Final qualifying day of the Street Car Super Nationals is here. Check out yesterday’s coverage using the dropdown at the top of the page, and venture through the gallery for some great photos. I’m heading out to the pits right now to see what’s happening. Stay tuned!

Another day full of carnage, wild action, crashes, and oildowns here at the Street Car Super Nationals. The Las Vegas Motor Speedway staff was on full alert throughout most of the day, and they worked hard to keep the track surface in tip-top shape despite the best efforts of many racers to knock them down, up until the last car went down the track this evening, when John Garafola nosed into the wall and forced the stoppage of the event for the evening due to the length of cleanup required mixed with an approaching cold front. The plan is to be back on the track at 8AM on Sunday to continue the elimination rounds. That said, let’s get on with the fun.

This morning I ran into Donnie Bowles, who had a parts failure of near epic proportions. It seems that the ear broke off his torque converter, wrecking the flexplate and more in the process. He told me it happened as he was doing his burnout this morning, with no load on the engine.

The ear shot out from under the car, narrowly missing his crew guy, Steve, before bouncing off the track and rocketing through the track’s tractor window. When I caught up with him, he and teammate Susan Roush-McClenaghan were off on the far side of the track looking for the missing piece of converter.

Kevin Wallauer is getting the details down on the combination in his 275 Radial car this weekend. An all-new 403 cubic-inch small-block Chevy is topped off with a set of Brodix -13 cylinder heads and fronted by a ProCharger F-1X-12 supercharger. Wallauer, the owner of composite body parts manufacturer Unlimited Products, has only three passes this weekend on the Clint Downs-tuned package.

“We got beat by big mile-per-hour with the old engine, which had 23-degree heads and a regular F-1X, so we decided it was time to turn it up,” he says. Wallauer is currently qualified ninth going into eliminations with a 4.805 at 154.72 mph.

Not the sight any nitrous racer wants to see. A fresh combination for Ken Sihota was out of competition early.

“We made a bunch of changes and fixed some issues with the fuel system,” he explained. “We’re making more power than ever before, so it took a different management approach, and we didn’t get enough runs on it to sort it out.”

Yesterday, he overfueled the engine on a qualifying pass, then tried to clear it out to get off the track at the big end, and as he did that it popped back through the intake and he had to be pulled off the track by the safety crew. After they fixed the intake, the team looked over the engine and all seemed to be OK. Unfortunately, it waffled an oil ring (which they couldn’t see during their inspection) and on the next pass this morning it lost oil control.

“Oil met nitrous met heat and boom. It put deep divots into the sleeve and metal through the oiling system. I decided to pack it up rather than make a temporary fix, as I didn’t think it would be in good enough shape to make it through the race,” he said.

I met Canadian racer Greg Henschell for the first time today. The 2016 275 Radial class winner, who took home the title last year with a best pass of 4.48, made lots of little changes that have led to a substantial performance increase. Henschell goes into eliminations in the top spot with an outstanding personal-best 4.41 at 167.51 mph, which is the West Coast 275 record and nearly a tenth better than Chris Groves. The car runs a Bennett Racing Engines 400X engine topped off by a set of cast D3 cylinder heads.

“We’ve got the car ironed out pretty good right now, and I’m considering coming back down to the States to race more often. This is my third season with this car. I learned a lot from John Kolivas, who got us started with the tune, and I’m now working on my own tuneups. Ben Thomas from KBX Performance is here this weekend helping me with the chassis,” says Henschell.

Longtime Ford racer and class racing champion Mike Murillo made the move into no-prep racing and event promoting over the last couple of years, and his Dirty South No Prep series has been attracting the no-prep world’s heavy hitters in 2017. Murillo signed a number of hero cards for his fans while I was visiting with him today, and it was really cool to hear them tell him the stories of how long they’ve been following his racing career. Unfortunately, when Murillo attempted to race in the first round of Big Tire No Time today, he discovered that the boost line wasn’t attached to the wastegate and was out of competition before he ever really got started. He made another test hit later on tonight to put on a show for the fans.

