BURKART TO RACE FROM 5th SPOT

Phil Burkart will wheel his beautiful new Techron Monte Carlo Funny Car to the line on Sunday, pairing up with Whit Bazemore in round one, and a spot in the POWERade top ten should be on the line. The only negative for Burkart is the fact his teammate Del Worsham is the man now holding on to the 10th spot.

"All we're thinking about is winning round one, and past that we're hoping Del wins too," Burkart said. "If we can both win a couple of rounds here, we can get back on the good side of things for the season. We need to right this ship and go 'full steam, ahead' if you will. It would be a bittersweet thing to get back into the top ten, but knock Del out by doing that. I'm confident he can get back in the win column tomorrow, and I'm very confident we can too. Let's just go for it and see if we can both keep winning rounds. We're on opposite sides of the ladder, so there's nothing wrong with both of us knocking some people off.

"We made a real nice lap in the final session today, the third-quickest of the session, so we feel good heading into Sunday. We'll be racing earlier in the day than we have all weekend, and if the sun is out we might be out there on a very hot track. It was supposed to be another sizzler out there today, but we got some surprise cloud cover for a while this morning and that allowed some people to shuffle the deck on the first lap. It's too bad we didn't hold onto the top spot, but that's really the least of my concerns. I don't care if we're 16th, I just want us to win round one tomorrow. After that, we'll worry about round two."