Murry Grabs Sacramento Gold

Race wins have been rather scarce lately for San Jose’s Brendan Murry, but this past Saturday night at Sacramento his luck took a turn for the better. He emerged from the race with his parts and pieces relatively intact and the gold in hand.

Sacramento Raceway’s annual Funny Car Fever show added a four car top fuel match race to this year’s event to compliment the slate of floppers, jet cars, and index racers. In addition to Murry’s Running Wild dragster, the bill featured the Santa Rosa based Birky Bunch with Mark Malde, and Larry Gotelli in the canopied Champion Speed Shop #2 car out of South San Francisco, all with Chevrolet power. The lone Chrysler car was Mike Fuller’s Forever Young entry. Journeyman driver Bill Dunlap was in Fuller’s machine as regular driver Mike McLennan had business commitments and couldn’t attend. The two run per car format was to be an open draw for the first round pairings, with the second round to match winner against winner, and loser against loser.

With the non-qualifying format of the show Murry’s car had made a couple of runs earlier in the day toward licensing future driver Frank McBee. Those runs resulted in a tire smoker when the car exited the concrete pad on the first run and an aborted run after a sharp right turn on the second attempt. With Brendan back in the seat for the first round of the match race he faced off against Fuller & Dunlap. Fuller’s bad luck seems to have followed him from Bakersfield to Sacramento as he again encountered engine damage at the starting line, forcing Dunlap had to pull to the guardrail and watch Murry sprint to the win. Murry’s car was not without his its own drama as the big block Chevrolet pulled a rocker arm stud out of a cylinder head during the run. Brendan quickly caught the problem before further damage manifested itself.

In the second half of the first round Gotelli faced off against Malde, with Gotelli’s smallblock Chevrolet coming home the winner over Malde’s big block Chevy.

For the gold Murry was to run against Gotelli, however with the show running behind schedule, the weather and track cooling rapidly, and the Champion car late coming to the staging lanes, the event staff decided to run Murry on a single. With the air density down to a crisp 900 feet, and the jet cars running right in front of him, Brendan knew that the odds were high that the track would be slippery. He was right. Despite holding the brake throughout the run Brendan spun the tires on a wild ride that made full use of the width of his lane. The evening concluded moments later when Gotelli made a courtesy single.

The next 2011 NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Series points race for AAFD will be the Pepsi Nightfire Nationals in Boise, Idaho August 11th-14th. Visit www.firebirdonline.com for more details and tickets.

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