Dallas: Gary Scelzi eliminations summary

ENNIS, Texas (Oct. 12, 2003) - Gary Scelzi advanced to the second round in his Oakley Time Bomb Dodge Stratus Funny Car after handily defeating Dale Creasy Jr. with a 4.879-second elapsed time at 321.65 mph to Creasy's 5.135/285.17. The second round was Scelzi's undoing, however, as a broken spark plug resulted in a holeshot loss to Dean Skuza (4.935/306.74 for Scelzi; 4.959/304.67 for Skuza.)

"We went up there and tried to run a 4.82 or .83 like we did in qualifying," said Scelzi, who holds the national top-speed record of 329.18 mph. "All the numbers were perfect, and then somewhere down the run, right before or at half track, it blew a spark plug out of it, then it dropped a cylinder. It was obvious that something went wrong when you look at the speed we ran, just 306 mph. Our car runs 320 by accident. We're just having no racing luck at all.

"It's getting hard to keep picking yourself up after you keep gtting kicked like this. But you know what you've got and you know it can win the race at any time and everybody else knows it too. It's frustrating as hell.

"We're seventh in points now, with 1013, so we moved up a shot, which is dynamite, because from seventh to 11th is just a couple of rounds.

"We just need to stay tough, don't change anything. We'll test Monday after the Las Vegas race and try a few more new things that we're going to try for next year to get our program together. Over the winter we can refine everything and put all brand new stuff on it again and go to Vegas (early testing at the end of January)."

Scelzi, a Fresno, Calif., native, can now look forward to some time off after seven straight weekends of racing. "It's over. We can go home and get a week and a half off," he said.