The ‘clown prince’ of NA$CAR, Michael Waltrip was on hand to welcome the NHRA stars to the new zMax Dragway in Concord, N.C.
Waltrip brought his NAPA #55 Toyota to challenge Ron Capps to a match race. Capps drives a funny car also sponsored by NAPA. Can anybody else see a commercial here?
From nhra.com: Arriving with his fully race-functional NAPA Auto Parts Toyota Camry, Waltrip faced Capps, driving an NHRA Super Comp dragster owned by Charlotte’s Tisha Wilson, in the pair’s first head-to-head match on a racing surface.
It was a heady experience for both, as neither had been down the new dragstrip touted as the “Bellagio of dragstrips” — for Capps because it was an all-new venue, and for Waltrip because it’s doubtful that he had ever been down a state-of-the-art dragstrip in a powerful car in his lifetime.
The track was clearly green as both drivers struggled to gain traction after launching following their burnouts. As the pair tore down the track, Waltrip’s mount experienced problems at the finish line, resulting in, surprisingly, his hitting the wall and damaging the front of the car. Although Waltrip may have been ahead, it turned into a very loosely based case of the tortoise and the hare as Capps took the victory for all the non-existing laurels in his 500-horsepower dragster over Waltrip’s Cup car pulled by 800 horses. The numbers: 9.85, 115.14 for Capps and 11.21, 79.38 for Waltrip.
Waltrip’s NAPA crew quickly repaired the Toyota, and Capps was invited to drive it down the quarter-mile. He did so in fine fashion, posting a run of 10.6 seconds at 140 mph.
“It was a fun thing,” said Capps, who enters this weekend’s national event and the beginning of the Countdown to 1 playoffs in Concord ninth in the standings. “It was scheduled originally that we were going to do a little match race. It got so serious that Michael actually brought one of his real Cup cars. So we were trying to up him a little bit by getting a Super Comp dragster because I didn’t want to show up to a gunfight with a knife. And I didn’t want to get beat by Michael at our own game.
“Knowing Michael, it was going to be fun no matter what, but we were both pretty serious about it. And it was going to be fun to go down the track at the new zMax Dragway.
“In Michael’s defense, he gave it his all, but they hadn’t sprayed the track [with traction compound], and both he and I were fighting for traction. I kept seeing him out the window, and I was so surprised when I looked out the corner of my eye that he was still out in front of me. And I thought, ‘Uh, oh, this car is fast over here, I’d better stay in the gas,’ and luckily I got by him because I think the excitement started happening over in his lane right when I went past him.
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