2001 Swedish Top Fuel Tour Round 3
Tullinge Raceway
Report and pictures by Ivan Sansom
SATURDAY
Saturday proved to be an extremely long and tiring day at Tullinge Raceway, with qualifying for the third round of
this year's Top Fuel Tour cut short to a single round thanks to a combination of the weather and a phenomenal number
of oildowns in the accompanying Nordic Pro Street Cup. First and foremost a big Thank You must go to the SHRA Stockholm
track crew who battled through the weather conditions to enable qualfying to start at 3 pm this afternoon, and then
proceed through the numerous aforementioned oildowns and vehicles stuck on the track until just after the 6pm curfew.
Hopefully the crew will be rewarded with better weather on Sunday - needless to say it turned out to be a beautiful
sunny Stockholm evening after the final pair went down the track!
However, the Top Fuel qualifying session saw a couple of excellent passes from Kågered and Möller and a superb driving
job from Öberg. The four cars on the Tour came out late on under overcast skies with solo efforts being the name of the
game. First up was Tommy Möller in the Optima Batteries and Sunoco Fuels backed tangerine dream machine - a strong
burnout was followed by a picture perfect 5.19 at 442km/h with a beautiful wheels up launch and header flames shooting
high above the wing. Not good enough for number one qualifier though, as Micke Kågered belted out a 5.13 at 461 km/h in
the very next pass - a slight waver at mid track was quickly corrected and what looked like death smoke at the top end
proved to be nothing more than a whole load of kitty litter being picked up by the Bahco-Quaker State machine. Alan
Jackson was looking somewhat ruefully at the cleaning job that faced him when I left the track.
Unfortunately I missed Freddie Fagerström's 6.64 on Friday, but his 6.9 driving job whilst sideways through the lights
more than made up for this - and I'm sure his burnouts are getting longer! Kent Trenneman, Jallo Makima and Kenneth
Feldthusen are all nicely in the high sixes as well.
SUNDAY
Sunday was a much improved day weather-wise, although there was some rain early in the morning preventing racing
from starting until gone eleven - the track drying wasn't helped by the track prep tractor breaking down at half
track and depositing fluid all over the right hand lane - yet another slog for the track crew...
Prior to the first round of eliminations in Top Fuel I had the chance to chat with Micke Kågered who was in a
quietly confident mood, with the Bahco Tools Quaker State CBD dragster running clean and quick. Micke now feels
very much at home in Top Fuel and sees his future very much in the class, and has adjusted to the more subtle
corrections required in driving a fuel dragster as opposed to his TMFC. His talent for TMFC obviously hasn't deserted
him as Micke ran a 6.3 test pass in the Quaker State Funny Car this afternoon (Magnus Larsson had a more troubled test
pass in his gorgeous silver and blue Trans Am bodied TMFC today).
Monica Öberg typically downplayed her driving job from yesterday, remarking "It was just a little" when asked about the
violent twitch at the top end - all who saw it will know different!
First round of TF saw No 1 qualified Tommy Möller take the win (5.30 at 436 km/h) over a tire spinning 5.49 effort at
350 km/h from Monica which also resulted in the blower belt being spat off. Monica and Tommy were pretty much even as
they came past me at 100 feet, although the short end of the track was covered in slightly different fashion - Möller
cutting a sci-fi like 0.402 RT coupled with a lazy 1.014 60 foot time, whilst Öberg had an impressive 0.937 60 foot
and a 0.543 RT.
In the second pairing Pelle Lindelöw was confident of putting yesterdays problems behind him. Pelle was almost a
complete car length (roughly a full tenth of a second) ahead of Kågered at the 100 foot mark through a nice holeshot,
but then the blower belt let go and cut an oil line at 200 foot putting paid to Lindelöw's bid for a place in the final
as the bright pink fueler slowed to a 7.74 at 172 km/h. Micke meantime shot off to another teen - this time a 5.15 at
473 km/h (Top Speed of the meet, and the same TS as the car ran at Piteå earlier in the Top Fuel Tour). Pelle had a
mixture of disappointment - "I thought I had him" - and apologies for causing the lengthy clean up job. Hopefully
Pelle's luck will improve for the rest of his final season.
In a sense Lindelöw's season improved in the 3rd/4th place runoff with an early shut off 5.25 at 385km/h defeating
Oberg's tire smoking 5.65 at 422 km/h. "A bad race weekend" for Monica.
The 1st/2nd place match up saw co-crew chief Alan Jackson very happy with the setup on Kågered's car - "it runs so
clean and consistently quick", whilst Peter Lantz (acting as advisor to the Lorentzon & Möller team) had been trying
to find the 5.05 set up he ran at Tullinge two years ago, whilst comparing notes with Kim Reymond (racing at the FIA
round in Gardermoen). Asked if a five-zero was likely, Peter replied "maybe 5.0, but who knows with these cars!"
Möller welded Micke on the startline, but then climbed into a three foot high wheelie by the time he passed the
Christmas Tree - Kågered was long gone on a clean and quick 5.10 (low ET of the meet) at 472 km/h and Tommy wisely
clicked the Optima car off as he brought the front end back down to earth.
So another eventful weekend on the Top Fuel Tour - as usual my thanks go to the racers and teams for taking the
time to chat with me; Lelle and the NPSC organisers; the SPN guys and Stefan Boman for helping me with the Svensk;
and Kinna and Elliott. Cheers guys, hope to see you all again at Tullinge next year when, hopefully, the track
will be able to fend off the very real threat of closure for a housing development. Stockholm needs this track!
Ivan sent us a number of other photographs which are below; he also took a large number of pictures of other
racers in action at Tullinge. Anyone wanting copies of the above pictures, or wanting to enquire about pictures of
other racers, can contact Ivan by E-Mail at
i.j.sansom@bham.ac.uk.
Swedish Top Fuel Tour web site
Eurodragster event coverage index