Championship Drag Racing

Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals
Pomona, CA
(November 9-12)

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Driver Profile

Del Worsham DHL Toyota

Pomona, Thursday: Del Worsham lowered his career best elapsed time a full hundredth of a second, to 4.712, during Thursday's single qualifying session, and by doing so landed himself in the rarified air of the No. 1 spot on the provisional qualifying sheet. As stout as the run was, it was far from perfect. Running strong through half-track, Worsham's CSK Chevy blew up at 4.5-seconds, and coasted the final few hundred feet of race track, as evidenced by his 309.56 mph speed at the finish line.

"Well, it may be the 23rd race of a 23-race season, but we finally got the car to do what we've been aiming for with this new tune-up," Worsham said. "We've been working on this new approach since the beginning of September, and it has shown us that it wants to run fast but we've had some fluke stuff happen that cost us a few good runs. This time, I knew it was running hard but when it blew up down there I thought 'Here we go again,' because I was afraid another good run got away. Instead, an amazing run got away but we still got a very good one out of it. I don't even want to play the game of what it could've run, but let's just say it would've been much quicker than 4.71 if it had lived to the finish line.

"As it is, we get to spend at least one night as number one, and we'll just try to build on this for a couple of more days. There are plenty of teams here who can knock us back, but we'll see if we can't get it to run a little farther without hurting itself down there, and maybe we'll step up a little too. The real goal is to win some rounds on Sunday, but it's nice to know we're solidly in and probably solidly in the top half. That could help us on Sunday."  

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