J.R. Todd may be bucking for rookie of the year honors, but he passed on a valuable bit of information to new teammate Steve Torrence, who was making his Top Fuel debut this past weekend at VMP. “If you want to be on television, you have to do something spectacular.”

Torrence took his advice. On the heels of a 4.656 elapsed time, the defending Top Alcohol Dragster champion pulled the parachute release lever only to have the ‘chutes blossom and then fly away from the car, sail over the retaining wall and land in the grass beyond.Torrence stood on the brakes to slow the car, and it came to a stop just short of the sand. The interesting part of the scenario is that Torrance had no idea what had transpired behind him.

J.R. Todd may be bucking for rookie of the year honors, but he passed on a valuable bit of information to new teammate Steve Torrence, who was making his Top Fuel debut this past weekend at VMP. “If you want to be on television, you have to do something spectacular.”

Torrence took his advice. On the heels of a 4.656 elapsed time, the defending Top Alcohol Dragster champion pulled the parachute release lever only to have the ‘chutes blossom and then fly away from the car, sail over the retaining wall and land in the grass beyond.Torrence stood on the brakes to slow the car, and it came to a stop just short of the sand. The interesting part of the scenario is that Torrance had no idea what had transpired behind him.

“I don’t know who to attribute that one to,” Torrence said. “I think all the crew guys got a kick out of that. I got the car stopped and I’m so much of a rookie that I didn’t know that anything had happened. I got on the radio with [crewchief] Jimmy [Walsh] and I told him that thing didn’t stop worth a darn. The crew was saying something about the parachutes and I told them…yeah - they didn’t work too good. “Then I looked back there and there was an empty space. It was pretty alarming after the fact.

“It was the quickest run I had ever made by a tenth. The car left kind of weak but got strong in the middle. It dropped a hole about 900 feet out and another a little further down.”

Did Todd have this scenario in mind when he made the “spectacular” suggestion to Torrence?

“It goes back to Denver when I asked Mike Dunn what I had to do to get television time,” Todd admitted “He told me that I either had to catch on fire or go in the sand. I went into the sand. I told Steve those were his options.

“He went out on his own with the parachutes.”