WESTCLIFF drag racer Graham Ellis scored the second victory of his Pro Modified career at the weekend to overtake Chelmsford’s Roger Moore at the top of the MSA British Drag Racing Championship’s leader-board.

Ellis won this season’s third MSA round at Santa Pod Raceway’s Summer Nationals by defeating team-mate Nick Davies in the final.

Ellis drove his supercharged Plymouth Barracuda to reach the all-Ellis Motorsport final while Davies took the wheel of Ellis’s turbo-charged development car, a Plymouth Superbird.

Testing an experimental clutch during qualifying, Ellis had struggled to hook his Barracuda’s power to the track, but switching to a more familiar unit before the start of Sunday’s eliminations set him on course for the trophy.

Ellis achieved the event’s quickest elapsed time over the standing-start quarter-mile, 6.448 seconds, beating Wayne Nicholson in the opening round.

In the final, Ellis was plainly on a stormer, but the car’s weaving trajectory towards the finish line persuaded him to shut off early to a still-respectable 6.567sec at only 166mph.