and Funny Cars, if you don't do something with that track, you got all that clutch dust and all that crap. And you can't just say, 'Well, we're going to run it,' because it doesn't work. We used to do that, and we wrecked car after car 10-15 years ago.”
 
Referring to Dan Olson, NHRA's director of Top Fuel and Funny Car Racing, “Mr. Olson decides he ain't doin' it. Then when you confront Graham, you know what he does: 'I'll do what the hell I want and you guys can just go park.' I wish he'd come look at my [computer] graph. He'd understand. There is no racetrack from third gear to the end. None. Zero.
 
“I was a dumb-ass and kept going,” Krisher said.
 
However, he was concerned for his fellow racers. Moreover, he was angry at the NHRA's attitude, which he described as “Just tell people to just go to heck and race on it and if you don't want to race, go sit down.” Said Krisher, “That's baloney. If you're not going to do anything with it, then don't put anybody out there.”
 
A similar situation developed in February at Phoenix, spurred by two qualifying rollovers and driver allegations on Sunday of an unsafe surface at the national event. (The rest of the Phoenix Pro Stock eliminations carried over to the March Gatornationals at Gainesville, Fla.) That, coupled with the NHRA's admission a week later that it sprayed the wrong traction compound on the track there for a divisional race, undoubtedly emboldened the first four Pro Stock competitors Sunday to demand immediate fixes.     
 
“You had the potential to do the same thing out here. I promise you - you did,” Krisher said.
 
Greg Anderson, sarcastically calling the NHRA decision and reaction “brilliant,” said, “They were so lucky they didn't wreck those first two pairs. We go through it and go through it. It's just a broken record. You have to have glue for these guys -- have to, have to, have to. Period. End of story. We've gone through it a hundred times.
 
“They didn't spray the racetrack downtrack; last eighth-mile of the racetrack. We can't have that. We're going to crash cars. It's as simple as that,” Anderson said. “They think they can get away with not doing it. They can't.”
 
Kurt Johnson said his dad “about crashed. You know, you've got a $150,000 race car, and you're trying to put on a show. This is strictly entertainment. It's for the fans. Obviously there's competitiveness -- you want to turn on that win light and the sponsors are paying millions of dollars for that to happen. When you have the potential to do that and the conditions are not what they were the day before, it's tough.”
 
He said his father's qualifying runs in the left lane, one generally considered less desirable for Pro Stock cars, were “fairly nice.” However, he said, “This run here was absolutely out of control from second gear to the finish line. What went on that racetrack I don't know. It's obviously not the same track prep that we ran on yesterday. It's pretty tough to put on a good show when the track's not consistent.
 
“The car was out of control,” Kurt Johnson said of his dad's K&N Pontiac. “RPM (was) jumping up and down. Tires were not hooked up. It was ridiculous, like going out there on Wednesday afternoon, being a car that's never been down the racetrack before. It was just stupid. All I know is that it wasn't the same track we raced on yesterday.”       
 
The shame of it, Kurt Johnson said, was that “these conditions here should absolutely be perfect. You should see some 6.54s, 6.55s, a good show for the fans. These Pro Stock cars and these Goodyear tires that we have nowadays should go A to B with absolutely no problem. When they're shutting off, something's obviously wrong.”
 
Johnny Gray showed Krisher the computer printout from son Shane Gray's pass against Gaines. Seismic-calamity spikes danced all over the page. "Oh hell, that's way nicer than mine!" Krisher said.   
 
“You've seen me sideways and every way in the world. And you know, it doesn't bother me that bad,” Johnny Gray said. “But when my son turns sideways, that bothers me. That's a different deal.”
 
“I've got bad experiences with this joint anyway,” Krisher said. “I ate a car here, and I don’t want to eat another one.
 
“There's no point in going on and telling you there's nothing wrong with the racetrack and keep racing. What on Earth are we doing?!” Krisher exclaimed.
 
Krisher's assessment of the NHRA performance in this situation was “You don't know what the hell you're doing. That's pretty much standard.”
 
Johnny Gray said, “The last time I talked to Graham about track conditions for Pro Stock cars, he said, 'We can fix it. We can put wings on 'em where they will spin the tires.'”
 
“Baloney,” Krisher responded. “When they start in third gear, you can't put enough wing on 'em. You don't have enough tire speed to put the downforce on the car to do squat in third gear.”  
 
Kurt Johnson said, “We don't have wings that put down 10,000 pounds of force on the back end and do all that. Either we need to change or they need to change. This is how we make our living. We all need to work together.
 
“The ones who suffer are the fans. It's ridiculous,” Johnson added, extending empathy to the Phoenix fans. “They got screwed, too. That's why you don't see very many fans out there in the seats today. It's only 60 percent out there, and that's just not right. This is a great show that we have here (with) great spectator-driver communication. It's just not fair for the fans.”
 
Krisher's gripe included the notoriously quirky Pacific Raceways that years ago prompted frustrated Funny Car driver Scotty Cannon to declare, “Ray Charles could see there's bumps out there!”
 
The Warren, Ohio, driver said, “It's not a good racetrack. It's just not. Track's horrible. It's never any good. It's not a fair racetrack for anybody to race on.
 
“We've been promised for 10 years what they were going to do to fix it,” Krisher said. “It's got too many bumps in it. They don't even grind it. I could show you the bumps last year and where they were, and guess what -- same place this year. There's no starting line. You got about 30 feet and then 30 feet of nothing. The cars all spin out, and you got to screw around with transmissions in second gear to compensate what first gear not goin' anywhere. It'll start out, it's OK. Then it just goes straight off the end of the Earth. You need to do so many things different here to run fast.
 
“It's a mess,” he said. “We've raced on messes before. But you don't race on messes and risk hurting people. It's that simple.
 
“There's a bunch of guys upset because they couldn't run and don't know when they're going to run,” Krisher said before the class got the call back to the staging lanes. “But believe me, they're lucky. They were going to hurt somebody. We don't need to hurt anybody else.”  
 
Johnny Gray had an idea about what the class needs: “We need a bunch of Larry Morgan's buttons that say, 'You can't fix stupid.'”