The first leg of the three-race NHRA Western Swing, the 30th annual Mile-High Nationals held at
Bandimere Speedway, did not go as well for Kurt Johnson as he would have liked when he entered
today's eliminator. But even with a round-one loss to Greg Anderson, the ACDelco Chevrolet driver
is confident that some key chassis adjustments made to the car this weekend will move the team
forward during their next two stops at Seattle and Sonoma (Calif.).
"We thought we ran pretty decent here Friday night during qualifying and then we chased the chassis
around on Saturday," explained Johnson. "In the first round today, we finally made the kind of run
that we made during all of last year, but it was apparent that we had a motor issue because we
didn't run the backhalf yesterday or today. Looking at the computer we now know that we had a motor
going away.
"We know what's wrong. We'll put another motor in and go to Seattle. We're confident that the
chassis problem is fixed because we didn't bounce at all. The ACDelco Chevrolet made a nice, smooth
run on the graph."
The next stop on the schedule is the 22nd annual Northwest Nationals on July 17 - 19 at Pacific
Raceways in Seattle, Wash. It is the 14th race on the 24-event NHRA Full Throttle Series tour.
Johnson is a three-time winner of the Northwest Nationals (1993, '99, '05), and he was runner-up in
1996 and '98.
"The biggest thing is that we have the car, the suspension package, back to the way we had it when
we won the Full Throttle last year," Johnson said. "It took a lot of work, but the guys on this
race team did a great job making those changes. We were here late last night, and early today
getting the ACDelco Chevrolet ready to race. We're pretty pumped about the run today; we're upset
about the 7.08, but the computer shows that we have an issue with the crankcase vacuum. We can fix
that, maybe not with that particular motor, but we have others that are similar to it that have
last year's package in them."
