Columnist Larry Dixon: Prudhomme’s team has second-round letdown

Larry Dixon

Monday, Oct. 29, 2001 | 10:53 a.m.

Larry Dixon, driver of Don Prudhomme's Miller Lite Top Fuel Dragster, wrote a daily column exclusively for the Las Vegas Sun in conjunction with the inaugural ACDelco Las Vegas NHRA Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Well, unfortunately for all of us on Don Prudhomme's Miller Lite Top Fuel Dragster team, we found ourselves out of the running at the ACDelco Las Vegas NHRA Nationals a little sooner than we would have liked on Sunday.

Our first trip to The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway saw us post a second-round finish to Cory McClenathan after a cheap little piece broke on our car. Last season, we simply didn't have enough data from the track and were not able to make the kind of horsepower needed to advance.

That's what makes Sunday's second-round loss so disappointing. In fact, I don't think there is any comparison to what happened this year and what happened the last time we were here. After we got through qualifying on Saturday, we had the best car out here with a new track elapsed-time record of 4.509 seconds and felt pretty good about our chances on race day.

We started the day with an opening-round meeting against the No. 16 qualifier, Brady Kalivoda. It turned out Brady could not answer the bell due to a malfunctioning air system in his car, so we were able to take the win with a single. The best thing about a single is that it's an automatic win. It gets you to the second round and you don't have to worry about anything.

As a result, we also kept Top Fuel's longest current first-round win streak intact with 25 first-round wins dating to last October. I felt bad for Brady because he is a young driver just coming up like I was, and I know how difficult that can be.

The second round saw us take on the No. 9 qualifier, Don Lampus. I have to tell you that no one was more shocked and surprised than I was when the car smoked the tires at the hit of the throttle. It turns out that we had a cylinder go out early and when it came back on, it was too much for that part of the track and it just pulled the tires loose. When you kick on 700 or 800 horsepower, which is what each one of the cylinders produces in our cars, sometimes it's just too much and the car is unable to recover.

Unfortunately, our string of second-round finishes at The Strip continued, as we haven't been able to get past the quarterfinals in the three-event history of the Las Vegas. Hopefully, we can change all that when we come back here in April.

With our finish Sunday, we are now 54 points out of the Winston Top Fuel points lead heading into the season finale in Pomona, Calif., in two weeks. But we can't really afford to change our strategy. What it came down to going into these last three races is we were less than three rounds out, so if we won all three races and Kenny Bernstein went to the finals of all three, it wouldn't matter because we would pass him and we would have the points title.

We did well at Dallas two weeks ago, but didn't get it done here, so now we are relying on him to have some bad luck at the last race for us to even have a shot. But we still have to go out and win. We can't really control anything that goes on with them, we can just try to go into the last race and win and see what happens.

I am not sure how this whole thing is going to play out, but I know that the Miller team will keep giving it our best shot and I hope that all the fans have enjoyed this season as much as I have. Thanks for letting me share my thoughts and hopefully we'll talk to you all again next spring.