Melanie Troxel will take her Vietnam Veterans POW/MIA Top Fuel dragster into eliminations to square off against Doug Herbert in the first round at the 38th annual ProCare Rx Supernationals at Raceway Park.
She is facing Herbert for only the eighth time of her young career and in head-to-head competition, Herbert leads the pairing with four wins to her three and she’s more than anxious to even the score.
“Absolutely, ” said Troxel. “You go up there every race trying not to focus too much on whom you’re racing and just run your own race in your own lane. That’s definitely what we’ll do tomorrow and we’re not going to play it any differently than we would with anybody else. It’s time for us to start making a move in competition. We would like to start out strong on this first race of six in-a-row.
Although the team wasn’t successful in getting down the track on Saturday, the valuable information learned from it will prove to be precious in eliminations.
“I don’t think we purposely tried things that were way outside of the box, ” said Troxel. “We found some things—the little things here and there because we changed so many things on the car this week. Even though the car didn’t go down the track today, it was nice to know we sorted out some issues today rather than tomorrow. I think we’ll have a good race car, especially around 11 o’clock Sunday morning. The air will be nice and cool and we’ll have a great opportunity to go out there and run some big numbers. ”
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