Things have begun to look brighter for Pro Stock pro, Johnny Gray this weekend at the O’Reilly Super Start Batteries NHRA Fall Nationals at the Texas Motorplex. Gray’s beautiful Dodge Stratus finally started to show some promise in its performance under the hot Texas sun.
With 20 Pro Stockers vying for a qualifying spot, Gray was able to take the No. 11 position with a 6.658 at 206.26 mph. His first-round match-up was against the No. 6 qualifier, Rickie Jones. It was a close side-by-side race and everyone had to wait for the scoreboard to tell them the winner. Gray lost to Jones with his 6.675 at 206.45 mph against a 6.662 at 206.13. But even after suffering a first-round loss, Gray sees good things coming his way.
“I feel a whole lot better about things this weekend,” explained Gray. “We definitely found a huge part of our problem this weekend. We found it in our carburetors. We found that we’ve had some pretty sever issues with the carburetors. We owe a big thanks to Rickie Jones, Jr. because he came over and helped us with them and it made the car show a lot of promise. We kind of ran middle bottom half of the pack all weekend, which is a lot more than the car’s been doing. So, we feel pretty good that we can go to Memphis next week and unload the thing and be competitive.
“I think this weekend we found the edge and then came back over the edge. We made big enough steps to go over center and actually back up and find pretty close to where we should be. On today’s run we were fourth in 60 foot and like ninth or tenth in E.T for the session and we were about tenth in speed. So, that’s so much better than we’ve been running that we feel like we’ve made leaps and bounds this weekend. Now if we can carry it over and see that it wasn’t just a fluke, we’ll feel like we learned a lot.
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