Ron Capps today maintained the No. 1 qualifying position he set on Friday driving the NAPA AUTO PARTS Dodge Funny Car. His quick elapsed time of 4.023 seconds at 305.63 mph held up through two more qualifying rounds, giving Capps his eighth career pole position and his first since the 2005 NHRA season. Capps was also No. 1 here at Firebird Raceway in 2000.
His final two passes today were a 5.290/137.27 and a 4.119/304.53. His first run out of the box on Friday was a 4.116/294.82.
“Considering what we went up there to do, that was more of a test run,” he said of the 4.116-second pass in his final try. “Ace (crew chief Ed McCulloch) and Ronnie (Thompson, assistant crew chief) and the NAPA guys were wanting to experiment with a couple of things for the second half of the track and it did what we wanted it to do. It ran 304 mph, which was great. We weren’t shooting to run a low 4.0 again.
“In the earlier run today, in qualifying No. 3, it pulled the tires loose quite a ways out there at half track, and that’s the benefit of running so well on Friday and getting in the show then. We can experiment and try some things on Saturday that we needed to try. And that’s what we did,” added Capps, the winner of the first national event of the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series season in Pomona, Calif., last week.
“We learned a lot in that first run today. We learned the track wouldn’t take what we wanted to give it. And then we were able to experiment to try to run some better mph that second run, and that worked as well.
“I’m excited about first round of eliminations. We won Pomona from the 13th position so anybody in the field can win, but to give NAPA a No. 1 qualifying spot is huge.”
Capps faces No. 16 qualifier Jeff Arend in the opening round of Sunday’s eliminations.
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