Laced with the lore of legends, the 50th NHRA Gatornationals added more memorabilia to its scrapbook this past weekend.

On hand at the Amalie Oil-sponsored Florida classic were eight selected drag-racing pioneers who took nostalgic but competitive runs down the Gainesville Raceway in Toyota Camrys.

The event was a peek at the future, too, with Top Fuel rookie Jordan Vandergriff challenging eventual runner-up Clay Millican for a spot in the semifinal round and challenging fellow-23-year-old class newcomer Austin Prock to a T-shirt sales battle. (The loser has to wear the winner’s promotional T-shirt at next month’s Houston race.) Megan Meyer, 24, earned the Top Alcohol Dragster victory and set low elapsed time and top speed of the meet. The Top Alcohol Funny Car trophy went to still-youthful-at- age-37 Sean Bellemeur, on the 10th anniversary of his mother Nancy’s passing.

Twenty-one-year-old Jianna Salinas made her debut in a Pro Stock Motorcycle class that featured no fewer than eight females competing. She missed the cut, as did veteran Steve Johnson and five others, but her family posted on the Scrappers racing Facebook site, “Not only did she impress us with her skill, but her grit and determination to get to this point. This is only the beginning of a very bright career.” Her older sister Jasmine, 27, broke into the Top Alcohol Dragster class, qualified eighth, and fell to Josh Hart in the opening round. “Much like Jianna, the outcome of the race could never take away from the pride the entire Scrappers Family has watching her kick off what will be a successful season and career,” her family said.  

And Drew Skillman, 31, the 15-time Pro Stock winner, won the Factory Stock Showdown season-opener in his first go in the category and ran the quickest-ever E.T. in the class in the semifinal round at 7.718 seconds.

A tapestry of stories made the 50th Gatornationals as memorable as each of the previous 49. Here are a few of the threads woven through the picture:

ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE AND DRAG RACING – Relationships took their turns in the spotlight. Matt Smith won his first-round match-up with wife Angie in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class. And points leader Bo Butner won the Pro Stock trophy Sunday, matching fiancée Randi Lyn Shipp’s from the Stock Eliminator final the night before. 

ANDERSON RACES WITH HEAVY HEART – Exactly one week since the passing of his father, Rod Anderson, Pro Stock multi-time champion Greg Anderson made it through the first round of eliminations. But his quest for a semifinal-or-better finish ended in the quarterfinals Sunday against Alex Laughlin. That extended to eight the number of races Anderson has gone without advancing past the second round. He said he had hoped that a satisfying pre-Gatornationals test session at Orlando Speed World Dragway would help eliminate his race-day stumbles. But he’ll have to take what he called his “best Summit Racing Chevy I’ve had in a long time” to Las Vegas in two weeks for a new roll of the dice.

Despite not gaining his 800th round-win Sunday at the track where he recorded his milestone victory No. 75, Anderson did qualify No. 2 in his Summit Racing Chevy Camaro in the No. 2 spot with the event’s top speed of the event. He also earned bonus points in each qualifying round for a total of six.

Meanwhile, he and his family have other matters to address. Anderson lost his father, Rodney Anderson, 85, Sunday, March 10.  The family issued this statement: “We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Rodney Anderson, husband to Joan and father to Terri, Greg, Steven, and Jeff. Rod left this life on Sunday, March 10, 2019, at the age of 85.  ‘He was my hero and the one who got me started in racing,’ said his son, Greg. ‘He was a man that never had an enemy – a great man loved by all. He will be greatly missed.’ In lieu of flowers, the family respectfully asks that donations be made to the American Heart Association.” The Anderson family said it will have a private celebration of life soon.

BIKER HALL GIVES IT A SHOT– John Hall, the Hamden, Conn., Pro Stock Motorcycle racer, was on the DNQ list this weekend, but given the competition and his own budget and inactivity during the winter, he wasn’t beating himself up about it.

“It’s a tough field, if you look at everybody that is out there. Almost everybody [has a time when the don’t] qualify,” Hall said.

Going into the Gatornationals, he said, “we’re not thinking about Sunday. We’re thinking about Friday and Saturday and just making some clean runs and getting qualified. That’s an accomplishment in itself.” He had said, “I’m hoping that I’m thinking about Sunday on Saturday night. That’s our main goal, to be able to run on Sunday. There’s a lot of great equipment out there, a lot of great riders out there. . . . We’re taking a shot at it.”

Gann keeps Hall’s motorcycle in North Carolina at his shop.

“My motors are kind of outdated. They need some work. They need some updating to catch up to where everybody’s evolved to. So I’m using one of his motors and my bike,” Hall said.

