Las Vegas: Paul Jones Friday pit notes

Jones sits fourth after first day in Vegas

LAS VEGAS - After the first day of qualifying, NHRA Federal Mogul Dragster driver Paul Jones sits fourth during this weekend's final NHRA Division 7 Federal Mogul Drag Racing Series event at "The Strip" in Las Vegas. Jones cites that the first run was just a 'point a to b' run, and much more is in store for the Western Stabilization/Jelly Belly/Redline Oil team.

Jones, from Stockton, Calif., recorded a 5.606 second elapsed time at 255.53 mph in Friday's first qualifying session. With the team solidly in the 16 car field, Jones feels they will be able to step the car up for Saturday's final qualifying session.

"We set the car up kind of soft, knowing this is a Division 7 race, and we only get two shots down the track for qualifying," said Jones. "It shook pretty violently at the top of low gear, so I had to shift it a little early. It still went down the track and ran a 5.60, which put us fourth in the show. We got [Brandon] Henkelman right there with us in Division 7, we're trying to stay right third in points; he's right on our heels in fourth. We're just trying to match what he does this weekend. We would really like to come out with the '73' on the car next year rather than the '75.' We're going to go out, and try something a little bit different for the second round of qualifying, and see if we can get it down the track. If so, we should be able to step it up, and move up in the field. Duane's [Shields, No. 1 qualifier] performance numbers have been kind of hard to compete with with the budget he's working with. We're just going to do our deal, and hope the thing stays together and get this Western Stabilization/Jelly Belly/Redline Oil dragster down the track."

Jones and team raced here just last week at the AC Delco Nationals, but went out in the quarterfinals due to the data recorder on the car going out. With the data recorder back working properly, Jones feels they should be able to improve on their low 5.5 second performances of last weekend.

"With the problems we had last weekend, we didn't get any data," stated Jones. "We finally got a complete run on the computer during the last run with Strasburg, when we lost, and were kind of able to tell that we were way off the mark on the clutch set up. Had we known that earlier in the weekend, I'm sure our performance would have improved. Now that we have data, we should be able to continually improve. Hopefully that will get us into the final round."

The Federal Mogul Dragsters have one final qualifying session today, followed by first round eliminations. Final eliminations will conclude the event on Sunday. Stay tuned to InsideFMRacing.com for the latest news in Federal Mogul racing.

-WSR-