They are a long way from home, but there's no doubt that whatever happens in the Seattle area this
weekend, everyone on the LifeLockracing.com Top Fuel team will be breathing a lot easier when the
22nd annual NHRA Northwest Nationals unfolds at Pacific Raceways near Seattle.
Driver Clay Millican, crew chief Lance Larsen and the crew members of the Munford, Tenn.-based team
are happy to have a new front half mounted on their Brad Hadman-built dragster. That was necessary
after the car did a wheelstand Friday on a qualifying run at Denver. Fortunately, Hadman's chassis
building shop is in nearby Tacoma and Tuesday the crew delivered there for repairs.
"Brad will fix it quickly because he's had a few days to get prepared for the job, and then the
guys will take it to Pacific Raceways," Millican reported. "And then we'll go out and try to make
better runs a lot closer to sea level than we were last week. We are optimistic. We're hoping
for a much better performance from the LifeLockracing.com dragster at Seattle."
This is Millican's second visit to the Pacific Raceways. He qualified third in 2007, but was upset
in the first round.
"We knew when we lost (to Doug Kalitta) Sunday in the first round that we'd lose ground to him in
points," he continued. "But he really took advantage of it and got to the finals, so now we're 100
points behind (634-534) him." Kalitta is ninth and Millican 10th, 42 points ahead of Joe Hartley,
as NHRA's regular season reaches the 14th of 18 races. The top 10 drivers move on to the six-race
Countdown to the Championship.
Larsen, the veteran tuner, was cautiously optimistic about this week's race.
"The air is so good when you get down there to sea level," he said. "They have trees all around
the track and that makes it easier to run there. You have to use less blower boost, less (engine)
compression and less (engine) timing to calm the engine down. It's so easy to make power there.
Sometimes all the trees make it more difficult for us because we have to back down the motor so far
from the way we ran it in Denver" that it takes more runs to fine-tune the combination.
The Western Swing concludes with the FRAM-Autolite Nationals, July 24-26, at Infineon Raceway in
Sonoma, Calif.
