Wilkerson still has an impressive hot rod


NORWALK, Sunday: Tim Wilkerson leaves Summit Motorsports Park still bearing the distinction of being the POWERade Championship Funny Car points leader even though the talented tuner and driver of the Levi, Ray & Shoup Chevrolet Impala SS could only get to the second round of racing action today at the Summit Racing Equipment Nationals.

In the first-round of eliminations Tommy Johnson, Jr. smoked the tires as Wilkerson sailed by him posting the quickest run of the session, an impressive 4.905 at 299.26 mph. There was a brief rain shower as the cars sat in the lanes waiting for second round. And here Wilkerson lost his impressive hot rod slowing to a 5.062 and gave the win to Tony Pedregon and his 4.962.

“Our first pass was pretty nice and ran just about what we thought it would,” said Wilkerson. “But it spun the tires real bad downstairs and put two holes out. It would have gone in the 80’s if it hadn’t done that. Quite frankly, we went up there for the next round thinking it would do the same thing, but it dropped a hole way early and when it does that you can’t make it up. It was really hard to keep it tuned-up in this kind of weather. It didn’t look bad but it was really bad. I thought it may have changed while we were sitting out the rain but it didn’t work out the way I thought. I thought we would go a mid-90 and it would have been good if we would have but it didn’t.

“Tony’s guys did a good job. They went down the race track and went pretty fast. We went down the track and would have been there if they would have screwed up a little bit.”