Before qualifying at the Northwest Nationals, the Top Fuel rookie enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of Pacific Raceways from a hot air balloon—and even landed in a fan’s backyard.NHRA Top Fuel racer Maddi Gordon qualified a ho-hum eighth, in the middle of the order, for Sunday eliminations at the Muckleshoot Casino Resort Northwest Nationals.But her weekend at Pacific Raceways started out with an unforgettable adventure, nothing ordinary about it.Gordon, a rookie from Paso Robles, California, who drives for Ron Capps Motorsports, usually sees the drag strip from the seat of her 330-plus-mph Carlyle Tools Dragster, usually in three-to-four-second clips. But she got a bird’s eye view of it Friday before qualifying began—in a rather slow-moving method of transportation: a hot-air balloon.“It was awesome. It was so fun,” the always-supercharged Gordon said Saturday, still grinning from the memory.She said he got the chance to experience floating over the fir trees and gazing down on the racetrack, courtesy of the Muckleshoot Casino Resort. But, she said, “I thought we were going to be tethered to 150 feet because of the weather. And then the clouds didn’t roll in like they thought they were going to. So, we got to go for a full ride. It was so cool. I love heights and adrenaline stuff.“It was way calmer than I expected, so that was pretty cool,” Gordon said. “And then with the wind—I didn’t know this—but they don’t have any guarantee of where we’re going to land because we just have to go wherever the wind goes.“So we’re coming down. We’re getting close to these people’s yard,” she said. “It’s a nice, big yard. And they [the residents] come outside and our guy yells, ‘Hey, can we land in your yard?’ And they’re like,‘Yeah!’ So we landed in the yard. We made some race fans out of it, got them tickets. They came out, got to go in the burnout box. They got the full experience [at Pacific Raceways]. You want a hot air balloon to land, you got to have a big yard.”She said the ride “was really fun,” even though she didn’t drive the balloon.