Qatar’s Al-Anabi seeks win at season’s final race

It has been a long time since the 2012 NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series season began back in February, and so much has happened with the Qatar’s Al-Anabi Racing Top Fuel team, the two-time, reigning NHRA Top Fuel World Champions owned by His Excellency Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani. Despite a slow start to the season, the team’s new drivers have won a race, and each has a chance to win a second race at the 48th annual Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals in Pomona, California just 50 miles east of Los Angeles this weekend. Qualifying is set for Thursday, Friday and Saturday with eliminations scheduled for Sunday. Dubai rookie driver Khalid al-Balooshi enters the season’s final race in 11th place in the NHRA Full Throttle Top Fuel point standings. Since he did not make the Countdown to the Championship NHRA Playoffs, the best he can finish the season is 11th place. He leads 12th-place Clay Millican by 158 points and is now assured of finishing the season in 11th place – the best possible result after not qualifying for the Countdown. That is a stunning achievement for a man who had never driven a Top Fuel dragster one year ago. Al-Balooshi won the first Top Fuel race of his career last month in Reading, Pennsylvania, and he followed the win with a solid semi-final performance two weeks ago in Las Vegas. He has advanced to at least the second round of eliminations at nine of the last 10 races including each of the last eight. That represents significant progress after the slow start to the season he endured while learning his way around the cockpit of the 8,000 horse power Top Fuel dragster.“This season went by very fast, but I have learned a lot,” al-Balooshi said. “When we started at Pomona in February, it did not take long to understand that the Top Fuel car was very different from Pro Mod, but I did my best to get better and better every race. In the last five or six races, our Al-Anabi team has been good. We won a race and had a good result last race in Las Vegas to go with the win.”“We have one more race, and I know everyone on our team wants to win it this week for Sheikh Khalid and for ourselves. My crew chief and everybody on the team are working as hard as they can, and we want to win this race. But whether we win this week or not, our Al-Anabi team will start next season much better than we were when we started this season. I think next year, our two Al-Anabi cars will be two of the best cars in Top Fuel.”Mathematically, silver Al-Anabi driver Shawn Langdon can still win the 2013 NHRA Full Throttle Top Fuel championship, but it is a tremendous long shot. Langdon, who trails points leader Antron Brown by 116 points entering the season’s final race, would need to win the race, set a national elapsed-time record and hope the three drivers ahead of him in the point standings have significant problems during the race weekend. Langdon is 51 points behind second-place Tony Schumacher and 46 points behind Massey making a second or third-place finish a much more realistic possibility. However, both would require an excellent performance from Langdon with Schumacher and Massey losing early in eliminations.The way he’s been running late in the season, Langdon is definitely a threat to win this weekend. In the last eight events, Langdon has a win, a runner-up finish and two semifinal finishes in addition to three No. 1 qualifiers. He has qualified in the top five at 15 of the 22 races this year including seven of the last nine; his average qualifying position this season is 4.73, and last month at the Auto-Plus Nationals in Reading, Pennsylvania, Langdon ran the fastest pass in NHRA history when he reached 334.15 mph during the second round of eliminations.“Going to Pomona, we’re just going to do the best we can to qualify No. 1, win the race and end the year on a good note,” Langdon said. “We can definitely get No. 2 in points; we need to have things fall our way to make that happen, but it’s doable. If a miracle happens, we still have a crazy outside shot to win the championship so that’s still kind of possible.”“At this point, though, there are just so many different scenarios that need to fall our way so we just need to do our best this weekend and see where it all shakes out. The main thing is to end the year on a good note for all the guys who have had a long year so you have that excitement in the off season and rolling into testing in January.”Al-Anabi Racing operates out of multiple locations in both the United States and Qatar. In the United States, the Brownsburg, operation is a two-car NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series team that is managed by Alan Johnson Racing. Sheikh Khalid’s initiative has created increased international awareness of the nation of Qatar while highlighting the nation’s international sports outreach. Alan Johnson is a 14-time NHRA champion in various capacities including crew chief, team owner and team manager.