Tony Pedregon and crew had a scare in Saturday's opening round of qualifying at the Lucas Oil Raceway Indianapolis, when the throttle on his Q Power Funny Car was accidentally forced wide-open after he failed to do a burnout and his crew surrounded the car to look for the problem. Crew chief Dickie Venables and crewman Cody Pendergrass were slightly injured in the incident, which ended with Pedregon's car lodged on the A-boards in front of the Christmas Tree. This was one very lucky NHRA crash.

"First and foremost I was worried to death about my guys," Pedregon said. "But I've already talked to both of them and it appears they just got scraped up. Thank God they're okay. I was really worried about Cody because he was in front of the car.

"We've had a problem the last few races with the throttle getting hung open after the burnout. What the guys did was basically put an extension on it to prevent that from happening. Well, that time when I tried to do the burnout the pedal wouldn't go all the way down. I was communicating with them on the radio and with hand signals trying to tell them something was preventing the pedal from going all the way down.

"I think what happened at that point is Dickie started working on the injector while Cody was trying to lift the body at the same time. Something jammed up in there and the throttle went straight up. I had a handful of brake but they're not designed to hold back 7,000 horsepower. I knew it was going to go so I just steered to the one place where no one was standing."

The front end of Pedregon's chassis was bent to the left and his crew has already elected to put their back-up car into service. Pedregon hopes to run Round 3 later Saturday evening.

Because the car hit the electronics box, action was halted for an hour.