Commerce: Cory McClenathan Saturday summary

Cory Mac places Berryman Products dragster in No. 3 as qualifying ends

COMMERCE, Ga. (May 15, 2004) -- At the end of four qualifying sessions for the 24th annual Summit Racing Equipment Southern Nationals presented by Pontiac, Cory McClenathan, by virtue of a 4.545 second pass on Friday evening, qualified No. 3 on the Top Fuel ladder.

McClenathan, driver of the Carrier Boyz Racing Berryman Products dragster, will square off against Scott Weis when eliminations begin tomorrow. Weis qualified No. 14 with a run down the Atlanta Dragway quarter-mile of 4.756 seconds at a speed of 303.03 mph. The pair has split two races in their only meetings to date.

"After laying down some good numbers on Friday," said McClenathan, "we tried to see what the track would hold in the heat on Saturday. As anybody can see by the numbers, we got too aggressive and ended up losing traction on both runs. For tomorrow we'll go back to our base setup from Friday and we should be okay. Todd Smith (crew chief) and the guys will have us ready to run."

Entering eliminations, McClenathan sits in the seventh position spot in the POWERade Top Fuel point standings with 297 points, but is only 22 points behind No. 5.

Final eliminations for all classes will kickoff at 11 a.m. tomorrow. Same-day television coverage of eliminations can be seen on ESPN2 tomorrow evening from 7-10 p.m. All times is Eastern Time (ET).

-cbr-