Madison: Tony Bartone final summary

COMPETITIVE BARTONE DEFEATED IN FIRST ROUND

MADISON, Ill. (June 25) -- Tony Bartone, driving the Lucas Oil Chevrolet Monte Carlo Funny Car, wasn't able to defeat his first round opponent, Robert Hight, but he didn't make it easy for him either at the 10th annual O'Reilly Midwest Nationals at Gateway International Speedway.

It took the quickest run of the first round to take Bartone out of competition when Hight ran an elapsed time of 4.996 seconds, 297.61 mph to the New York native's competitive time of 5.093 seconds, 278.35 mph.

"In the third qualifying session we were the quickest car (4.956)," said Bartone. "We put that same tune up in the car for the first round and unfortunately two things happened. First, we had to race Robert Hight, who had low E.T. of the round, which was an excellent run. For us, we dropped a cylinder about two and half seconds into the run as we were trying to chase him down. He hit the stripe first and I shut it off early. It simply was the luck of the draw and we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of the other cars smoked the tires going down the track and if we would had any one of a number of cars things could have been different. We always try to put that win light on for our Lucas Oil Funny Car and today we weren't able to do it. That's disappointing, but from here we'll pack up and come out swinging again at the Mile-High city."

Up next for the Jim Dunn Racing Chevy team will be 27th annual Mopar Mile-High Nationals at the Bandimere Speedway near Denver, Colorado on July 14-16.

-jdr