SONOMA, CALIFORNIA // Khalid Al Balooshi, the fastest Emirati on four wheels, celebrated his 35th birthday with his fourth Top Fuel drag racing victory, topping out at 497 kilometres per hour in the winning pass at the Sonoma Nationals.
Al Balooshi won four knockout races on Sunday en route to his second victory of the season, defeating his Al Anabi Racing teammate Shawn Langdon, the world champion, in the final.
“Winning on my birthday is very special to me,” Al Balooshi said. “This is a very big race for the team.
“This trophy is the best birthday present I could get, and it came from my crew chief Jim McCulloch and all my crew guys.
“It was a close race with Shawn. I saw him at half track and I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ From there, he smoked the tires a little bit, and we won the race.”
The competition was sanctioned by the National Hot Rod Association, the world’s leading organiser of drag racing, and the Top Fuel “rail” dragsters, which run on nitro-methane fuel, constitute the fastest and most glamorous of all categories of the sport. The vehicles accelerate so quickly, often reaching 500kph in the space of 300 metres, that drivers experience “4G” forces – four times the force of gravity – during a three-second race, and 6Gs of negative G-force while decelerating after the deployment of the parachute.
“It was a great weekend for the Al Anabi team,” said Langdon, who previously had won six of eight match-ups with his Emirati teammate. “Both cars made the final, so it was win-win regardless of who won.”
Al Balooshi, a native of Dubai, began the day with a near-perfect run, hitting a top speed of 519.8kph, to defeat Billy Torrance while hitting a top speed of 519.8kph. In the quarter-finals, he won easily as Clay Millican was unable to get any traction at the starting line.
His semi-final victory was his tightest of the day; his margin of victory was 1 metre over Richie Crampton, as both drivers smoked the tires for a moment.
In the final, Langdon led for the first half of the race before he got “a little aggressive” on the throttle and lost traction as the Emirati passed him to win by about 7m.
Al Balooshi stands eighth in the season standings, after 15 of the 24 NHRA stops. The victory was his second this year. He won the season-opening event at Pomona, California, in February.
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