Commerce: Melanie Troxel Friday summary

TROXEL STEERS TO NO. 5 POSITION IN ATLANTA

COMMERCE, Ga. (April 27) -- Melanie Troxel made the moves of a real swashbuckler sawing the steering wheel to correct a darting dragster to enter into the provisional field of 16 cars at the 27th annual Summit Racing Equipment Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway in the No. 5 spot. Despite the swerving antics of the 8,000 horsepower Vietnam Veterans MIA/POW dragster, she managed to record an elapsed time of 4.525 seconds.

"The car was a little bit of an animal," said Troxel. "You kind of expect it to spin the tires down track and move around on you. But earlier on, I was fighting the car to keep it in the groove. The fact that you can't see the track at night just compounds that. On the other hand I knew that if I had to work that hard, that probably meant the car was on a good run. We would like to have a few extra hundredths there to get right up to the top, but we're certainly not complaining with a 4.52."

The Summit Racing Southern Nationals will air at 6.p.m. on Saturday, April 28 on ESPN2-HD.

-credit: lor