The Mel Bush Motorsports team entered the ADRL NATIONALGUARD.com U.S. Drags II 12th in points and
was looking to make a big move up the ladder but lady luck had other ideas.
With qualifying shortened to only two sessions teams struggled to get a handle on the Virginia
Motorsports Park surface; Mel Bush Motorsports was one of the teams. Crew Chief Kevin Peters took a
conservative approach on the team's first hit.
"I just wanted to get her down the track. I needed the data and knew our soft setup would give us
that," said Peters.
Luckily their "soft" setup netted a 3.923 elapsed time and placed him10th in the provisional
field.
For their second attempt the team entered the staging lanes early in the hopes of laying down a
number good enough to secure their place in the filed and get prepared for round one. The luck from
the first session did not carry over to round two of qualifying as the big red 62' Bel Air blew the
tires off at the hit.
What was to be a time to prepare confidently for round one, turned into a nervous time for Tommy
D'Aprile and crew. The team continued to get their machine ready for round one as they listened to
ADRL announcers, Brian Olson and Al Tucci , give play by play of each run with the bump spot
continually closing in on D'Aprile's 3.923.
"It's pretty nerve racking knowing you have to get the car ready when your listening to the radio
hearing the bump fall to our 3.93. and to not be able to do a thing about it makes it worse," said
crew member Jake Fahy.
Luckily for Fahy and crew the 3.93 held placing them 16th in the 16-car field, which turned out to
be the second quickest field in ADRL Pro Extreme history.
Not so lucky for the Mel Bush team was the fact that they would have to face the number one
qualifier and teammate, Mike Janis.
"We're having some issues with our clutch program and we need a few more hits to try and get this
thing right, having to face Mike in round one being somewhat handicapped in the clutch area is
tough," said team drive Tommy D'Aprile.
D'Aprile didn't lay down for his teammate in round one. The two left the starting line just one
one thousands of a second apart, but that was it for the Mel Bushg Team as D'Aprile put out a
cylinder just past the 60 foot mark and Janis drove by taking the win.
"These things are very touchy, said team owner Mel Bush. Between these two cars we have as much if
not more power than anyone here. The key is in the clutch. We have a new clutch in the car and
we're having some troubles with it. Before round one we were lucky enough to have Jeff Prock of
Applied Nitrous Technologies come by to give us a hand setting the clutch before we went up this
round and it seemed to help but we got bit by a sparkplug of all things. Somehow the porcelain had
a small crack in it and caused it to arc out. It was just one of those weekends you have racing;
the kind you don't want to see a lot of," said Bush.
Despite the struggles this weekend D'Aprile did manage to move up one spot on the points ladder in
the Speedtech Nitrous "Battle for the Belts" points standings. D'Aprile is now less than Three
Rounds out of the top eight with three races remaining on the ADRL National Guard 2009 Schedule.
