Langdon had a pair of great passes down Virginia Motorsports Park. The 27-year-old from Indianapolis opened with a 3.889 at 308.78 mph in his Lucas Oil/Dixie Chopper dragster before pounding out a 3.868 at 311.85 mph in the late afternoon.

"We couldn't be much happier right now," Langdon said. "We made two really good runs and best of all we didn't hurt anything in the motor. Last week in Memphis, for whatever reason, we were beating up our parts pretty badly. The guys took the car down to the rails and put it back together to make sure everything was cool and today all that hard work paid off.

"I hope the weatherman is right because it's supposed to cool down quite a bit overnight and if it does there could be some real fireworks tomorrow. If it's quicker out there, we will definitely be going for it."

Lucas opened with a safe 3.976 at 293.79 mph in his GEICO Powersports/Lucas Oil dragster before improving to a 3.909 at 300.33 mph in the second session.

The team was thrown a bit of curve in Round 2 when opponent Terry Haddock couldn't back up from his burnout and continued to drift down the race course. Unable to make the turn off, Haddock stopped on the track, which forced officials to shut Lucas off at the starting line.

By rule, Lucas was then allowed to return to his pit, refuel, make any adjustments the team deemed necessary, and return at the end of the round to make his run.

"It's times like that when you're so happy you have a group of top-notch guys on your crew," Lucas said. "No one panicked. We just did what we had to do and went back up there and made our run.

"The only bummer for us was it got so good between the time we originally were going to run and the actual time we did run that we left a bunch on the table. We could have put a much bigger number on the board.

"Either way, we like how the car is running and we know what it wants so we're good to go."

Saturday's final two qualifying sessions are scheduled for noon and 2:30 p.m.

Courtesy of Rob Geiger