On the way to Gainesville, Hall, tuner Blake Gann, and Hall’s longtime mechanic, Bobby Webb stopped briefly at Valdosta, Ga., Wednesday to test at South Georgia Motorsports Park. Webb worked with Hall in 2013-14, when Hall was affiliated with Matt Smith Racing. But the test session never was planned to be a big production.

“There’s a lot of people out there like the Harleys and a few other teams that have big budgets and a lot of time to test. I don’t take that away from them. They deserve what they get. They put the time and effort into it. So we [were] just going out there kind of testing on Wednesday and going to the Gators and see what we have.”

He said the plan was that if his test pass was “decent,” the he would make only one. He put a new tire on the bike, as well as a new engine. “When you’re on a limited budget like that, if things work, you leave them alone. As long as we don’t have to make any drastic changes and we like what we see, we’re just going to make one and that’s it. The Buells tend to go through parts, especially cranks, and cranks are expensive. Then when cranks go, a lot of other things go with it, and it could be very expensive. So we’re really just planning on making one [pass], and we hope it’s a good one and we get some data out of it.”

With the Gatornationals season-opener behind him, Hall said he isn’t sure which races he’ll enter. Hall stays busy with real-estate projects, buying homes and remodeling and selling them.

“I really don’t know. That’s a good question,” he said. “I have some potential things coming up that I might be able to do with another team that I really can’t say now. But there are some opportunities out there to run a limited schedule and then possibly more next year. There’s a lot going on. You know, I have more friends out there than I don’t. I’m pretty much friends with all those guys. You know, it’d be good to see everybody, it’d be good to get out there, and hopefully we can be competitive.”

GANN HEALED – John Hall shared some excellent news about the always-entertaining biker Shawn Gann, who had suffered a serious head injury in a motorcycle crash Dec. 16 at Stoneville, N.C., and was being treated in the intensive care unit at a Greensboro hospital.

Hall said, “Shawn is back to his normal crazy self. Thank God everything worked out and he’s back to, I’m not going to say normal, but he’s back to his normal.”

The incident was frightening and Gann’s prognosis uncertain at first.

“It was kind of scary for a little while. It was for a little while until he woke up,” Hall said. “They didn’t know what to expect when they woke him up, if he was going to have memory loss and stuff like that. Thank God everything was fine.”

As for whether Shawn Gann would come back to the racetrack with dad Blake Gann, at least to visit if not to compete, Hall said, “You never know with him. If he jumps in the trailer when he’s pulling out of the driveway, he’ll be there. If he doesn’t jump in at the last second, sometimes he surprises us and shows up.”

600TH ON THE LINE – Three-time Pro Stock champion Jason Line is zooming up on his 600th round-wins. He would have notched it at Gainesville had he reached the final round. Instead, he bowed out in the opening round against race runner-up Alex Laughlin. Only two other active Pro Stock drivers have more than 600 round-wins in the category. Greg Anderson has 799, and Jeg Coughlin Jr. has 647. "It would be great to get to 600,” Line said, “but if I make it to the final, then I'd really like to get to 601."

MILLICAN TEAM BONDS QUICKLY – The Clay Millican-Mike Kloeber Top Fuel combo, so successful in the IHRA with 52 victories and six straight championships, came close to kicking off their winning ways in NHRA competition Sunday - .0032-of-a- second close, or within-18-inches close.

Following the runner-up finish to Richie Crampton and his DHL team, Straightline Strategy Group partner Scott Gardner said, “It really felt like many people thought the jury was out on how this team would perform, and that hurdle has now been cleared. Mike Kloeber knows how to win rounds and has clearly shown that already in just three races into the season. The ownership group is ecstatic with the tremendous progress this team has made, coupled with the conservative use of parts. So far we've hit our playbook pretty well."

Kloeber said he thinks the team has been “exceeding our own expectations.” He said, “The Parts Plus crew handled the between-round service flawlessly on Sunday. The final-round appearance has the crew pumped up and looking forward to Vegas.”

WEE LITTLE JOKESTER – What would a drag race be without a little whimsy? Fun-loving Hector Arana, the 2009 Pro Stock Motorcycle champion, dressed up Sunday as a leprechaun to salute St. Patrick’s Day. But he didn’t find the pot o’ gold at the end of a rainbow. The skies were a little too dreary to see any rainbows, and Arana didn’t find any gold. He was a first-round victim to White Alligator Racing’s Jerry Savoie. (No tales we know of about alligators eating leprechauns, so maybe this is a first?)