Championship Drag Racing

NHRA Gatornationals
Gainesville, FL
(March 17-20)

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Driver Profile

David Baca Mach 1 Racing dragster

Gainesville, prerace: Crew chiefs/tuners of nitromethane-gulping Top Fuel dragsters search for consistency as diligently as Sir Galahad did the Holy Grail. Unlike Galahad, the crew chiefs/tuners are successful, to varying degrees.

For example, some are consistently tuning their dragsters to run in the 4.40-second range, while some are in the 4.50s, some in the 4.60s, and so on. It's not by design. It just takes some tuners longer to reach their target area than others.

When David Baca discusses performance consistency of his Baca Motorsports dragster, he talks about clicking off elapsed times equal to the quickest qualifiers at NHRA POWERade Series races.

If the subject is his results after the first two 2005 events, then he has been consistent, but not to his or the team's liking. One can't get much more consistent than qualifying eighth in stops at Pomona, Calif., and Phoenix, and not advancing past the opening round.

That kind of consistency will get you 66 points and 10th place, which is where you'll find Baca in the standings going into the Mac Tools Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway.

What Baca and co-tuners Dennis Baca (David's father) and Larry Meyer covet is a reliable, but quicker, race car. We're talking less than one-tenth of a second.

"We're excited to be going to Florida," David said. "If the weather's cooler, the track should be fast. But if it's hotter, it will be trickier. We're pretty optimistic. We tested after Phoenix and made some improvements in the clutch and power curve areas. We've done fairly well in our first two races there. We reached the Gatornationals semifinals on our first race there in 2003."

The building contractor from the San Francisco Bay Area has confidence in his dad and Meyer.

"We're on the cusp of running with the cars in front of us," David said. "We gauge ourselves on how close we are to the performances of those cars. We believe we're only a couple round wins away from producing the kind of elapsed times that will make us very competitive with the top-caliber teams."

They'll attempt to validate those feelings at Gainesville Raceway.

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