Let’s Go Racing at Memphis in the Meantime
Written by Sheila Scarborough · September 16, 2007
Troxel, Scelzi, Connolly and Hines win the O’Reilly Mid-South Nationals, the second of four events in the Countdown to Four.
NHRA.com Sunday recap.
With apologies to John Hiatt’s great song “Memphis in the Meantime,” it’s been a busy day down in the sunny South, and I’ll bet some teams are going to head to Beale Street now for some of that great BBQ and music.
Although she isn’t a contender in the Chase, Melanie Troxel eliminated Vandergriff, Grubnic, Bernstein and Herbert to win the Wally, her second victory of the season. She would love to end this racing year on a high note before shifting to Funny Car next year under the Mike Ashley team umbrella.
“I’m becoming more and more disappointed with not making the Countdown and it’s been tough but I stand by my decision to not ask my teammate to take a dive for me,” Troxel said. “You have to earn your way in and at the time we weren’t running well. We just didn’t quite get it turned around in time to make the field. All we can do is make the best of the situation and try to win as many races as we can down the stretch.
“When we didn’t make the Countdown we made the goal of winning a race as a team, especially with the changes coming for me next year moving over to Funny Car, so it’s very satisfying to get it done. These guys certainly deserve the win and my leaving the team, as I told them, is not a reflection of them at all. They’re a great group and they were overdue for this win.”
Even going down in the finals put “Dougzilla” in fifth place in the Countdown standings.
Funny Car winner Gary Scelzi barely made it into the field because of various mechanical problems.
Yesterday, he said, “We changed bodies because when [an] arm fell off the barrel valve the motor went lean and blew the burst panels and cracked the windshield and the doghouse and we didn’t have a spare set for this body, so we had to make it fit. It’ll be OK for tomorrow. The guys ran out of time to make everything fit. So, if we have a little bit of luck tomorrow, we can go out and whip some ass.”
Guess that worked today, but the posterior to whip was Scelzi’s own teammate, the red-hot Jack Beckman (remember when all of us said “Jack Who?” after Whit Bazemore left?”)
The two went at it side-by-side, with the numbers showing the margin of victory: Scelzi’s 4.886 at 314.61 mph to Beckman’s 4.892 at 310.55 mph.
“We came into this race thinking we’d better go to the final or win if we want to stay alive in the Countdown,” Scelzi said. “The first step was to get into the top four. Now we need to build on that. We’re in fourth but it’s very bunched up. This is exactly what NHRA wanted and right now it’s pretty damn exciting.
“This car’s been running really, really well but stupid things have been happening. This breaks or that breaks and we’ve been chasing it. We won first round today then go to Round 2 and the car is vibrating again and we shear off all the blower studs. Thank God Del [Worsham] had problems in the other lane or we were done. That was our lucky round. Then we beat Tommy [Johnson] and Jack in the final and he has an identical tune-up to ours so it was a battle the whole way.”
Continued Scelzi, “It’s a big relief [to move into the top four. That was our first step. We’ve got to get into fourth. Unfortunately, we have two more races left. We want to be as high as we can because I don’t want to give away anything going into Vegas and Pomona, because if the car that’s in the lead goes the same amount of rounds as you, you’re still going to be a loser. We need to get into first place. We need to get as far as we can to get as much as we can when we roll into Vegas [the final race counting towards the Countdown to Four].”
Big Funny Car news this past week included Ashley Force on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno to acknowledge her win as AOL’s Hottest Athlete.
Great Ashley Force quote from the show: “I was the girl in auto shop wearing a cheerleader’s outfit while I was taking apart the engine of a motorcycle.” The YouTube video of the appearance is here.
Dave Connolly took out Greg Anderson in the Pro Stock finals; this is Connolly’s third win in a row, his second in a row over Anderson and he’s now at the top of the Countdown to the Championship points standings.
“You couldn’t ask for a better time to get hot,” Connolly said. “It’s just remarkable and I’m so thankful I get to do this with the team I have, Tommy and John Utt, Keith Graham and Craig Campton, these guys are like family to me. I’m just a small part of this whole process — the lucky guy that gets to drive up and down the track.
“I start to look back three or four years when I was first getting started and every time I got to the final there was Greg and he was beating me. Here we are a few years later and I’ve beaten him in two finals in a row. Everything is just clicking right now and hopefully we don’t use up all our luck before we’re done.”
Speaking of wins-in-a-row, Andrew Hines has strung together three of them at this Memphis drag strip in Pro Stock Motorcycle, including today’s win over Steve Johnson (despite a slow start to avoid red-lighting.) Hines is the Chase leader in this class by 24 points.
“There was no way I was going to red-light in the final, especially after doing it in Indy,” Hines said. “I’ve been hating myself for two weeks so I made sure I saw yellow and let the clutch out and pretty soon after that I didn’t hear Steve any more so I was feeling good. Once these V-Rods get out front they’re hard to catch.
“To win here three years in a row doesn’t get much better. I guess the Countdown deal is working in our favor now but if I had it my way I’d leave it the way it was, even though I probably wouldn’t have the points lead right now. We’re pretty secure in the Countdown to One now so hopefully we can roll this win over to Dallas and just keep rolling.”
In other Pro Stock Motorcycle news earlier this week, the US Army announced that it is dropping sponsorship of popular drivers Angelle Sampey and Antron Brown after this season, to concentrate on sponsorship of Tony Schumacher’s Top Fuel team.
See you next week near Dallas for the O’Reilly Fall Nationals at the Texas Motorplex, the only all-concrete quarter-mile strip on the POWERade schedule.
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