Mike Edwards and Allen Johnson have been like Siamese twins during qualifying lately. One tosses up a number and the other matches it.

Edwards, in his Penhall/K&N/Interstate GXP, drew blood in the first round of qualifying, but it was Johnson, in the Mopar/J & J Racing Avenger, who took the top spot at the end of the day in the cooling temperatures of a setting sun by a scant one thousandth of a second – 7.020 to 7.021 seconds. Johnson also had the fastest speed at 197.19 miles per hour.

“The conditions got a lot better,” Johnson explained. “I think the track temperature was 20 degrees cooler. (We) just put some gear ratio in there, revved it up and got after it. (The) track is pretty awesome.”

Last Sunday in Sonoma (Ca.), Antron Brown’s race day ended abruptly.

Brown, who drives the Matco Tools Top Fuel dragster, was upset by Terry McMillen in the first round.

Brown’s Don Schumacher Racing crew obviously has a short memory.

Brown rebounded to take the provisional pole Friday night at the Mile-High Nationals in Morrison, Colo., with a 3.961-second pass at 286.19 mph.

John Force raced to the qualifying lead in Funny Car Friday at the Mopar Mile-High NHRA Nationals at Bandimere Speedway near Denver.

Season points leader Force powered his Castrol GTX High-Mileage Ford Mustang to a 4.191-second run at 296.76 mph to move into position to claim his fifth No. 1 at this event, fourth of the season and 135th of his career. Qualifying continues Saturday with two sessions that will set the field for Sunday’s 11 a.m. eliminations.

“We really choked it down on the first run just to make it go A to B to see what would happen,” Force said. “At half-track I’m thinking, ‘This is almost embarrassing.’ But the crew chiefs are making the decisions and it’s very critical to get down there. Coming into this race No. 1 in the points put us at the rear of the pack [in the first session] and allowed us to watch the rest, then that run put us low and put us at the rear of the pack [in the second session] to watch the rest. (Del) Worsham stepped up and ran a great number, then we went out and did it and got it on speed.”

Frankie “Mad Man” Taylor has already put his brand-spanking-new, Larry Jeffers-built  ’05 Corvette through the spin cycle after adding it to his racing stable just a week ago.

The ADRL Pro Extreme ET record holder found an ignition problem in the car that surfaced only during the hard acceleration of a launch, so yesterday, just one day prior to the big double-race weekend at Houston Raceway Park, Taylor and crew visited nearby Houston Motorsports Park for a quick shakedown. Trouble was, the track was soaked with rain.

Gary Gardella, an Import Drag Racer hailing from Jackson, New Jersey, was taking Import Drag Racing by storm in 2007.

A champion that year, with backing from Red Bull, Dupont, and General Motors, it looked like he and his team would be contenders in drag racing for years to come.

Unfortunately, near the end of the same year, everything changed.

After about a decade-long run, with the National Import Drag Racing (NIRA) series its predecessor, the NHRA folded their sport compact division, leaving Nopi, a rival series with similar rules and regulations, the lone series in the discipline. But, only a few months later, Nopi folded, leaving all competitors seemingly out in the cold.

Joshua Smith is your typical seven year old boy.

He has a favorite football team in the Washington Redskins and a relentless admiration for cartoon superheroes. He is the grandson of Pro Stock crewman Gary Futrell, a member of Robert Patrick’s team.

He also has a brain tumor; categorized as Glioblastoma Multiforme, it is one of the most aggressive of brain tumors.

It was hard enough for John Force, steeling himself to justify leaving wife Laurie to tend by herself to chores such as potty-training three children and household maintenance, then to school schedules and teenage-daughter drama, while he went out an raced cars around the country. But youngest daughter Courtney admittedly wasn't much help sometimes.

 
"As much as I loved racing, if I couldn't be there, I wasn't happy. I didn't want my dad to be there, either," she said. "I remember Dad would be gone, especially on things like the Western Swing. He'd be gone for three weeks and [we] never saw him. It was hard on us. We were always excited when my dad got home. But it was the hardest watching him leave, walk out the door. And who knows the next time you were going to see him? Especially when he gets into his race car, it's a lot harder. He knows he's not exactly safe in the car.

Whether it was coincidence or not, John Medlen’s timing with Don Schumacher Racing’s Diehard Funny Car could not have been any better.

Shortly after joining DSR in mid-March to serve as co-crew chief with Tommy Delago on the car driven by Matt Hagan, the team started winning.

Hagan reached the winner’s circle at O’Reilly Auto Parts NHRA Spring Nationals in April at Houston and then he won again at the United Association Route 66 Nationals in June in Chicago.

“Anytime you bring a guy in like John Medlen, your team is going to benefit from it, and we saw the benefit from him,” said Hagan, who is competing in the Mile-High Nationals in Morrison, Colo., Friday through Sunday. “We won two races and the first day he was onboard we set a mph record. John, though, really didn’t change anything in our program; he just massaged it a little bit. The biggest thing I saw personally was that John was helping us with calls on the race track. He was really reading the race track and stuff like that.”

Justin Lamb has developed a penchant for winning drag races.  More specifically, NHRA Lucas Oil National Events, as the 23-year old college student just earned his eighth coveted national event “Wally.”  More specifically yet, Lamb has a penchant for winning NHRA National Events along the vaunted Western Swing, the annual stretch of back-to-back summer events in Seattle, WA, Sonoma, CA, and Denver, CO.
 
Lamb’s first NHRA title came in Sonoma, back in 2007 when he defeated Sheldon Gecker for the Super Comp crown.  Last season, he kicked off his Western Swing with a Super Stock victory in Denver, and capped it two weeks later with a near double in Sonoma.  There, he won the Super Comp category for a second time, and took runner-up honors in Super Gas.

Mike Neff is used to challenges.

The championship nitro tuner turned driver returned tuner is faring well in his bid to put one of drag racing’s most prolific racers in the championship hunt. Considering 14-time NHRA Funny Car champion John Force was the first to clinch a Funny Car Countdown to 1 berth, suffice to say, Neff has been an asset to the already colorful tuning crew comprised of the likes of Austin Coil and Bernie Fedderly.

At this weekend’s NHRA Mopar Mile High Nationals Neff will have to rise to the challenge of 5,500 feet when it comes to tuning Force's Funny Car.

Not to worry, Neff already has a plan.

“Denver is a challenge,” Neff admitted. Neff hasn't won at Denver as a driver but in 2006 he tuned Gary Scelzi to victory. “Our strategy is going to be to try to make as much power as we can.

“That’s the problem with Denver. It’s a mile high, roughly 5,500 feet elevation and it’s just hard to make power. We’re going to try to make sure we’ve got the engine tuned up and we’ve done our homework on that. To make sure we’ve got good power will be the first task and then making sure you can make it run on eight cylinders. The trickiest thing going into Denver is trying to get the engine set-up correctly.

“That’s the biggest challenge of the year just because the conditions are so different and you never really know for sure. You’re not really comfortable until you get started and you just have to hope for the best. That’s one place where you’re just happy when it’s over so you can get back down and race in the normal conditions.”