Baytown: Tony Bartone final summary

BARTONE BOWS OUT IN BAYTOWN'S QUARTERFINALS

BAYTOWN, Texas (April 1) -- Tony Bartone drove his Lucas Oil Chevrolet Monte Carlo to a quarterfinal finish at the 20th annual O'Reilly Spring Nationals at Houston Raceway Park.

In his first round, Bartone knocked out Tony Pedregon from competition in the first round with a good performance recording an elapsed time of 4.911 seconds at a speed of 301.20 to his opponent's time of 6.458 seconds, 150.51 mph advancing the Lucas Oil Funny Car to the next stanza.

In the quarterfinals, he unfortunately shook the tires and tried in vain to overcome his difficulties, but fell short of completing their goal only to be set aside by Del Worsham. Bartone's time of 7.443 seconds, 119.96 mph was surpassed by Worsham's run of 5.021 seconds, 302.69 mph.

"That makes us happy anytime we beat the Pedregons," said car owner, Jim Dunn. "It makes me feel good because we've both been racing for a long time. We put a whole new fuel system on it for this race. We were hurting it at Gainesville and didn't harm anything here and ran decent. So, we're happy what we did with it. Since we don't test, we normally test on our first couple of qualifying runs. It worked very well, we didn't hurt anything."

The Lucas Oil Funny Car team will continue the battle on 'The Strip' at the Las Vegas for the running of the eight annual Summitracing.com Nationals on April 12 -15.

-credit: lor