With twenty-eight machines lighting it off and jostling for the
eight-quickest positions during Saturday's AA/Funny Car Eliminator
qualifying round, one has to expect some broken hearts -- and broken
parts.
For "Nitro Kitty" Mendy Fry and her mount, McCain's Bomb Squad, that
meant a broken rear end -- and one that was impractical to mend. At
the shift-point during the first of what should have been two
qualifying runs, a puff of smoke came out of the '73 Duster's headers,
a signal that the pinion gear lost more teeth than two cowboys in a
bar fight, and the damage spread throughout the drivetrain, including
destroying the axle and snapping a steel input shaft like a pretzel.
With power to the slicks dis-engaged, Fry coasted to a quarter-mile
elapsed time of 7.13 at 131 mph, netting a provisional 19th position,
insufficient to qualify for Sunday's race.
Which was academic, because after the damage was assessed, in hopes of
making Sunday's qualifying round, a frantic search for a replacement
rear axle was met with sympathetic responses from members of the Nitro
Funny Car community, most specifically by the teams of Claude LaVoie
and Todd Lesenko, but to no avail. And after McCain's Bomb Squad spent
the night disassembling the drivetrain in hopes of putting it back
together in time for more qualifying, the team's season came to end
for want of a spare axle. Which begs the question: How do you mend a
broken heart? Or even a broken rear end?
