NHRA

Charlotte: Kurt Johnson Saturday notes

Starting No. 1, KJ Looks for Sunday Success in Concord Kurt Johnson and the ACDelco Cobalt crew got their NHRA playoff season off to a great start on Saturday, with their 6.680-second time from Friday earning the No. 1 qualifying position for ...

Edited: Sep 14, 2008, 11:47 PM

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Starting No. 1, KJ Looks for Sunday Success in Concord

Kurt Johnson and the ACDelco Cobalt crew got their NHRA playoff season off to a great start on Saturday, with their 6.680-second time from Friday earning the No. 1 qualifying position for Sunday's final eliminations of the inaugural Carolina NHRA Nationals in Concord, NC. This is the 29th No. 1 starting position of KJ's career, and second of the 2008 season.

Although the warmer temperatures at the magnificent new zMAX Dragway on Saturday prevented any real improvement among the top runners in the naturally-aspirated Pro Stock class, Johnson took advantage of his final two attempts to fine-tune his set-up for race day, with each run among the best of the 26 cars making an attempt. The blue crew's consistent performance earned them the Full Throttle award for this race, which is given to the highest-performing and most consistent team throughout qualifying. Armed with this additional data, KJ looked to translate this strong showing into success in Sunday's final eliminations.

"At this stage of the game, every point counts, and we're after them all, so for this ACDelco Cobalt crew to come in here, run as well as we did and get those eight points for qualifying No. 1 is absolutely huge. Overall, we made four pretty good runs, and even though it was slower out there today due to the increased temperatures, our two attempts today might have been better than what we ran yesterday. Besides, these conditions are closer to what we'll have tomorrow, so this was a good tune-up.

"We're on a mission, that's all there is to it. After all, to be there at the end, you have to have the total package, from racing the racetrack to being on the tree. We're going to treat every run from here on out as if it was a final, executing as best as we can. The hard part is over -- now it's time for the fun to begin."

-credit: j2r

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