This photo of Murillo clearly illustrates the relationship between the Christmas tree, the racer’s reaction time, and the vehicle’s reaction time before the car pulls the tires out of the beams–and my own hair-trigger with the camera’s shutter button. Note that the three ambers are lit, the back tire is wrapped up around the wheel, but the front tire is still on the ground and the redlight is not illuminated. The car is reacting, but not quickly enough to get the car out before the green light comes on. Unfortunately, as this is No Time racing, no timeslip is available to me to see what Murillo’s reaction time actually was on this pass, but you don’t get to be a 14-time class champion if you can’t cut a light.

There’s an all-new 959 cubic-inch Sonny’s engine under the hood of Steve Nicholson’s gorgeous Corvette. It features six (!) Speedtech nitrous kits and an EFI Technology engine management system. So far he’s been a best of 4.07 with this combination and is solidly capable of going deep into the 3-second zone.

“We are using three or four kits right now and only have seven hits on the car. It’s had a .980-second 60-foot and 2.67-second 330-foot time. When we wick it up, it’ll be an animal. Right now it has really small kits in it,” he said.

It was interesting to see Jim Bell shooting video of his own car, as he has engine builder and tuner Carl Stevens, Jr. handling the driving duties this weekend. Stevens won in the first round of eliminations tonight with a stout 5.79 at 251 mph over John Luglietta, who has an interesting story of his own.

Luglietta, who has a stock bottom end 5.3 LS engine installed into this Top Sportsman-style S10 chassis, outfitted it with a monster turbocharger and entered into the Turbo Pro Mod class with one goal: to become the quickest SBE-powered LS vehicle on the planet. How does a 7.16 at 190 mph sound to you–with stock, mass-produced General Motors parts underhood? That’s damn impressive.

It’s taken him an entire year, but John Urist is ecstatic with the progress he’s made of late with the Turn 14 Distribution Mustang. Although he hasn’t put together the complete pass he’d like as of yet. he turned in a 1.09 short time during today’s final qualifying session–a personal best in any car he’s ever owned. A malfunction in the air shifter mechanism denied him the quickest elapsed time he’s looking for, the team figured out the issue and will be ready for eliminations tomorrow.

I spent some time with the Hairston gang (Clint, Jake, and Jim) today to talk about their Pro Mod Camaro, which will be featured here on Dragzine soon. The car runs one of Elite Motorsports’ 522 cubic-inch engines packed full of parts from CFE, backed up with one of M&M Transmissions’ Turbo 400 units and an M&M converter. Previously the team was using a Quick Drive setup, but they are doing development work with M&M and are excited about its potential in this application. And although the team isn’t ready to divulge all of the engine’s details, look for a Pro Mod engine build on our sister magazine EngineLabs in the coming months.

Back in 2014, we featured Eddy Whipple’s Nova here on Dragzine, but he’s moved into a new car–this beautiful Outlaw 10.5 Mustang packing 427 cubic inches of twin-turbo Ford power. Moments before this photo was taken, I was chatting with Eddy in the staging lanes when Greg Seth-Hunter’s crew chief, Mark Luton, came over to inform Eddy that they’d be switching lanes for competition. Eddy, who only has a few runs on this car so far, took the change in stride, switching to the left lane. He wasn’t expecting to win as they are still shaking the car down, but Seth-Hunter’s decision came back to bite him as the MMR Mustang got wildly out of shape in the right lane, which allowed Whipple to sneak around him for the win to move on to Sunday’s program.

It’s been a whirlwind couple of months for Terry Barkley. This weekend has been crazy for him as he’s competing in both Bit Tire No Time and Outlaw 10.5 with the same car. They didn’t get any test passes in on Wednesday due to issues with the car that required a new third member. Then on Friday he experienced wicked tire shake and ended up taking all of the power out of the car to get it down the track. This morning he was in the throttle for 2.17-seconds before he had to pedal it and still moved up from number 28 to number 8 in Outlaw 10.5.

“Without pedaling, it would have been a number-one qualifying pass based on the numbers we have. This twin-turbo stuff is new to me, and my driving style has to be altered. We’re still working on getting the tuneup squared away to get the starting line scenario figured out. We’ve got something for everybody in the class,” he said.

We saw this way more often than we wanted to today. Let’s hope for a clean day of racing tomorrow!

Final Qualifying Results

Eliminations Results