Entering this weekend’s Mile-High Nationals in Denver, Tim Wilkerson remains just outside the Full Throttle Top 10, but with the gap between his 11th spot and Johnny Gray’s 10th-place position now whittled to only two points, he’s not yet ready to press the button marked “Now Or Never”. Still, a good showing on Thunder Mountain would go a long way toward earning a coveted spot in the Countdown playoffs.
In order to mount such a charge, Wilk realistically knows he probably only needs to continue the performance he has been showing of late, with his Levi, Ray & Shoup Shelby Mustang, but a little more of that elusive good fortune would certainly help. Although he’s exited in the first round at the last three races, he’s been qualifying well for much of the year and has too often earned the dubious distinction of being the guy who would’ve been beaten any other driver in the round, except the one he faced.
“If we were scuffling along and not winning rounds because we were lost with the tune-up, then it might be time to start thinking about panic mode,” Wilkerson said. “But the truth is, just about the only thing I’d change in the way we’ve been running would be to find a way to race somebody else in the first round. We’ve really had an unlucky streak going here, where we just consistently end up racing the one car that can beat us.
“I’m not really a believer in luck, because I think you make your own, but after a while you begin to wonder. We know better than that, though, so we’ll follow our brains and rely on the numbers, just like we always do. If you add them all up right, you have to start winning some rounds. It’s just math and probabilities, really. So, I guess now would be a really good time for the numbers to start adding up in our favor.”
Qualifying well and winning rounds at Bandimere Speedway, located just to the west of Denver, can be a difficult exercise based in the “one time only” area of the tuning curve. Racing at one mile of altitude is one thing, and a difficult thing at that, but adding in the typical July weather in the Rocky Mountain foothills can make the cars think they’re racing as high as 9,000 feet. The mountain does, indeed, present a mountain of challenges.
“That’s the thing about Denver; you don’t use this data anywhere else so you have to figure it out on the spot,” Wilkerson said. “You have to spin the blower as fast as you can, to create some kind of air to burn with the fuel, and then if you do get the car to go you have to deal with far less downforce than we have anywhere else. It’s a double-whammy for sure.
“And, if it gets as hot as it usually does, the track gets slick under that bright sun and the corrected altitude goes through the roof. It’s like a combination of all the things they could throw at you to make it impossible to race, but we all do our best to figure it out and get to the other end at some decent speed. There’s only one track like this, and it makes you earn everything you get.”
With five races left in the NHRA Full Throttle regular season, the mission for Wilk is to move into the Top 10 on the points sheet so that he can be a part of the Countdown playoffs in the fall. If he’s able to do that on Thunder Mountain, he will have earned it the hard way.
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