Tim Wilkerson drove the Levi, Ray & Shoup Shelby Mustang to a pair of similar laps on Friday, posting a 4.238 on his first pass and then following that up with a 4.226 during session No. 2. Ranked 8th after the first run, Wilkerson gave up ground to a pair of cars that ran quicker (Ron Capps and Matt Hagan), but gained back one of those spots by leapfrogging over Tony Pedregon, who had barely outrun the LRS driver in the first session, but slowed in the second.
Wilkerson will therefore enter Saturday’s racing in the top 12, which means his 4.226 is an officially recorded time on the board. He will begin the second day of qualifying from the 9th spot.
“On the first lap, it did pretty much what it wanted to do, going from A to B, but it was just soft and slow,” Wilkerson said. “You know, you’d like to roll up there and do what our teammate Bob Tasca did, and throw a beautiful lap on the board (Tasca was No. 1 after the first lap, with a 4.124, and stayed there at the end of the day) but it’s also pretty good to get to the finish line under power, so you know what you have and what you can tune from. I always like being No. 1, and I’m happy for those guys, but I really don’t like smoking the tires on the first pass and then not having a good enough idea what we need to do on the second. The way it worked out, I felt pretty good that we could improve because we have a good baseline.”
“We got a little more aggressive on the second lap, and it was running better for the first second and a half, but then it ate a piston up and that about killed our chances to really get after it and jump way up. The way it ran, even with a piston burned out of it, you can tell we were on a better pass. We just need to take a good hard look at what caused that to happen, and if we’re not total knuckleheads we ought to be able to go quicker. I mean that in comparison to what everyone else will be running, because if it gets a bunch hotter tomorrow everybody could slow down. We’ll just compare our results to everyone else, and hopefully at the end of the day we’ll be in a good solid spot to race from on Sunday.”
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