About NHRA Racing Qualifying Runs

Video Transcript

"TINA STULL: Hi, I'm Tina Stull and I drive the Top Dragster for Interstate Batteries. On behalf of Expert Village, today, we're going to talk about the basics of racing. Every single one of the qualifying runs is going to give you information about that track. You might--you may have raced there a year ago. This year, they've done something and one of the lanes is different than last year. So you don't wanna--although the logbook is very important, those first three runs are going to show you how your car is running today and under these conditions because if they--even if the track is dry but it's been raining for the last 10 days, that can affect--the moisture can come up through the track. So it's like--those qualifying runs tell you basically how your car is running on that day 'cause we're talking about such a small amount of time that almost anything can make a difference. Ten, 15 pounds sometimes is enough to make a difference in the way your car performs. So that's always what you come back to, that you set up for first round. Now, it doesn't matter during your qualifying rounds. It doesn't matter if you have a red light. It doesn't matter, win, lose or whatever. You're just getting information. When it comes to first round though, that's--every driver's nightmare is first round because it's always hard to go home when you didn't feel like you even got to race. The only thing I would say about qualifying runs is you need to make sure that you at least have the tree gets activated. If you go and you stage and something goes wrong and you just take off before they've activated the tree, you'll get no numbers on your run. A lot of times, drivers will go out and say, first qualifying run, they don't even care what the tree is. They're just going to up there and wait till they know that the tree has been activated and go and they just blow off the reaction time because if you get a bad run like, say, you lift halfway down the track, you're not going to have the numbers that you need for a full pass. And so a lot of times they'll say, just go out get a clean pass that first round, that first qualifying round and then you could make adjustments if need be or try things different but at least you have that clean run. And of course, the longer you have your car, the better you know it. And the less important each qualifying round might be, but in the first 20, 30 runs on a car, that information is just vital. "