Doug Kalitta has hauled everything from Triple Crown-contending Thoroughbred raceshorses to a Sea World whale to Broadway production sets to Ted Nugent and his concert equipment and life-flight patients with his Michigan-based Kalitta Charters airline.

But Friday at Minnesota's Brainerd International Raceway, he delivered the Top Fuel class' low elapsed time in the first day of qualifying for the Lucas Oil NHRA Nationals.

Doug Kalitta has hauled everything from Triple Crown-contending Thoroughbred raceshorses to a Sea World whale to Broadway production sets to Ted Nugent and his concert equipment and life-flight patients with his Michigan-based Kalitta Charters airline.

But Friday at Minnesota's Brainerd International Raceway, he delivered the Top Fuel class' low elapsed time in the first day of qualifying for the Lucas Oil NHRA Nationals.

He registered a 3.812-second E.T. at 322.96 mph in the Mac Tools Dragster to ace out provisional No. 2 Shawn Langdon by three-thousandths of a second.

In his first run Friday, the veteran from Ann Arbor, Mich., encountered a couple of problems: "I dropped a cylinder, and then it just smoked the tires out there. So it wasn't going anywhere."

But his crack Jim Oberhofer and Troy Fasching-led Mac Tools team, which has kept him in the points lead for virtually the entire season, figured out what went wrong and what needed to go right in the second qualifying session. And Kalitta deferred to their expertise, then relied on his right foot to improve from ninth place.

It was just the second pass he had made on this car since it was front-halved and back-halved at builder Brad Hadman's shop in the Pacific Northwest while the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series made its annual swing through Seattle a couple of weeks ago.

Incidentally, Kalitta had just won that most recent event, at Seattle. And this provisional No. 1 position poises him perhaps for his first back-to-back triumph since the 2006 Topeka and Chicago races.

"We just put the car together. We drug it out here," Kalitta said, "and the second pass on it, it drove nice and straight for the quick time, at least today. We started the year with that car. Pretty much all we did with the car was change out the tubing. And Brad's pretty good about putting everything back where it started from.

"It worked out well. We figured we'd bring it out here before Indy," he said, referring to the upcoming U.S. Nationals that starts in two weeks and is the final race before the Countdown to the Championship begins "So far so good. Jim's definitely on his game this year."

Kalitta said, "There's a class full of good cars – including mine. There's a handful of good cars. You can't take anyone lightly – or they'll go out and wax you! It prove what a tight field we've got right now. The Mello Yello Drag Racing Series has a ton of classes, and they're all tough."

Coming to Brainerd isn’t a tough assignment for Kalitta, who'll turn 50 this coming Wednesday.

"It's a special place for us," he said, alluding to team owner and uncle Connie Kalitta and his late cousin Scott Kalitta. "We've had good luck here over the years."

He has won here twice, but not since 2005, and he has led the field at this north woods retreat three times.

As he aims for his sixth No. 1 qualifying position this season and 42nd of his career, Kalitta said he thinks his time will hold up as best "if we get overcast and it's a little cooler than it was today. If it’s like today with the same times that we ran, it might be a little tricky. Hopefully it’ll hold. If not, we'll be right there to try to stay ahead of these guys."

He said he wasn't even convinced, though, that it would hold up Friday.

"It was cooling off," he said, "and with the four cars that were back there, anything could have happened."

But nothing bad happened for him and his Mac Tools team.

And he's hoping he'll haul the mail once more Saturday, when the Top Fuel class will have two more qualifying opportunities at about 1 and 3:30 p.m.

The Don Schumacher Racing trio of Spencer Massey, Tony Schumacher, and Antron Brown dominated the initial Top Fuel session with the only 3.8-second passes. But they dropped to Nos. 4, 6, and 9 by the end of the day. Schumacher was fastest Friday at 323.43 mph.

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