Drag Illustrated Issue 152, January 2020 | Page 32

Special Section
ELITE TOP SPORTSMAN
SCOTT MOORE
MagnaFuel Elite Top Sportsman lived up to its
name yet again in 2019, as different winners
emerged at all seven contested races. Scott
Moore, the winner of the North-South Shootout
at Maryland, walked away from the World Finals
as the world champion.
“As a team, we set two goals in January,” says
Rodney Pryor, Moore’s crew chief, who accepted
the championship trophy on his behalf at the
PDRA Awards Banquet in Indianapolis in Decem-
ber. “We all made the commitment to run for the
Top Sportsman Elite championship and we won.
We also made the goal of if we get in the situa-
tion to win the championship, we wanted to see
if we could run in the 3s, and we did that as well.
Not a bad year after all.”
Moore was a consistent late-round player all
season long in his Robert Hayes-built and up-
graded ’08 Ford Mustang. He added a runner-up
finish at Ohio and semifinal exits at Virginia 1 and
South Georgia to go with his Maryland win. Then,
he got his 3-second runs in at the World Finals,
where he qualified No. 11 with a 3.975 and posted
a 3.99 in the first round. He lost that round, but
the championship was already his as he had a
commanding lead over Tim Molnar.
“When we win, it’s all [car owner] Sandy [Montgomery] and Scott,” Pryor says. “When we
lose, it’s my fault. But we work great together
as a team.”
This team’s collaborative efforts will come into
play again in 2020, as Montgomery plans to join
Moore at some races to compete in Edelbrock
Bracket Bash competition.
round,” Nyerges remembers. “She goes, ‘When
are you going to hang it up? You can’t win a race
– you don’t go 4.20s.’ I said, ‘I’m going to win the
next race.’ And we went to Darlington and ended
up winning the next race, and I said, ‘Did I go
4.20s? No.’”
Nyerges proved that the fastest horse doesn’t always win the race in Top Sportsman, though
he’s got a few new tricks up his sleeve for his
championship season. While he was holding back
the details in his championship speech, Nyerges
teased a new Bickel-built ride with Buck power,
an M&M transmission and Switzer Dynamics
nitrous equipment.
TOP SPORTSMAN 32
CHRIS NYERGES
Longtime Top Sportsman competitor Chris “Nitrous”
Nyerges was off to a respectable start to the season
when the PDRA rolled into the warmer summer
races. He was going rounds in MagnaFuel Top
Sportsman 32 at the first three races, but his nitrous-
assisted ’00 Firebird came alive in the heat. The
Ohioan won the Summer Nationals, runnered-up
one race later at his home race, the Northern Na-
tionals, and managed to finish just over one round
ahead of Glenn Teets III for the championship.
“Glenn was running the table all season,”
Nyerges says. “The rest of these guys, Buddy
[Perkinson] and Jeff [Pittman], they all kept me
on my toes. They are badass racers and they made
me better.”
Nyerges also credited his wife, Shari, for
pushing him to step up this season after a late-
season pep talk in 2018.
“Last year, we were at GALOT and we lose third
32 PDRA660.com