Madison: Scotty Cannon eliminations summary

Cannon advances to second round.

MADISON, Ill. (June 29, 2003) - The third car of the Don Schumacher Racing Funny Car stable was the only car to advance to the second round today at the Sears Craftsman NHRA Nationals at Gateway International Raceway. Scotty Cannon, in the Oakley Funny Car, defeated Johnny Gray in the first round with a 5.820/253.33 to Gray's 7.657/127.82. He was then ousted by Del Worsham in the second round after smoking the tires early: 5.011/304.12 for Worsham; 7.948/102.90 for Cannon.

This was the second time this season that Cannon has advanced to the second round.

"First round we just got lucky," he said. "This track was terrible (in the heat). What happened the second round was we were a little aggressive early. We haven't been on this type of track conditions all year. This track is tricky. Bottom line is we got a car set up to run 4.80s all the time and everybody else here has the same problem: you come in and try to back it down. You have to back everything down, which we did. We just didn't back it down enough.

"It would be nice to be able to be back here next year racing, looking at these runs under these kind of conditions. I'm not making any excuses, but we don't have any runs to look at with our whole combination, so we don't know. It showed some promise. We actually made an adjustment for the second round. I was pretty well 100 percent confident it would make it at least to half track. It wasn't set up to run 5.01; we were just trying to run 5.07, .08 or .10, and we were 200 hundredths later than him on the Tree. We took a little clutch out of it too. That's really no excuse.

"We just got beat. This track bit us. We have to gather everything up and go to Denver. Nothing we learned here or all year is going to prepare us for Denver. (Mile-high) Denver's a crapshoot. The car's making some consistent runs, that's a plus."

Cannon moved into 14th in the POWERade Drag Racing Series Funny Car point standings, with 424 points.

-dsr-