TORRENCE FEELS PRESSURE AS NEW DAD BUT DELIVERS 41ST TOP FUEL VICTORY AS FOUR-WIDE KING

Written by Susan Wade, photos by Burghardt Photos, NHRA    Mon, 2021-04-19 18:00

 

Four-wide NHRA drag racing is wild enough by itself. Top Fuel racer Antron Brown calls it “controlled chaos.”

But if the Denso Spark Plugs Four-Wide Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway is double the trouble and double the excitement, double that for Steve Torrence – or triple that.

Since the season-opening Gatornationals last month, “so much had transpired” for the three-time and reigning champion from Kilgore, Texas. So what’s a little extra drama?

“That one was pretty high pressure for me personally,” he said Sunday after leaving Doug Kalitta, Clay Millican, and Antron Brown as mere blips in his rear-view mirror.

Torrence became a first-time father to daughter Charli April 7, his own 38th birthday was Saturday, his mother Kay’s birthday was Sunday, and crew member Dom Lagana – who has shown steady recovery from an auto accident last August that has left him learning to walk with prosthetic legs – was someone for whom he wanted to score a victory.

“You got Dom on the starting line and Mama Kay’s birthday, and you got your daughter’s first race – you’ve got to get something done,” Torrence declared as he clutched his 41st Wally statue.

“Dom is up and walking even better than he was in Gainesville. He was on the starting line for that final round. So to compound my little girl’s first race win, which was the first race that we had her, my mother’s birthday and Dom standing on the starting line, you go up there with a little pressure to win,” he said, “because that’s what we come to do. We come to win, just like everybody.

“We just went up there and - I don’t want to eat my own words, but – I think that as my career has progressed, I do better in high-pressure situations,” Torrence said.

He does pretty doggone well in four-wide races, too. This is his fifth in six non-traditional format.

“At first, I was openly outspoken about not liking the four-wide concept or the whole program. But the way things are going, I have to like them, because we do well at them,” Torrence said.

“We're die-hard racers, so anything out of the norm is different for us. But if you're a fan coming and watching this, it’s probably pretty kick-ass,” he said. “I don't know if it's just because you run three rounds or the format messes with everybody a little bit, but we do well at it. So I'm looking forward to the next one.

It will come soon enough. After the NHRA’s final visit to Atlanta Dragway April 30-May 2, the Camping World Drag Racing Series will swing through Concord, N.C., for another four-lane spectacle at zMAX Dragway.

Torrence won with a 3.823-second elapsed time at 321.73-mph performance on the 1,000-foot course. But he said he felt satisfied with his car since the start of the campaign.

“We had a really good race car in Gainesville, and we went out and just overestimated what that track would take and smoked the tires,” he said. “We had a good weekend here. We ran well in qualifying. We got picked off the top spot by Brittany [Force]. They made a stout run then and a stout run earlier today. But these deals aren’t about who runs the fastest. They’re about who gets to the finish line first. We got it done today.”

No. 1 starter Force advanced from her opening-round quad but saw Brown and Millican best in Round 2.

Torrence said he got a kick out of a question FOX reporter Bruno Massel posed to him early Sunday.

Said Torrence, “He goes, ‘What's your strategy going in?’ I go, ‘Do you think I ever have a strategy? I just try to figure out what's happening at the moment and do it.’”

The result is he leads Kalitta in the standings by 21 points.

 

 
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