NHRA - Tasca Fired Up For Englishtown

Topeka, May 22, 2011: Bob Tasca III will head to his hometown race, the NHRA Supernationals in Englishtown, N.J. with a little more motivation to do well there than he had before – if that’s possible.

After running consistently all weekend at the NHRA Summer Nationals in Topeka, Tasca and the Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Shelby Mustang Funny Car team lost to Ron Capps by mere inches in the first round at Heartland Park.

Tasca grabbed an early lead on the starting line, treeing his opponent with a .048-second light at the Christmas Tree to Capps’ .065. But Capps ran him down. Tasca’s 4.178-second finish at 301.67 mph just wasn’t enough to defeat Capps’ 4.144 at 298.73.

“There’s not a loss that’s a good loss, but when you come up on the wrong side of a really close race, it’s painful,” Tasca said. “We would’ve beaten so many of the cars out there, but unfortunately we raced Capps and he made a great run. At the end of the day, a lot of the cars smoked the tires out there. (Crew Chief) Chris (Cunningham) made the call he thought he needed to make. That’s racing. That’s why they call it drag racing, not drag winning. We’ll pick up the pieces and go to Englishtown. We had a solid car that went down the track every pass. Unfortunately we just came up on the wrong side of a great drag race.”