Tim Wilkerson tried a new approach with his clutch during the first session on Friday, and what it told him was that the way he had been de-tuning his car to compensate for an aggressive clutch, all year, was far more remarkable than even he had thought. With a softer clutch set-up in the car, the de-tuned motor ran exactly like a de-tuned motor and his early-shutoff 4.405 landed 10th after one session.
In the nightcap, Wilk improved mightily but a dropped cylinder kept him from running the kind of number he was after. His 4.183 was still good enough for the 9th spot overnight.
“Wow, that’s about all I can say about the first run,” Wilkerson said.
“We found a way to go back to the old set-up with the clutch, and as soon as I hit the pedal I could tell the difference. With the discs we’ve been running, the motor has to be so de-tuned that when we went to this clutch pack, the thing hardly moved and 4.40 was all it had. We’ve been slaves to the clutch all year, and we’re trying to find a way to get control of it, so that run, right there, taught us a ton.”
“We went back to the way we’ve been running it on the second one, because it was under the lights and we wanted to be more aggressive, maybe trying to run a 4.11 or something in there, and it did pretty much what I expected but we just didn’t get to the stripe under full power from all eight. At least we’re in the top 12, and we have a time to carry over to Saturday. Not sure what the weather has in store for us, so that’s a good thing for now.”
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