Team Kalitta Nitro Nuggets

This week at Kalitta Motorsports

In the latest issue of National Dragster magazine, NHRA Top Fuel drivers were polled anonymously about how they view the abilities of their peers. In the 11 categories, Doug Kalitta, driver of the Mac Tools dragster, and Dave Grubnic, driver of the Zantrex-3 dragster, were voted best in five of them including:
Best leaver - Doug Kalitta
Best driver - Doug Kalitta
Best looking race car - Dave Grubnic
Best sense of humor - Dave Grubnic
Most likely to do well on Jeopardy - Doug Kalitta
Also, Connie Kalitta was voted to be the best team owner.

All of the Team Kalitta quarter-mile race cars stayed to test the Monday after the previous NHRA event in Phoenix . All of the team's crew chiefs feel that they gained some valuable data from the testing sessions at Firebird Int'l Raceway.

• Jon Oberhofer, crew chief of the Zantrex-3 Top Fuel dragster driven by Dave Grubnic: "We were testing some different things with our clutch levers and I'm really happy with what we saw. We had very encouraging results."
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• Rahn Tobler, crew chief of the Mac Tools Top Fuel dragster driven by Doug Kalitta: "We really struggled with our car being consistent in the first second of our runs during the race in Phoenix so we really worked on getting that problem figured out during testing. We made three laps in testing and had no problems in that part of the track in any of the runs so we think we'll have a far more consistent race car in Gainesville ."
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• Glenn Mikres, crew chief of the Kalitta Air Toyota Solara Funny Car driven by Scott Kalitta: "We tried several different things. Some of them worked better than expected and some didn't work at all, but all in all we should have a happier race car."
  
  
• Jim Oberhofer, crew chief of the KB Racing LLC Top Fuel dragster driven by Hillary Will: "We tested some new engine parts and some different engine combinations. I'm cautiously optimistic with what we saw. We tried a little different clutch set-up too and that looked pretty good as well."

Upcoming NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series event
ACDelco NHRA Gatornationals
Gainesville Raceway
Gainesville , Fla.
March 15-18, 2007

The ACDelco NHRA Gatornationals begins Friday, March 16, for the nitro-fueled classes with one qualifying session at 1:00 p.m. (ET), and then another qualifying session at 3:30 p.m. Two more qualifying sessions follow on Saturday at 1:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. The top sixteen qualified cars will race Sunday in final eliminations beginning at 11:00 a.m.

Upcoming ESPN2 TV coverage (ET)
ACDelco NHRA Gatornationals
3/18/2007-Qualifying 1:30 a.m. - 3:30 a.m.
3/18/2007-Eliminations 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
3/21/2007-Repeat Eliminations 3:30 a.m. - 5:30 a.m.

For more info about Kalitta Motorsports, please visit Kalitta Motorsports