Baytown: Gary Scelzi Saturday summary

SCELZI NO. 5 IN HOUSTON QUALIFYING

BAYTOWN, Texas (April 9, 2005) - Gary Scelzi posted two out of four excellent qualifying passes in the Mopar/Oakley Dodge Stratus Funny Car for the O'Reilly NHRA Spring Nationals - a 4.825/321.35 in the night session on Friday and a 4.822/313.37 in the final round today, which was the second quickest of the round and good for No. 5 in the field of 16.

"I don't really like the idea of two out of four, but I'll take two out of four," he said. "It's just a different race track and I don't know if it's preparation or the track is just getting old and needs a facelift, or what's really wrong. I think the track was actually better than we thought it was and when you pull it back too far you tend to shake the tires and smoke. It looks like you're overpowering it. And I think that's what we did.

"This last run Mike (Neff, crew chief) said, No, I'm not going to get fooled. I'm not going to back it up. I'm just going to leave it, and it should run an .81 or .82, and it did. Unfortunately, it dropped a cylinder at four seconds into the run or it should have run 320-something mph and it would have run a 4.80 flat or a high .70. All the numbers show it would have."

Scelzi faces his teammate Whit Bazemore in the first round of eliminations on Sunday. "Now I have to race Bazemore, but when you've got this many teams (three Funny Cars in the Don Schumacher Racing camp) it's going to happen. So we'll just go do our best against Baze and hope he continues to struggle in the sunlight. And maybe we can get a win for this Mopar/Oakley Dodge. That's important for us right now."

-dsr-