It was a long, tough weekend for all concerned at the FUNNY CAR CHAOS season opener at the Texas Motorplex. Finishing really late Friday night, then wrapping not quite as late last night, the FCC teams put on an awesome show with some incredible performances and surprising results. The winners of the "A" and "B" fields were driving blown alky floppers, and they prevailed over their heavily favoured nitro burning opponents.

Despite series record performances in qualifying and the first round of eliminations, culminating in all-time bests of 3.207 - 270+ timeslips, Del Worsham shook, smoked, and sashayed down the track, as Kyle Smith laid down another consistent low-3.60 pass to turn on the winlight. His winning e.t. was a career best (over the 1/8-th mile) of 3.61 - 211.41 in his NHRA-legal Top Alcohol Funny Car.

As they promised, tuner Tim Wilkerson and driver Richard Hartman broke the 300-mph barrier on Saturday, with another jaw-dropping 4.920 - 304.53 pass. It wasn't easy as the car started hazing the tires at half-track, but Hartman stayed with it all the way to the 1320 stripe, with lots of engine smoke trailing at that point. Despite many old-school naysayers objections to the "pedigree" of the car, it was still an absolutely remarkable performance for a car without much downforce or aerodynamics.

With so many cars running over the two-day event, our photographer didn't get much sleep - in bed at 3:00 a.m. both days - and that didn't leave much - if any - photo processing time. His latest message, coming in this morning as he started the long drive home, was "don't expect to see any pics until Tuesday"... so we'll all just have to wait patiently until then.