In shocking news that hit the wires late last week, Tim Boychuck who was awarded the Wally for winning the March Meet was disqualified after his fuel pump was found to be outside of the class specs. Chad Head, who was the runner up at the race was named the winner of the March Meet. Also, Rick White, the runner up in the Top Fuel category was also disqualified for the same reason, a fuel pump violation and was forced to forfeit his finish as well.

Simply put, the guys had fuel pumps that were confiscated after the race to be tested by NHRA. Class rules state that their pumps can only flow 21-GPM at 4,000RPM through a 0.300-inch orifice. The pumps on Boychuck’s and White’s car obviously moved more fuel than this and that is a major league problem. For those of you not familiar with nitro, the more you feed into an engine, the more power it will make and if the guy in the left lane has a legal pump that flows 21-GPM and the guy in the right lane has one that flows 25-GPM (we’re throwing a number out, the specific results of the tests were not released) and both make clean runs, the guy with the 25-GPM pump will out run the other car 100 times out of 100.

Pump flow management is one of the ways that officials are trying to manage the costs with this type of nitro racing. It is certainly not cheap by anyone’s standards, but keeping the pumps at the same level prevents the whole thing from spiraling out of control. Obviously, pumps can be modified in the same way that any device that flows air or water can.

The two racers will lose all of the points that they earned as well as any purse money that was earned at the event.

We feel bad for Chad Head as this was not the way he wanted to win his first event and we feel especially bad for the crew guys who really busted hump to get the car ready and tuned up all weekend. Hopefully his next win happens at the track, not a couple of weeks later!