MADISON: It was a troublesome day of qualifying for hometown favorite, Tim Wilkerson at the O’Reilly Midwest Nationals at Gateway International Raceway. He would have liked to have his usual strong qualifying performance, but ran into problems in his Levi, Ray & Shoup Funny Car.
On both of today’s passes Wilkerson had a good run going early, but ran into troubles down the track. On the first pass, he dropped a cylinder around half track and posted a 4.883 at 301.27. On the night pass, Wilkerson hit a small bump and got pushed out of the groove. He had to pull his foot to avoid hitting the wall. Here he only ran 4.912 at 260.86 mph. At the end of the day’s activities, these runs put Wilkerson in the No. 12 qualifying spot.
“It was running pretty good early on both runs,” explained Wilkerson, “but on both runs we had a mishap and put a hole out. I just need to get that nailed down. I think if we put some new ignition coils on it, I think that should help us out. But it was running good early, good enough to be low E.T. of both rounds. On our last run, there’s a little bobble out there and when I went over it, it washed it out and spun the tire. It scooted me out of the groove and I got out of it so I wouldn’t hit the wall.
“But it’s showing good promise though, good enough to be one of the top two or three cars. We just need to get it down to the end on all eight holes. Hopefully, we’ll go out tomorrow and keep our heads on straight and not let all our St. Louis hoopla get in our way. Like I said it was running good early but sometimes you’re the bug and sometimes you’re the windshield. Today we were the bug.”
| 
|