Englishtown: Warren Johnson Friday notes

WJ Rebounds to Sit Third Midway through Englishtown Qualifying

Warren Johnson and the GM Performance Parts Pontiac GXP crew showed few signs of the transporter difficulties they had experienced on their way to the Lucas Oil NHRA Supernationals, making two solid runs during the first day of qualifying. Although their bad luck from the day before seemed to carry over in the first session, when issues with the racetrack affected their run, The Professor came back in the evening session to record a 6.605-second elapsed time with a class-leading top speed of 209.52 mph to claim the third position heading into Saturday's final two attempts at Raceway Park.

"The day started out a little iffy, not from our performance standpoint, but due to the racetrack not being up to par in the first qualifying session until they cleaned it. Unfortunately, we were the first car out after they worked on it, and there was still something on the track because you could see the dirt blowing out from under the car on the video. As a result, it got loose in third or fourth gear, which obviously hurt our elapsed time.

"Still, we knew that if we came back with a decent run, we should be able to run a 6.61 or better, and we did that. It made a good move at the start, but the track was a little better than we anticipated, and the car got up a little high and moved to the left just a bit, which probably cost us the low elapsed time. Overall, we're relatively satisfied.

"Heading into tomorrow, we're fairly confident that won't get bumped out of the top half. That's our primary goal, because it earns us lane choice for the first round on Sunday. Therefore, we'll make a few calculated changes based on what we've learned in the last few weeks to see if we can keep making progress with our GM Performance Parts GXP."

-credit: j2r