Yet at this event their finest efforts were overshadowed at every turn by the other element in the axis, the new alliance of Sweden's Michael Gullqvist and America's Roger Burgess. Following Gullqvist's historic NHRA victory at Atlanta in another of Burgess's R2B2 team cars, the Camaro he had raced earlier at Gainesville was airfreighted to Santa Pod in May and driven by Melanie Troxel, aided by a full American crew. With his familiar Bel Air not quite ready for Alastaro, Gullqvist slipped back into the Camaro's driving seat and, quite simply, demolished the opposition and re-wrote Europe's Pro Mod standards.
Tuning the Camaro himself, and with his own crew augmented by two American R2B2 mechanics, Gullqvist equalled his European personal-best ET, 6.126, on his first qualifying pass, also adding 9mph/14kph to his best terminal speed, before clocking fresh PB's in both categories on three further passes. Like Lindberg, Gullqvist overcooked it in the third qualifying session with a 12-second dawdle, but each of his other seven passes exceeded 240mph/386kph. His best effort, in a first-round defeat of Freddy Fagerström, was the quickest, fastest pass yet seen in Europe, 5.911sec at 245.76mph/395.52kph. The terminal speed was backed up for a new European record but the elapsed time proved too quick to be ratified by his other ET's.
After hammering Mikael Lindahl and Adam Flamholc,Gullqvist faced Lindberg in the final. Another great performance from Lindberg proved not great enough. Gullqvist left first, ran almost a tenth quicker on the ET clocks and crossed the finish line a full 10mph/16kph faster to take his second Alastaro victory in succession.
