Championship Drag Racing

Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals
Pomona, CA
(November 3-6)

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Driver Profile

Melanie Troxel In-n-Out Burger Dodge R/T

Las Vegas, Saturday: Melanie Troxel rolled a No. 3 in Top Fuel qualifying for Sunday's ACDelco Las Vegas NHRA Nationals in the Skull Gear/Torco Race Fuels Top Fuel Dragster. This followed her stellar No. 2 in Dallas two weeks ago and puts her in serious contention for her first Top Fuel victory in the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series.

Troxel clocked a 4.590-second elapsed time at 328.14 mph in the first qualifying round, then bettered that with a 4.521/328.78 pass in the second under near-perfect Friday evening conditions at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

The following two rounds on Saturday, however, produced tire-smoking laps of 6.727/118.55 and 10.335/78.50.

"I'm not sure exactly what happened in the final pass. Richard (Hogan, crew chief) is checking that out. It shook really hard. In the first pass today we tried something and obviously that didn't work.

"We still have yesterday's setups to go back to, so we still feel very confident going into race day.

"It's still a huge improvement over where we were a couple of races ago (before Dallas). We continue to qualify right in the middle of the field and that just makes it really tough.

"We would have liked have stepped up into No. 1 in that last session, but we're still in the top four and that's great and we're feeling good about heading into Sunday."

Troxel faces IHRA regular Doug Foley in first round of eliminations. "There are definitely no gimmees out there," she said. "This is a great facility. Anybody can come out and pull a great number out of the hat, so we're going to have to be on our A-game tomorrow and that's what we plan on doing."

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