Seven years might not seem like a long time, but in drag racing, it's an eternity. When "Big Daddy" Don Garlits made his historic 5.63, 250.69-mph blast at the 1975 Super Nationals, it was a monumental achievement, but it's doubtful that anyone expected it to be the best performance in Top Fuel for the better part of a decade.

Garlits' record did withstand the test of time, and it remained unbroken until the 1982 Summernationals, when Mark Oswald drove the Candies & Hughes dragster to a 5.61 clocking. Oswald's record was just one of the performances that highlighted the 13th annual Englishtown event.

The hot temperatures and stifling humidity, which often accompanied the Summernationals when it was held in mid-July, didn't do much to limit performances.

Frank Manzo, a longtime Raceway Park favorite, won the Alcohol Funny Car title over Arnie Karp, but returned to lose the Pro Comp final against Don Woosley's Alcohol Dragster.

Oswald, who had eclipsed the speed record four months earlier with a 251.39-mph effort in Pomona, opened fuel qualifying with a 5.65 at more than 254 mph. Later that afternoon, Oswald rode out a two-foot wheelstand and lit up the win light with a 5.61, 252.10 run to officially grab the record.

"The 5.61 was a marginal pass," Oswald said at the time. "The wheelstand was just on the edge of control, and I was a split second from shutting the car off."

The Englishtown Top Fuel field was one of the year's best. All 16 qualifiers ran between Oswald's 5.61 and Johnny Abbott's 5.86, making it the sport's third-quickest field at the time.

Gary Beck, the other performance star of the early 1980s, ran a 5.866 in Larry Minor's dragster but missed the field by .002-second.

No one in Top Fuel was close to Oswald. Shirley Muldowney was the only other driver in the 5.6s in qualifying with a 5.67 from her Pioneer entry, but the 1977 and 1980 Winston champ, who went on to win a third title in 1982, was upset in round one by Lucille Lee.

Oswald's only significant challenge came in the final, where he downed reigning Winston champ Jeb Allen, 5.70 to 5.73.

Just two months after Don Prudhomme broke the 250-mph barrier for Funny Cars at the Cajun Nationals, Billy Meyer buried Prudhomme's record with a 5.829, 254.95 blast from his Chief Auto Parts Firebird. Meyer's run marked one of the few times in history that top speed of the meet in Funny Car was quicker than that of Top Fuel. It had been widely speculated that Meyer and several other fuel teams were using nitrous oxide, which was legal at the time, to run the incredible speeds, but Meyer's crew insisted that, although there was a nitrous system installed on the block, it wasn't used during the run.

Like Oswald, Meyer also backed up both numbers for NHRA records, eclipsing Raymond Beadle's elapsed-time mark of 5.87 and Prudhomme's 250-mph mark from the Baton Rouge, La., event six weeks earlier.

Though he qualified at the top of the field by more than a tenth of a second over No. 2 qualifier Beadle, Tom Anderson, and Kenny Bernstein, who all ran 5.93s, Meyer didn't win the Summernationals Funny Car title. That honor went to Prudhomme, who edged Mike Dunn in the final, 6.00 to 6.15.

After seven years, Mark Oswald finally broke "Big Daddy" Don Garlits' longstanding Top Fuel record with a 5.61 blast at the 1982 Summernationals. Oswald went on to win the race with a string of 5.6-second runs.

Prudhomme had qualified sixth with a 5.96, but didn't register a five-second run during eliminations, although his string of low 6.0s was enough to carry him to his 34th career victory.

For the first time in the 12-year history of the class, an Oldsmobile graced the Pro Stock winner's circle after Warren Johnson drove his Starfire to a narrow final-round win over reigning champ Lee Shepherd.

Johnson, who had been a two-time champ on the IHRA mountain-motor circuit, benefited greatly from NHRA's switch to the 500-cid format at the beginning of the 1982 season. Not only was Johnson's victory the first of many for the Oldsmobile brand, but it also marked the first time in nearly three years that someone other than Shepherd, Bob Glidden, or Frank Iaconio had won a title in Pro Stock.

Johnson, who is still going strong 83 wins and five Winston championships later, was one of eight qualifiers in the sevens, with a 7.91. For Shepherd, the runner-up finish enabled him to expand his already huge lead in the Winston points standings. A little more than halfway through the 1982 season, Shepherd had nearly twice as many points as second-place Iaconio, 8,124 to 4,722.

The 1982 season was a transition year for alcohol-fueled racers. The old Pro Comp class had recently split into Top Alcohol Dragster and Top Alcohol Funny Car eliminators. The winner of each eliminator would then race in the final for overall Pro Comp honors.

As was often the case in 1982, the dragsters dominated. Don Woosley knocked off Darrell Gwynn in the Alcohol Dragster final, 6.60 to 6.63, then won Pro Comp honors over hometown favorite Frank Manzo. Earlier, Manzo had dominated the eight-car Alcohol Funny Car field with a string of 6.5-second runs, including a 6.58 in the final against Arnie Karp's Boston Strangler, but fouled in the final against Woosley.

Other champions from the event were Danny Townsend (Comp), Don O'Malley (Super Stock), Bob Slater (Stock), and Steve Eckard, who won the Summernationals en route to the first NHRA Winston championship in Super Gas.