Allen Johnson took advantage of mineshaft conditions Friday night and under the Infineon Raceway lights, he did more than make a bid for Pro Stock's No. 1 qualifying position for the FRAM-Autolite Nationals.
 
He rewrote both the track elapsed-time and speed records with a 6.545-second blast at 210.77 mph in his Team Mopar / J&J Dodge Avenger. They wiped out Jason Line's year-old marks.
 
The Greeneville, Tenn., native, on target in his native Southeast, was No. 1 qualifier at Atlanta and Bristol. So this would be the third top spot of the year and 10th of his career.
 
"Conditions at 300 feet -- best conditions we've had in awhile. Humidity rolls in and it slows us down on miles per hour.  But track's awesome. Air's awesome," Johnson said. "We had a decent run."
 
He corrected himself.
 
"It's pretty much an above-average run," he said.

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Excitement was in the air Friday evening as the MOPAR Nitro Jam Nationals presented by E3 Spark Plugs officially got underway at the Grand Bend Motorplex in Grand Bend, Ontario.

Friday wasn’t as much about the show as it was giving all the race teams a hit at the track, but still several fans came out to enjoy an evening of exciting doorslammer and dragster action. All sportsman drivers and even members of the Pro Modified Racing Association got in one pass on Friday in preparation for two days of thrilling Nitro Jam action Saturday and Sunday at “The Bend.”

And those in attendance Friday evening got a bit of a surprise and a taste of things to come as Mike Stawicki (Medina, N.Y.), the new record holder for the PMRA Pro Mod group and the most recent race winner, continued his reign of dominance with a blistering 5.881 second pass at 252.05 miles-per-hour to rocket to the top of the charts.

All season, Larry Dixon has been a favorite to win qualifying pole positions.

Friday at the Fram-Autolite NHRA Nationals it was no different and Dixon lived up to his billing.

Dixon took the provisional pole with a 3.839-second time at 317.79 mph. Dixon’s run was the last run of the first round of qualifying and it held up when the second round of Top Fuel qualifying was cancelled by NHRA officials because they didn’t believe the second round of qualifying could be completed in time to meet the 10 pm curfew at Infineon Raceway.

“We made a nice run in that first session,” said Dixon, who is aiming to capture his fifth No. 1 qualifying spot this season. “As more cars ran, it gave Jason (McCulloch) and Alan (Johnson) an opportunity to gauge what they thought the track would hold. They went up there and made a very good run. It was just a great job by everybody on the Al-Anabi team.”

The employees of Combustion Technologies USA were life-long fans of NHRA Top Alcohol Dragster racer Mark Niver.

His dedication to the sport and his creative, quality driven craftsmanship is an instrumental part of our business philosophy. Tragically, Niver lost his life due to injuries suffered in a racing accident this past Sunday during the running of the NHRA Northwest Nationals. On behalf of the staff at Combustion Technologies USA, we would like to offer our heart-felt condolences to the Niver family for their loss.
 
As NHRA Sportsman racers ourselves, we believe Niver, a machinist by trade, was one of the best examples of ‘Ingenuity in Action’, a phrase which is a fundamental principle of those who created the National Hot Rod Association. He was also a gentleman.

Jack Beckman is in position to earn his first No. 1 qualifier of the season at the halfway point of qualifying at the 23rd annual FRAM-Autolite NHRA Nationals.

The other provisional No. 1 qualifiers at the 15th of 23 events in the NHRA Full Throttle Series season were Larry Dixon (Top Fuel), Allen Johnson (Pro Stock) and Matt Smith (Pro Stock Motorcycle).

The drag racing world may never know what transpired during the first round of Pro Stock eliminations at the recently completed NHRA Northwest Nationals in Seattle, but new facts have come to light which may lead to a logical explanation. However, the explanation may still be a guess as to what transpired forcing various Pro Stock racers to verbally lash the sanctioning body alleging a lack of track preparation.

At issue is whether the NHRA prepped the track before the Pro Stockers ran their opening round. What is not at issue is the difference in opinion between the drivers and the race officials.

“We have a huge discrepancy in what us as Pro Stock drivers and crew chiefs need in a racing surface and what the NHRA believes we need in a racing surface,” Pro Stock racer Greg Anderson told ESPN on Sunday afternoon. “They prep it in the way they do for the fuel cars – they run 1,000 feet. We run quarter-mile. They [NHRA] go out there and decide the track doesn’t need any extra glue for the Pro Stock cars. That’s 100-percent wrong. We preach it. We preach it. These cars have to have glue all the way to the quarter-mile. That was skipped today.”

The NHRA instituting new rule changes is nothing new, but renowned chassis and car builder Brad Hadman, a noted chassis builder for 38 years, believes the sanctioning body doesn’t have a reciprocal relationship with drivers when it comes to the issue of safety.

“I feel like it always gets passed off on the racer to make it safer to do this and to do that,” Hadman said. “It is still the age old argument and we’ve never improved our race track. That’s the same netting system, the same crap they have had for 100 years. Are they (NHRA) going to change it? Probably not because they feel like it is the way it is. I look at being proactive and NASCAR got into soft walls and they’ve tried to do things to minimize the injuries in their sport, and we haven’t. There are other things we could institute into the ends of our race tracks that could make them far safer than they are right now. The racers have paid their fair share trying to keep up on the safety rules that they (NHRA) make and I feel it should be the same in turn. They (NHRA) should make as big of an effort on their end, as they expect the racers to do.”

Hadman's feeling's aside, the NHRA acted quickly to amend its rule book following the on-track death of Top Alcohol Dragster driver Mark Niver Sunday at the Northwest Nationals in Kent, Wash. Niver died when his dragster crashed into the safety net at the end of the Pacific Raceways track and it buckled the chassis into the driver cockpit.

This weekend, the Fram-Autolite NHRA Nationals figured to be hectic for Matt Smith.

Not only is Smith driving his Al-Anabi Buell Pro Stock Motorcycle, he also is tuning his wife, Angie Smith’s V-Twin entry, as well as being the wrench boss on a new bike GT Tonglet is riding.

To Matt Smith’s credit, he never lost his focus Friday.

Smith took the provisional pole in qualifying with a 6.912-second time at 191.32 mph at the Infineon Raceway track. Smith just edged Craig Treble for the top spot. Treble came in at 6.919 seconds at 192.58 mph.

“When we came up at first, I thought we could run a 91 or 92, and the track kept getting tighter and tighter and the air kept getting colder and colder and I thought we were going to be too lean,” Smith said. “I really didn’t want to come back and put a percent of fuel in it. Maybe we could have and we could have run a 90 or 89, possibly. Right now, I’m happy our Al-Anabi V-Twin is running awesome and I can’t say enough for it.”

The performance history of alcohol dragsters and Funny Cars over the last decade is the reason NHRA decided not to reduce race distances for those classes to 1,000 feet, despite two fatal accidents in a month.
 
So said Graham Light, NHRA's senior vice president, racing operations, in a Thursday morning interview.
 
Top Alcohol Dragster driver Mark Niver was killed last Sunday at the Northwest Nationals at Pacific Raceway in Kent, Wash. That came one month after Top  Alcohol Funny Car driver Neal Parker died at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, N.J.  In both cases, the parachutes detached from the cars.