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<\/p>\nIt was a weekend of peaks and valleys for Alexis DeJoria and her Bandero Caf\u00e9 Funny Car team at the NHRA Northwest Nationals. On Friday evening, she wowed fans at Pacific Raceways, making the best pass of Q2 to win a watch from Ben Bridge Jewelers as part of a special track promotion. On Saturday, she laid down the best MPH of her career, but the tide turned on Sunday morning when she smoked the tires against her first round opponent, ending her race day sooner than she had hoped.\u00a0
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While the first qualifying opportunity of the weekend resulted in tire smoke, the John Force Racing Bandero Caf\u00e9 Chevrolet team responded with a monster run of 3.955 seconds at 326.56 mph, the quickest of the session. Not only did DeJoria gain three valuable bonus points, but she also won a special Oris watch offered to the nitro low qualifiers of the session.
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\u201cLately, a lot of tracks have been doing these special Friday night qualifying bonuses,\u201d remarked DeJoria. \u201cThis one was the Ben Bridge Jewelers low qualifier giveaway. The prize is an Oris watch in Washington Green. I love it. It matches all of the trees around here. They\u2019ve been making incredible watches since 1905. Our team got that top qualifier on Friday. That was a win in and of itself. This team needed that. That was a huge confidence booster. Our team is so good together. I love them; we\u2019re a family. I\u2019m so proud of every single person on this team. They are accountable for everything, and they don\u2019t make mistakes. So now, I\u2019m going to get 10 more of these Oris watches for my team.\u201d\u00a0
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After more tire smoke in the first pass on Saturday, DeJoria made another stellar qualifying effort in the final opportunity of the weekend. She rocketed her 12,000 horsepower Funny Car to a 3.900 at 337.41, the best speed of her career, earning a couple more bonus points and landing her in the No. 3 qualifying position for eliminations.\u00a0
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DeJoria faced Dave Richards, the No. 14 qualifier, in the first round of eliminations. She got the starting line advantage but ran into tire smoke almost immediately while Richards outpaced her to the stripe.\u00a0
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\u201cI love this racetrack,\u201d said DeJoria. \u201cI\u2019ve had some good success out here. I won my first national event in Top Alcohol Funny Car here. It\u2019s an incredible facility. We\u2019ve got a strong car right now. This race didn\u2019t go as planned but I know we\u2019ve got the car. We\u2019ve got what it takes. It\u2019s just little tweaks here and there. When all the planets align, then we\u2019re going to be on a roll. And everybody knows it because everybody\u2019s been through it. But it\u2019s frustrating because we are the new kid on the block as far as JFR goes and my teammates\u2019 cars are doing great. We are still trying to play a little bit of catch-up. But Mike Neff and Jonnie Lindberg (crew chiefs) are so smart. This ain\u2019t their first rodeo. They are getting this thing figured out, but in a way that\u2019s very methodical because they\u2019re not going over center. They want to creep up on it and really get this car consistent. We are going to test in Indy and in Brainerd after the race.\u201d
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The next stop on the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series schedule will take DeJoria and her John Force Racing Bandero Caf\u00e9 Chevrolet SS Funny Car to Brainerd, Minn., where they will compete in the NHRA Brainerd Nationals, an event DeJoria won in 2017, at Brainerd International Raceway, August 20-23.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This story was originally published on July 28, 2026. <\/p>\n
The post DeJoria Achieves New Milestones in Qualifying Before Early Exit in Eliminations at NHRA Northwest Nationals<\/a> first appeared on Drag Illustrated<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was a weekend of peaks and valleys for Alexis DeJoria and her Bandero Caf\u00e9 Funny Car team at the NHRA Northwest Nationals. On Friday evening, she wowed fans at Pacific Raceways, making the best pass of Q2 to win a watch from Ben Bridge Jewelers as part of a special track promotion. On Saturday, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}