Tim Wilkerson came into Richmond for the Virginia NHRA Nationals in first place in the Funny Car Countdown to 1and after a great outing in his beautiful Levi, Ray & Shoup Chevrolet Impala SS; he leaves still ahead of the pack. Wilkerson may not have qualified in the top half of the field or had lane choice all day, all things touted to be preferred, but he didn’t let that stop him from taking two spectacular round wins and making it to his fifth semifinal round.
In a huge first-round match-up, Wilkerson faced Ashley Force. If Wilkerson won this round, no matter what else happened, he would leave Virginia Motorsports Park with the points lead. Wilkerson’s last three elimination round wins were over Team Force cars, and he made it four with his .02 second holeshot win over Ashley. Wilk ran 4.071 to her 4.061. In the next round, he faced another pretty lady, Melanie Troxel. Here Wilk had his hands full, driving all over the track, but did a great job keeping his Levi, Ray & Shoup Chevy in his lane and posted a 4.109 as Troxel smoked the tires in the other lane and ran 4.491. In the semi’s Wilkerson encountered some mechanical trouble and gave the win to Cruz Pedregon. Wilk ran 4.438 against Pedregon’s 4.134.
“All in all we had a good day,” expressed Wilkerson. “We made really good runs on our first two. I had it tuned-up for the semi’s and thought it would run a .10 or .11 out there but we had another slide valve malfunction like yesterday. We thought we had it fixed but found there was more wrong. The damage went further than we thought, but now that we know that we can resolve the problem. The car left great on that run, but at about 200 feet it seemed to almost stop. I stayed with it for awhile but when I saw Cruz go by me, I lifted. I knew I wasn’t going anywhere and I sure wasn’t going to blow up.
“So, now we’ll take our junk to the last two races and if we can do as well as we did here, nobody should be able to catch us.”
Wilkerson leaves Richmond with a lead of 51 points.
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