WORSHAM IS No. 4 IN HIS BLACK & WHITE WORLD

Del Worsham debuted a striking new monochrome Checker, Schuck's, Kragen Impala here in Brainerd, and by the end of his first day he had proven that even in his black and white world, there are some seriously successful (and quick) shades of gray. After making it slightly further than most of the cars in a smoke-filled first session, Worsham came back with a strong 4.152 to land 4th on the chart in session two. His run broke up what might have been a 1 through 4 procession of Force cars, as he sneaked in between Robert Hight (3rd) and Mike Neff (5th) while Ashley and John Force finished No. 1 and No. 2 respectively.

"The new black monochrome car is bad, and it looks even better when it's out in the sun and on the car, with a our black wheels," Worsham said. "You never know when a good idea and a good computer rendering are going to look as good in real life or look ridiculous, but this car is just plain cool looking. Everybody thinks it's looks great, and I know one place where it would look the best, with lots of photographers in front of it and our whole crew behind it.

"On the first run, we saw car after car smoke the tires, and all the crew chiefs on all the teams were scrambling back to change the set-ups after they saw the guys ahead of them. Because of that, each pair seemed to make it a little bit farther, and by the time we ran we had pushed the power out about as far as we thought we could, and made it down there past where anyone else had gone. You just knew, though, that our run was the one that would show the rest of the crew chiefs what was out there, so we ended up 5th but that was pretty good, because it put us farther back in the line tonight. We weren't sure how brave to be, right up until Ashley Force ran a 4.11 a couple pairs ahead of us, in our lane, so we put it back to the aggressive set-up and it went right down there. The lap itself was just beautiful; pretty much right down the middle."