Pomona: Don Schumacher Racing Thursday summary

Scelzi 6th, Cannon 9th at Pomona.

SCOTTY CANNON, OAKLEY TIME BOMB FUNNY CAR, qualified eighth in first round of qualifying for the NHRA season opener, with a quality run of 4.918 seconds at 318.17 mph, the second best speed of the round, good for ninth place. Cannon and his new crew chief Phil Shuler, in his first stint as a Funny Car crew chief, are satisfied with this run following recent test sessions at Firebird Raceway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

"We struggled in testing. We had lots of gremlins and thought we had them straightened out in Vegas and actually made some runs to half track that were better than this. We knew that if we could keep all our ducks in a row and keep the gremlins out of there and keep bad things from happening to us, we'd be OK. And it was all our fault. No bad parts or anything, just stuff we were doing ourselves and we're finally just trying to get the rough edges ironed off of it and hopefully we have a good baseline. That's what we were trying to run; not to brag by no means at this point. We were trying to run anywhere, we said, from .90 to .85. It gave us a .91 and we'll take it."

CREW CHIEF PHIL SHULER, a man of few words: "We hope to improve, but we're happy with it."

GARY SCELZI, in the OAKLEY TIME BOMB DODGE STRATUS R/T, made his first qualifying lap in a Don Schumacher Racing Funny Car, and sat No. 1 for a brief time with a 4.884/311.56. He ended up in fifth: "No question about it. The hits just keep on coming. Michael Neff (crew chief) just makes me so darned happy. He's just so cool and calm and he said, you know, we're going to go down the race track. Even if somebody goes out and runs a .70, which they didn't before we ran, he said, I'm not going to get caught up in that. I'm going go get some data, we're going to go the finish line, we're going to get you a good straight run and we'll work on it from there. I like his approach. It makes sense. You don't learn anything by smoking the tires and we didn't. it was a great soft run, an .88 came up on the board. I'm thrilled to death. The team really is on an upswing right now and I want it to stay that way."

WHIT BAZEMORE, MATCO TOOLS DODGE STRATUS R/T, qualfied 10th, 4.929/313.07.

-dsr-