Points leader Doug Kalitta urgently needed Sunday’s Top Fuel victory at the O’Reilly Auto Parts NHRA Northwest Nationals, for a number of reasons.

That it came against Antron Brown, his closest challenger, only made the accomplishment more satisfying.

Their two tool-company-sponsored, same-color-schemed dragsters were a yellow, red, and white blur as they ran virtually side by side down the Pacific Raceways 1,000-foot course.

Points leader Doug Kalitta urgently needed Sunday’s Top Fuel victory at the O’Reilly Auto Parts NHRA Northwest Nationals, for a number of reasons.

That it came against Antron Brown, his closest challenger, only made the accomplishment more satisfying.

Their two tool-company-sponsored, same-color-schemed dragsters were a yellow, red, and white blur as they ran virtually side by side down the Pacific Raceways 1,000-foot course.

Kalitta, in his Mac Tools Dragster, laid down what Brown called “a monster run” of 3.844 seconds at 318.84 mph.

Brown countered with a 3.887-second elapsed time at 311.70 mph in the Sandvik Coromant/Matco Tools, losing to Kalitta for the second time in as many final-round meetings this season.

Kalitta defeated Brown in March to win the Gatornationals at Gainesville, Fla. And that was his lone victory of 2014, despite advancing to seven previous final rounds. Meanwhile, Brown piled up five victories and had narrowed the gap to just 46 points. So Kalitta knew he had to start making the most of those money-round appearances . . . and not simply for the money.

The aggravation of not closing the deal had weighed on him a little.   

“It kind of makes you wonder,” Kalitta said. “I’m real proud of Jim O  [crew chief Jim Oberhofer] and all my guys on this Mac Tools car. They’ve got it running good. It’s a consistent car, and I’m just trying to do the best I can in that thing. The competition is tough out here. We’ve been banging on the door, trying to get another final and another win – and it couldn’t be at a better place than Seattle.”

He will take a 76-point advantage over Brown to the Lucas Oil Nationals at Minnesota’s Brainerd International Raceway in two weeks. But Brown promises he and his Brian Corradi- and Mark Oswald-led team won’t let down, not even now that they have a break from their grueling schedule of seven races in the past eight weeks.

"We'll just keep our heads down and get after it in Brainerd and Indy to end our regular season, and see if we can make some points up on those Kalitta boys and sneak around them before the Countdown starts,” Brown said.

"We're still in the fight, and we're not giving up. We are ready for a heckuva fight,” he said. “That was a monster blow by them today in the final round. We threw our best shot out there, and we thought it would be good enough to win. But they just threw a monster run out there. They got us this weekend. But that's all right - we'll be back."

And that’s what bothers Kalitta.

“Antron, he’s been winning all the time,” Kalitta said.

He indicated he didn’t see any sort of pattern to his runner-up finishes: “It was what it was. There was never a lack of effort and trying to make it happen, I can tell you that. Just getting to the final at these things, with the way the competition is in all the classes, in my opinion, is something you should be proud of. We’re just glad to get another win.”

He said his blueprint was “trying not to beat ourselves out there and trying to go rounds.”

But that almost happened in his semifinal race against another ambitious contender, Shawn Langdon, when he smoked the tires but won just the same.

“Running against Shawn there, I thought for sure he’d go blowing by me, because my car was spinning the tires and I was like, ‘Well, I’ll just run this thing and hope that it doesn’t blow up before the finish line.’ Fortunately it didn’t. But it was a plenty close race. It was a good day for Connie [his uncle and team owner, Connie Kalitta] out here. We’ll just drag it up to Brainerd and see what we can do.”     

With his 35th victory, Kalitta tied "Big Daddy" Don Garlits on the NHRA's all-time Top Fuel career-victories list. He needs five more to leapfrog Kenny Bernstein into the No. 4 spot.

“That is very cool. I’ve been keeping an eye on that one for awhile,” Kalitta said of the achievement. “It’s a big deal for me. He’s somebody I’ve looked up to and continue to look up to. So we’ve inched in to tie. That’s very cool.”

This marked the first time anyone from the Kalitta family, including Connie Kalitta and the late Scott Kalitta, had won at Seattle. Doug Kalitta said he had no clue why his family has had such a difficult time here at the track south of Seattle.

“I don’t know. It’s just one of those deals,” he said with a shrug.

“I knew we could do it as the day was unfolding,” Kalitta said. “It got pretty hot in the final, but the track stayed pretty good, both lanes. They’ve done a great job with the track this year. It seemed like one lane was better than the other in the past. It was pretty even out there, I thought. People were going back and forth between lanes with lane choice, and it was good.”

And so was that feeling he had when he posed for winners circle pictures with John Force (Funny Car) and Jason Line (Pro Stock) then headed down the road to the airport to fly himself home in his private jet.

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