When Bristol Dragway introduced its inaugural class of the Legends of Thunder Valley back in 2007, North Carolina drag racing great Rickie Smith was emotional when he found out he was one of the four inductees.

Smith, who was dominant at the old Bristol Dragway back in the 1980s during his IHRA Pro Stock career, joined Larry Carrier, Wally Parks and “Big Daddy” Don Garlits as the first official members of the Legends of Thunder Valley, the track’s hall of fame.

“To be one of the first inducted alongside those three was really, really special,” Smith said. “I couldn’t believe it. There’s a lot of racers who’ve run there over the years and for them to pick me, it was a real honor, probably bigger than any championship I ever won.”

A downtrodden Jeff Diehl exited the remains of his exploded Funny Car, the look on his face telling the story. His words confirmed the disappointment.

“I gotta go home, I’m out,” he told ESPN2 in an interview after the disaster at Rt 66 Dragway.

No one would have blamed the independent racer for throwing in the towel considering this was his second major, body-crunching accident in 2010. Just nine races earlier in Concord, NC, Diehl launched a body skyward during qualifying at the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals.

This time, a broken header forced the car into a massive wheelstand, ignited the engine and the imbalance of exhaust forced Diehl into the retaining wall.

Del Worsham plans to roll into Bristol with the swagger of a defending event champion.

Worsham, driver of the Al-Anabi Toyota Funny Car, brings the momentum of a final round showing at the rain-delayed NHRA SuperNationals last weekend in Englishtown, NJ, to a venue where he’s won twice.

“The Al-Anabi team has made a 100 percent turnaround from the Joliet race and earlier events to Englishtown last weekend,” said Worsham, a three-time winner since joining the team last season. “We’ve been saying for most of the season that we needed to get consistent, and we’ve talked about how hard everyone has been working.  Finally, all of that hard work started to pay off last weekend in Englishtown.  Normally, a turnaround like we appear to have made is a gradual thing, but our performance changed a lot in basically five days.  That kind of effort is a good example of the talented people who work on this Al-Anabi Racing Team.  

“We aren’t there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were; that feels good.”

Participating in the National Hot Rod Association’s inaugural NHRA Unleashed event at Atlanta Dragway, Suwanee, Georgia’s Ronnie Davis qualified his 1963 Corvette in first-place for the highly competitive Dixie Pro Mod class.

Davis followed up with a dominating win in the opening round of eliminations, but his day ended prematurely when something in his nitrous-injected, 822 cubic-inch engine broke during preparations for a semi-final race against Robert Mathis.

“It just started vibrating really hard in the middle of the burnout, so I just shut it off,” Davis explained. “I thought at first the timing belt had failed, but it’s something else; I’ll have to take it apart and figure it out when I get home.”

The 10th edition of the Mopar® HEMI® Challenge Race Series will make its first-ever appearance at the storied Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, Ky., pitting the nation’s fastest SS/AH 1968 HEMI Darts and Barracudas against each other during the NHRA National Hot Rod Reunion (NHRR), June 18–19.

Perennial favorites Jim Daniels, winner of two 2009 Mopar HEMI Challenge events in his 1968 Dodge Dart, and Charlie Westcott Jr., driving his new War Fish ’68 Plymouth Barracuda, will be among the field of entries that will highlight the racing card at the NHRR. Qualifying will take place on Friday, June 18, with eliminations set for Saturday, June 19.

While the Father’s Day weekend NHRA Thunder Valley Nationals will be special for many people, several families will celebrate the return of some of America’s greatest heroes during the June 18-20 event.

In cooperation with the James H. Quillen VA Medical Center in Johnson City, Thunder Valley will host veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom during Final Eliminations on Sunday, June 20.

Each year, a celebration is planned to welcome the veterans home from their respective tours of duty. According to Judy Fowler-Argo, Public Affairs Officer for the VA Medical Center, the decision to host the celebration at Bristol Dragway was an easy one.

The NMRA rolled into Milan, Michigan for the 7th annual Aeromotive NMRA Ford Nationals, bringing along its usual group of Mustang-crazed drag racers.

In the Turbonetics Pro Outlaw 10.5 class, Conrad Scarry and Mike Murillo traded record-setting passes during qualifying, with Scarry taking the top spot heading into eliminations.  The pair met up in the final round in a battle of big-block ‘Stangs, with Scarry coming out on top for his third win of the season.

Johnny Macdonald has been working hard to unseat John Urist in the ProCharger Super Street Outlaw class, qualifying number one with a strong 7.38 at over 197 MPH.  But during eliminations, Urist and Chris Tuten ran through their respective competition to meet up in the finals.  There, Urist turned on the red bulb, earning Tuten his first SSO win!

For seven-time NHRA Top Fuel world champion Tony Schumacher, the challenge never gets old.

And the challenges come in many forms for the 40-year-old Chicago driver.

His much-publicized rivalry with Larry Dixon that is really developing on the track this season – the two have met head-to-head six times with each driver winning three times apiece – and the challenge from a host of talented teams with veteran drivers keeps “The Sarge” constantly cranking at full steam.

Jim Yates will be the first to admit, the view from the back of a race car isn’t so bad.

Yates, the two-time NHRA Pro Stock champion from Occoquan, Va., has reinvented himself all the while remaining in the class he’s raced for years. His newest assignment is to oversee the two-car team of Johnny Gray and when necessary implement the elements which made him a champion in the 1990s.

“I’m enjoying it right now,” admitted Yates, who considers himself neither a tuner nor a crew chief. “I’ve always been involved in the tuning of my cars and this is a little different. I think it’s the engineer in me, being a mechanical engineer I always enjoyed. Probably the biggest challenge I enjoyed the last five or six years of racing is trying to figure out how to make them run faster. I get enjoyment from this and I don’t have the stress of driving. Even when I enjoyed the driving, it’s part of the job that I could do without.”

Don Schumacher Racing’s contribution to the NHRA’s data gathering process is nothing more than bolting a metal plate onto the blower inlet.

“That’s really about all it is,” confirmed Mark Oswald, who spearheaded DSR’s test of a restrictor plate during the NHRA’s test following the NHRA Route 66 Nationals in Chicago.

His driver, Antron Brown, made two very productive passes with his best run a 3.89-second elapsed time at 304 mph (at 1,000 feet), slightly slower than the team’s race day performance. It was determined that a smaller restrictor plate will be tested in the future. The session marked the first time a Top Fuel team has participated in the testing sessions.