Seattle: Warren Johnson Friday summary

Warren Johnson and the GM Performance Parts GTO Racing team had a busy week preparing for this weekend's Schuck's Auto Supply Nationals in Kent, WA. Arriving in the area on Monday afternoon, they immediately went to work on their race car, using local racer (and father of crew member Adam) Nick Drzayich's race shop in Auburn as their Washington state headquarters. After spending two long days inspecting the car from nose to tail, they traveled to Renegade Raceway in nearby Yakima for a full day of testing on Thursday.

Fortunately, their efforts were rewarded during Friday's first day of qualifying at Pacific Raceways, when Johnson made two consistent and quick passes, with his best run of 6.732 seconds, 205.98 mph positioning "The Professor" in the fourth spot midway through qualifying.

"Today was a good starting point for this GM Performance Parts GTO team. Our performance on these first two runs shows that we've headed in the right direction with the tune-up, and, looking at the data, I believe there's more in it. Now that we have this supposed baseline, we will try going on either side of it to see where the actual sweet spot is. In any case, we're in pretty good shape for now, solidly in the top half at the end of the first day.

"Looking at the forecast for tomorrow, the conditions for the third session should be similar to what we had tonight, unless we have a few clouds move in, but since I have no control over that, we'll focus on getting whatever we can from our race car, and see what we can do to keep moving forward."

-j2r-