Native Ohioan Jeg Coughlin Jr. returned to his home state for this weekend’s inaugural POWERade Drag Racing Series event in Norwalk and posted two solid qualifying passes in his JEGS.com Chevrolet Cobalt. But by day’s end, the happy-go-lucky 37-year-old was wishing for more.
“It’s been three years since we’ve even been down this particular track, ” Coughlin said. “We tested here back in 2004, but that was our last time through town. The NHRA does a great job of prepping all these tracks to make them very similar but there are little nuances you have to learn.
“We ran a 6.69 in Q1, and that was sixth best of the session. We came back out in Q2 and managed to improve to a 6.673 at 206.67 mph, but we dropped back to ninth. That tells me we missed the tune-up just a tad. Our recent history tells us we should be quicker and if we were just a hundredth of a second quicker we’d be in third place or so. That’s the way this class is these days.
“The good news is that we’re in, and that it should be really good again tomorrow morning so we’ll try our best to move up then. “
Locals classify a visit to this facility as “The Norwalk Experience. ” It’s something Coughlin felt many times in the past when he was in college at nearby Ashland University.
“We’d sneak up here on the weekends all the time, ” he said. “It’s 30 minutes to Ashland and we would come up here whenever there was a big event going on. The place looks better now than it ever has. We’ve known the Bader family (track owners) for many, many years and I knew they’d put their best foot forward for their first NHRA race. They’ve done a lot of improvements so the place is like new but at the same time it has the heritage of a 30-year-old track. “
Coughlin who now lives in Delaware, Ohio, and the rest of the Pro Stock drivers will have two more chances to improve during Saturday’s final two qualifying sessions.
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