Baytown: Whit Bazemore final summary

BAZEMORE OUT EARLY IN HOUSTON

BAYTOWN, Texas (April 2, 2006) - Whit Bazemore and crew chief Brian Corradi are baffled by the difficulty they've encountered in tuning the Matco Tools Iron Eagle Dodge Charger R/T Funny Car lately, based in some part on adapting to the newly-mandated tire by NHRA.

This was evidenced this weekend at the O'Reilly NHRA Spring Nationals, where Bazemore produced two of four sound qualifying runs for No. 9, then experienced tire shake in first round of eliminations, losing to Tony Pedregon (6.819/137.85 to Pedregon's 4.869/316.67).

"It's very disappointing," said Bazemore. "The Matco Tools Dodge Charger just didn't make it through the 1.5 (-second) problem area that we've had, and it shook and smoked the tires. It didn't recover either; it's like the tire had oil on it.

"For us, right now, the way we run our car the car has no traction. If it shakes just a little too much it won't make it. It should have recovered easily and it didn't. We still wouldn't have won.

"The Matco Tools Dodge team has made good progress, but we struggled. Right now it's very, very frustrating because we are making progress, but we're not getting the results. And the progress we've made deserves better results.

"I told Brian the other day. We can't worry about winning rounds; we just have to get our car to run good and it's running a lot better than it was. When the car runs well the results are going to come. The problem is the tune-up window is so small that we can't tune it."

Bazemore is 12th in the Funny Car point standings.

-dsr