Sonoma: Scotty Cannon Friday summary

Cannon takes no. 9 on Friday in Sonoma.

SONOMA, Calif. (Aug. 1, 2003) - Scotty Cannon qualified No. 9 in the second qualifying session today in his Oakley Funny Car, popping the motor at the end of the run with a 4.941-second elapsed time at 296.05 mph. In the first session his 5.415/228.19 was good for No. 11. This is Cannon's first race weekend where he is technically the crew chief on his car.

"It was running good early and we're not sure exactly what happened," he said. "It laid over at about half track. The half-track speed was way down. The motor popped when I went through the finish line, like it blew the case on the supercharger.

"We have a whole different program going here," he added. "Me and Todd (Blakeley) are tuning the car and we're getting a little help from Zippy (Mike Neff, Gary Scelzi's crew chief), and (Lee) Beard (Whit Bazemore's crew chief) and those guys are helping us a little bit. Bottom line is I'm making the last call. If we can come out of this thing qualified and go some rounds it would be remarkable for me. But we're happy.

"Phil (Shuler, former crew chief who is now head mechanic) is still actually helping us a lot. This is all still Phil's deal. It's his motor. Probably things I had done may have messed it up, but we're plugging along. We changed our program all the way around, for good or bad. We've got to show some progress; I understand."

-dsr-