In a field of traditional door cars with freshly crushed oil pans and bent fenders, Chris Schneider pulled off perhaps the upset of the season when his dragster — yes, dragster—won the Dart Machinery Air Show wheelstand contest at Summit Motorsports Park’s annual season-ending Halloween Classic.

Footage and stills of Schneider’s supercharged, 4.2-second Top Dragster standing nearly vertical in the air have taken over social media news feeds, as the unlikely entrant who didn’t even sign up for the wheelstand contest until it was well underway, pointed his compass north — like really, really north — literally flew to the popular $1,000 victory.

Most, of course, assumed the car was junk. But Schneider was back behind the wheel, albeit proceeding cautiously, in Super Pro bracket racing competition in the car the very next day.

“We went three rounds with it today,” Chris laughs. “It bent the A-arms in a little bit, but it was still drivable.”

“I’ve never done it before,” Chris continues, speaking about his entry into the Air Show. “A few years back, another guy tried it in a dragster, but he had a wheelie bar, and I didn’t. But we did it. I wasn’t going out there trying to go the highest, but I was trying to go the furthest.”

Schneider’s rough ride earned both the “Highest” and “Farthest” honors, along with the $1,000 payout. It probably wasn’t enough to fix the damage, but you can’t put a price on virality on the internet. “It’s not about the money,” he says. “We did it, we won, and yeah — we broke the internet last night.”

His Cameron Race Cars-built Top Dragster, powered by a 565-cubic-inch big block with a TVS 250 supercharger and nitrous oxide at the ready for finish line driving, had been “a wheelie machine all year.” “If it isn’t a foot or two in the air, it’s shaking the tires,” he said. “At PDRA Virginia last weekend, I carried the front end to 310 feet. So I knew it could do a decent wheelstand, I just didn’t plan for it to go that high.”

At the hit, the car carried the nose cleanly, but the moment he activated the nitrous at the steering wheel, things went skyward. “When it shifted, it started coming down, so I grabbed the nitrous and his the throttle to keep it level — and that’s when it went straight up,” he recalls. “I couldn’t see the track lights or anything, all I could see was my dash and black. If I started to feel weightless, I was ready to just let go and grab my seat belts and ride it out. But then I felt it coming back down, so I got back in the gas to soften the landing. That probably saved it from breaking in half.”

When the car touched down, both front tires blew off the rims, and the A-arms bent, but the chassis mostly survived. “There’s a little tweak about a foot long in the chassis up around the nose, but the body still fits perfect and everything,” he explains.

By the next morning, new wheels and tires were bolted on, and Chris scored an easy rundown win on a red light in Super Pro competition, making it to the third round overall. “I didn’t make any full runs, just enough to turn on a few win lights,” he says.

With the support of he and his wife’s Axer Performance business, along with G-sport by Gesi, Mickey Thompson, Liguori Drag Racing, and Stainless Works, Chris plans to front-half the car at Diamond Race Cars this winter and add front suspension to help soften the routine wheelstands the car performs. “That should calm it down. I’ll have mounts for a wheelie bar too, just in case,” he adds in closing.