Wilkerson's day ended too early
ATLANTA, Sunday: Today was a beautiful day to enjoy great racing at the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway. Funny Car pro, Tim Wilkerson would have liked to do more racing, but his day ended after he enjoyed only one round of racing.
Wilkerson did exactly what he didn't want to when handed his opponent, Mike Ashley, the win as his Levi, Ray & Shoup Monte Carlo smoked the tires. And even though Wilkerson pedaled, his 7.973 was no match for Ashley's 4.8904.
"Smoking the tires is not what we went up there to do," said Wilkerson. "I don't know why the car keeps doing that, and you can be sure we're sure not trying to do it. And the problem is that you end up like a see saw. When we did it in Houston, we went to Las Vegas and we're slow on every run because we were afraid to smoke the tires. And because we're slow in Vegas, we come here and we're aggressive. You think, gee whiz isn't there a spot in the middle we could find that would make the car go down the race track. And there weren't very many good runs out there. Mike would have been hard to beat anyway. But regardless, we can't learn anything when we smoke the tires, and that's what we're trying to do. I changed our clutch program when we went to Houston, and put some small levers in it, and I thought that really helped until it smoked the tires there. That really irritated me. But, obviously, it's not the lever; it's what we're doing that's the problem. We're going to keep beating on it.
"I told the guys yesterday that I never thought I'd be happy to be 16th qualifier five years ago. Five years ago, we were knocking their heads off every place we went. But the competition is so tough now. You've got million dollar multi-car teams that don't qualify. So, maybe we shouldn't be upset to be 16, but that's not what we come here for. It's to go rounds and do good for Dick (Levi) and all his customers. I really thought we had a chance today, too. I felt good about it after our 4.82 run last night. We were only a hundredth away from Mike last night and I had him by two hundreds on the starting line today. So, if we would have had that hundred again today, we would have been okay. And I was looking to run between a 4.80 and 4.85. But when it's not leaving the starting line, it's not going to run what you want. We just hope we can keep trying to learn what we're doing right and wrong."
The next stop on the NHRA POWERade tour is next weekend for the O'Reilly NHRA Midwest Nationals, so Wilkerson and his team won't have long to wait to keep learning to be the best.
