[Jeff Higgins]

Wow. Hat's of to Daniel Wilkerson. Like the announcer says, "he never stopped driving that car".

Kind of a back story here that the announcer briefly touched upon. NHRA had mandated a form of body retention this year that had the drivers pretty widely upset. Ron Capps has been the most vocal about it. Essentially, the NHRA maintains their system is for spectator safety, to keep departing Funny Car bodies out of the grandstands. Which has simply never happened in the history of the sport. The drivers maintain that the NHRA system keeps too much of the body on the car, in front of them, so they cannot see. Capps, Wilkerson, and others have been allowed to experiment with their own retention systems. I'm not sure Wilkerson's worked as intended, it looks like too much of the body blocked his view. But at least it wasn't the entire front of the car up in his face. Capps lost a body a week or two ago and had a "better" outcome, if you could call it that. No real way to test this stuff, though.