NHRA
Phoenix: Tim Wilkerson Friday report
4.23 AND 4.20 LAND WILK 11th AFTER ONE DAY Tim Wilkerson was slightly mystified after his first qualifying session in Phoenix on Friday, and for a couple of reasons. First of all, his Levi, Ray & Shoup Shelby has yet to show the kind of ...
Published: Feb 21, 2010, 11:21 PM
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4.23 AND 4.20 LAND WILK 11th AFTER ONE DAY
Tim Wilkerson was slightly mystified after his first qualifying session in Phoenix on Friday, and for a couple of reasons. First of all, his Levi, Ray & Shoup Shelby has yet to show the kind of performance with which it finished 2009, and his 4.233 in the first session was another slower pass than he had hoped to make. Secondly, he made the run in the left lane, where a couple of bumps were making it difficult for anyone to complete an end-to-end lap, but Wilk's machine hopped over both of them and never spun the hoops. The 4.23 wasn't pretty, but it was good enough for the 8th spot after one session.
In the nightcap, Wilkerson got more aggressive with the tune-up, but when he made a full lap in the right lane his entire team expected something better than a 4.200 to pop up on the board. The improvement of more than two hundredths was nice, but it left Wilkerson in the 11th position overnight, as other teams leapfrogged ahead with better times.
"She just doesn't want to run right now, and we're trying to find out why," Wilkerson said. "On the first one, I can hardly believe we hopped over those two bumps without it breaking loose, but somehow it got over them and all it did was wash the rear end out to the left. On the video, the car looks like a plane landing in a crosswind for a while, with the rear end all washed out and me steering it back. More than anything, it was just good to get a time on the board, and being in the top 12 was an added plus, I guess.
"Tonight, we thought we stepped it up pretty good, but I also didn't want to go overboard and right now she's telling me she doesn't want to run any big numbers. It's a good thing we're still 11th, and we'll have to see what the weather does for tomorrow. Kind of out of the blue here, the forecasts all went south on us for Saturday, so hopefully they're all wrong and we get to make two more laps without any wet stuff coming down. We need the laps, right now. We need to figure out what the car wants in order to go faster."
-source: twr
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