Championship Drag Racing

Torco Racing Fuels Route 66 NHRA Nationals
Chicago, Ill.
(June 5-8)

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Driver Profile

Kurt Johnson Mark Christopher Auto Center Chevrolet Cobalt

Chicago, Friday: A review of the results from the first day of qualifying at Torco Racing Fuels NHRA Route 66 Nationals in Joliet, IL shows ACDelco Cobalt racer Kurt Johnson in the eighth position midway through qualifying, based on his 6.735-second, 204.85 mph run in Friday’s evening session. 

Although most of the 26 Pro Stock cars attempting to qualify at Route 66 Raceway would be more than pleased with this result, having come into this race as the POWERade championship points leader, the second-generation racer has set his standards high.  Therefore, he heads into Saturday’s final two qualifying sessions determined to improve his standing.

“Although the top priority is making sure you’re in the field, I can’t say I’m happy with being eighth, simply because I know we can do better.  To be honest, we should have been able to run a high 6.71 in the evening session, but it just blew the tires off in second gear.

“We had come into this race trying to make minimal changes to our ACDelco Cobalt while still going down the racetrack, avoiding the need to make wholesale changes as we did in the semis in Topeka.  As a result, we had a lot of last week’s set-up in it today, and it really didn’t respond the way we wanted it to.

“For tomorrow, we’ll go back to the tune-up we used in Bristol and the first couple runs in Topeka.  The good thing is that we know we can fix it, so we’ll regroup for tomorrow and see what we can do to move up the ladder. If everything goes as we’d like tomorrow morning, we should be able to slide into the second or third position.”

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