Tue, May 5, 10:57 AM Etchells Excerpts

Courtesy of Jon Knapp Castrol Lone Star Nationals

ENNIS, Texas Chuck Etchells battled a series of unusual problems in his Kendall Oil/MaMa Rosa's Pizza/Superwinch Camaro Z28 Funny Car during qualifying for this weekend's Castrol Nationals at the Texas Motorplex. As a result, his best elapsed time of 5.228 seconds found the NHRA Funny Car points leader, and the winner last week in Richmond outside the top sixteen for Sunday's final eliminations. This snaps a string of 28 events, dating back to the Winston Finals in 1996 at which Etchells has been a participant in final eliminations.

"Naturally, we're upset, but this Kendall Oil/MaMa Rosa's Pizza/Superwinch team is too good to let this keep us down. I don't think you can ever be a true champion or a true winner unless you can take a setback such as this, look it in the eye, and move on. Our Camaro Z28 is a great race car, and we've been running really well all season. We simply ran into problems at this race that I've never seen in my 19 years of racing. Everybody in the pits sees our E.T. cards - we had three great runs spoiled by different problems. Friday night, it was on a 4.93 or 4 pace when the blower belt simply popped off. Saturday, the car launched well, and was on another strong pass when the tires shook abruptly, breaking a brand new blower belt, which shouldn't have happened, because it didn't rev the motor high enough. Finally, we softened it for the last session to get us off the bump spot, and it was running great, it didn't spin the tires, or do anything foolish at all when the burst panel on the supercharger came apart at the seams, effectively ending our run. It didn't bang the blower, it didn't have any explosions, nothing. Each time, the car was great to half track, and then it just shut off. On a positive note, we came in here with the points lead, and worst case scenario we're behind by three rounds. We've worked really hard to get where we are, and we hate to give some back, but it's very early in the season, and we're just going to move on to Englishtown and get 'em there!"