Tony Schumacher and the SCAG Power Equipment Top Fuel team continued to build upon their program at the NHRA Winternationals in Pomona, Calif. Right out of the gate, the team unloaded with a smooth and straight pass during the event’s opening qualifying session, posting a 3.762 E.T. to place Schumacher in the top half of the field to start Saturday. The team backed up their solid Q1 effort with another good run during the second qualifying round, and were looking strong during Q3 until Schumacher’s machine pitched the blower belt as it approached the top end.
At the conclusion of the event’s three qualifying sessions, Schumacher was locked-in for eighth and faced No. 7 qualifier Shawn Langdon as his first-round opponent. The former world champs were the first pair to hit the track on Sunday and kicked off the elimination show with an exciting side-by-side race. The drivers launched hard and were glued together from start to finish, both clocking their best runs of the weekend, but Langdon’s slight starting line advantage (0.049 vs. Schumacher’s 0.065) gave him enough of an edge to propel him through the beams first.
“I came out on the right side of a very good drag race in Gainesville, and the wrong side of a fantastic race here in Pomona,” said Schumacher, a six-time event winner at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip. “One thing about drag racing is that it has never been this awesome before; it is just bad to the bone. That was a great race. Shawn Langdon is a hell of a driver and he got me on that one. We put a cylinder out at 800 feet but this was a great weekend. We made it down the track four times, and I feel like Zippy (Mike Neff), L.J. (Jon Shaffer) and Phil (Shuler) all think that the path we are going on right now is excellent, and now we can move it all in. We will keep getting a little quicker and quicker every run. Unfortunately, it’s a bummer going out early but these races are going to do that sometimes.
“The fans and the great people from SCAG got a great show today. We were first pair out, we didn’t have much to look at, didn’t know what the track was going to do but the great thing about the guys tuning my car is that that they have so much knowledge that they were able to pick the perfect tune-up for the car to get us a lightning fast hot rod. The rest of this SCAG Power Equipment team, man, these guys are doing an outstanding job, they have come a long way and it shows. I’m really looking forward to the Four-Wide Nationals at Vegas coming up. We are going to have a ton of people from SCAG Power Equipment coming to spend the weekend with us, and I can’t wait to put on a great show for the best people and partners in motorsports.”
This story was originally published on April 2, 2023. 
