The capacity crowd at massive Bristol Dragway didn’t know it, his fellow competitors were mostly unaware of it, and even his own teammates were unsure they could avoid it, but Del Worsham came “that close” to making zero runs on Friday. After suffering push rod malfunctions on the burnout during the first session, Worsham had to shut his car off without making the lap. That placed him right near the top of the order for session No. 2, and as his team worked hard to fix the issues from the first session, the clock ticked inexorably toward 8:00. With the class schedule running right on time, the 8:00 hour was going to bring Funny Cars to the starting line, whether Worsham was there or not.
The Checker, Schuck’s, Kragen team finally fired the car in the pit area at 7:30, but quickly saw the oil pressure drop to zero, and they immediately shut the car down. At 7:40, they were removing and replacing the oil pump and the mag drive, while Worsham paced nervously. At 7:59, with Worsham already in the car and in his fire suit, the team frantically towed to the staging lanes, wove their way through the other 18 teams already in position, and pulled forward with a solid 90-seconds to spare. 4.898-seconds later, Worsham was in the provisional field, though he had to do some valiant driving to keep his CSK Monte Carlo off the center line. He is 14th overnight, with two daylight sessions set for Saturday.
“I can’t even begin to explain how that all went down, ” Worsham said. “After all the problems in Norwalk, we replaced just about everything on the motor, and with all that new stuff, we had a push rod issue come up on the burnout. As soon as I got back from the burnout, it was popping and banging and back-firing, so we had to shut it off. That meant we were going to be right at the front of the line for tonight, but we had to fix the push rod problem before we could put the motor back together, and the clock seemed to be in fast motion. Of all the times for all the classes to run right on schedule, with no delays at all, it had to be tonight.
“Then, completely unrelated to the push rod deal, we had a mechanical problem with the oil pump warming it up, which created other problems, and we had all hands on deck working on replacing a bunch of stuff. I honestly didn’t know if we could get up there in time. I was trying to figure out how we were going to explain to our sponsors why we didn’t make a lap on Friday. Fortunately, we got it up there just in time and got it down the track. When we got back, the motor looked fine and I think we’re back to running like we can. Whether we can go any quicker tomorrow remains to be seen, because it’s going to be hot and muggy out here, but we’ll try to put the best possible laps on the board. We’ll also try to keep the drama to a minimum. ”
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