National Hot Rod Association

"When they lower that body down over you, it's a whole different world," says Cruz Pedregon, driver of the Snap-On Tools Toyota. "First of all, you've got that big injector on top of the engine, right in your line of vision. It's right where you're trying to look, almost like somebody's standing in your way, but after a while, you don't even realize it's there."

Del Worsham, driver of Alan Johnson's Al-Anabi Toyota, concurs. "You can't see much, but you can see what you need to see – the groove, your crew chief in front of you as you're backing up from the burnout, and the Tree."

Despite teams' best efforts to contain it, clutch dust escapes from the bellhousing and clouds drivers' vision, particularly at night.

"With all the technology that has gone into these cars over the years, you'd think that we would have come up with something to stop all that dust from getting out of the 'can,' but we really haven't," Pedregon says. "But dealing with clutch dust is part of driving a Funny Car. Some runs have more than others, and if the engine drops a cylinder and makes the clutch slip even harder the cloud is even bigger, but there's always some. When you're running at night, then add a little clutch dust and some tire-shake, you're just hoping the car is going straight."

Worsham, like most drivers, looks way down the track – hundreds of feet in front of the car, almost to the finish line. "I always look way down there and try to make sure I have myself right in the middle of the groove by the time I get there, he says. "That way, it doesn't feel like you're as out-of-shape as you actually are. I've gotten back from runs and had guys on the crew say, 'The car was moving around so much, I can't believe you got it to the finish line,' but it never seems that bad from inside the car."

Pedregon does just the opposite. "What works best for me is not looking very far beyond the edge of the hood, maybe 50 or 75 feet ahead of me," he says. "Most people like to look way down the track, I know, but I never look any farther down there than I have to. When I started driving, everybody said to pick a spot down by the finish line. I was like, 'The finish line? I'll figure that out when I get that far.' "

Both agree on one thing: If you can see your opponent, even just a little bit of the front fender, you're losing. You can even be behind the other car by as little as two- or three-hundredths of a second and not see him. "And you never see them when you're ahead," Worsham says. "That's what you always want to see out of the corner of your eye: nothing."

The last thing Funny Car drivers do want to see is fire through the fire windows, small cutouts in the dashboard that allow a glimpse into the engine compartment, enabling them to tell when a small engine fire has broken out. (Big fires, the kind that destroy cars, are a lot more obvious.)

"Whoever invented fire windows really knew what he was doing," Pedregon says. "You don't have to take your eyes off the track in front of you, and you never actually look directly at them. They're small, but when they turn red, you know it right away. You don't miss it. It's like a warning light coming on down there saying 'You're on fire.' "

Not all Funny Car bodies are the same. "I've been doing this for almost 20 years, and some cars you really can't see out of that well because the dash is up so high," says Pedregon, who has raced since 1987 and raced Funny Cars since 1992. "With this Toyota body, the visibility is great, probably the best I've ever had. The hood is so low because of the wedge shape of the body that I can see out of it as well as any car I've ever driven."

But not as well as if he was in a Top Fuel dragster; nothing has that kind of visibility. "In a dragster, you can just look down the body and see everything in front of you," says Pedregon, who drove a Top Fuel car in 1991 before winning the NHRA championship as a Funny Car rookie in 1992. "You can see right in front of you, see the front wheels, even see where they touch the track."

It's almost too much. "There are some things you don't want to see," Pedregon says. "When they raise the body after the burnout [to make final adjustments before the run], sometimes you'll look at the [header] pipe and not like what you see. It gets you thinking, 'Is thing going to make it?' A couple of times, I've thought, 'I don't want to see any more of this. Hurry up and get that body back down.' "

"In a Funny Car, you just react to what you can see," Pedregon says, summing up. "What are you going to do about it anyway? Great visibility is never going to be a part of driving a Funny Car, and after a while you get used to it. It becomes second nature."