Pomona2: Cruz Pedregon final summary

Pomona, Calif., February 29, 2004 -- Final eliminations were completed today for the NHRA Winternationals at Pomona Raceway. The Advance Auto Parts team and former Funny Car champion Cruz Pedregon posted their best run of the weekend during the first round of eliminations against John Force with an elapsed time of 4.901 seconds at 308.57 mph. But it wasn't quite enough to get past Force who ran an elapsed time of 4.843 seconds at 308.57 mph.

"We knew we had to be on our game today with Force as our first round opponent," said Pedregon. "During qualifying yesterday we smoked the tires for no reason and we were way to aggressive, we didn't recover for the second round because we didn't know we had a problem. We realized last night we had a clutch gremlin. So we applied some information that Tony's team had found during testing to our car and it worked, we just didn't have enough muscle. The thing about drag racing is that eight cars advance to the next round and eight cars go home. Unfortunately this week we're going home. But now we can start preparing for Phoenix and keep plugging away."

"Our Advance Auto Parts Pontiac Firebird is a great car, and we have a lot of racing left to go this season. Sure, you would like to do well at the first event, not to make any excuses but we're still going through some major household changes and we're not going to see the strength of our team until we get both cars running consistent down the racetrack. We know it will happen and we'll keep working at it.JIf we have to test more we will."

Jerry Toliver won the event with an elapsed time of 4.821 seconds at 319.29 mph over Gary Densham who posted an elapsed time of 4.955 seconds at 327.11 mph.

The next event for the Advance Auto Parts team will be in Phoenix, Ariz., at Firebird International Raceway on March 5-8.

-pr-