Texas NHRA FallNationals
Texas Motorplex
Ennis, TX
October 13 - October 16, 2022
Leah Pruett, driver of the Rush Truck Centers Top Fuel Dragster:
● Earned No. 7 provisional qualifying position in Q1 on Friday (3.906 ET at 290.06 mph).
● Earned No. 8 provisional qualifying position in Q2 on Friday (3.731 ET at 304.18 mph) when her car experienced a mechanical failure during the run.
● Maintained No. 8 provisional qualifying position based off Friday’s Q2 run. In Q3 on Saturday, Pruett ran a 3.802 ET at 321.08 mph.
● Secured No. 8 qualifying position based off Friday’s Q2 run. In Q4 on Saturday, Pruett ran a 3.776 ET at 325.71 mph.
● Advanced to Round 2 on Sunday:
● Round 1: 3.888 ET at 229.84 mph, defeated Josh Hart (red light – 3.707 ET at 330.03 mph).
● Round 2: 3.764 ET at 275.72 mph, lost to Austin Prock (3.737 ET at 324.18 mph).
● Currently 11th in the Top Fuel championship standings, 243 points behind leader Justin Ashley.
From Leah:
“It was great to debut our Rush Truck Centers scheme at Dallas. Their slogan is to expect more when you go to their service centers and we expected to have more this weekend. We’ve delivered to ourselves because we’ve been trying very hard to run 2.10 to the 1/8 mile and we were able to do it a couple times. We’ve been trying to improve our incremental times. The better incremental times you have, overall you’ll have a quicker ET. We had a setback Friday night when a valve train part malfunctioned and caused colossal damage. It was not an over-tuning situation or over-driving, so we had to be a bit more conservative on Saturday to make sure all our system checks were right. There’s nothing like being the first pair out on Sunday with the national anthem in the great state of Texas. You can feel all that goes into this race. You can either feel it and be afraid of it, or feel it and encompass that, which I feel I did and we all did. I’m very impressed with shallow staging and cutting one of my best lights in eliminations. I was so focused on going straight down the track because the left lane is tricky and it wants to pull you to the left toward the wall. I saw my blue win light and knew we were on a good run. Talk about processing a lot of information at a high rate of speed. All of a sudden, it was over. We had an electronic issue that made the burst panel electric communication deploy the chutes and shut off the car. We got lucky on Sunday and got to the second round. We tuned the car up a bit more and had a solid race. We went up against Austin Prock, who also did a great job on the tree. We blew a blower belt that broke and we’re still dissecting the cause of that. It aborted our run sooner and would’ve been an even closer race than it was. I definitely don’t feel defeated because we’ve made extreme improvements. We finally feel like we have a racecar and are racing and competing. We’re a force to be reckoned with. We’re focused on Vegas and testing after Vegas and keeping forward momentum.”
Contact: Ashley Wilson, (303) 594-8147, Ashley.Wilson@TrueSpeedCommunication.com
