Bazemore out in first round at Gatornationals

DON SCHUMACHER RACING
2004 NHRA POWERade DRAG RACING SERIES
Round 3 of 23
NHRA GATORNATIONALS
GAINESVILLE (FLA.) RACEWAY
RACE DATES: MARCH 19-21, 2004


GAINESVILLE, Fla. (March 21, 2004) - Every opponent in the other lane is a
potential danger to a Funny car drag racer when it comes to aiming for an
event win and eventually a championship. No one can be counted out. So when
Whit Bazemore, in the Matco Tools Iron Eagle Dodge, came head-to-head with
Cory Lee in the first round of eliminations at the NHRA Gatornationals at
Gainesville Raceway, he didn't take the challenge lightly.

Cory Lee's Funny Car was painted white, virtually unsponsored, and team
owner Dale Creasy Sr. was funding its first appearance this season in the
NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series.

Bazemore came to the line ready to race. He blasted off at the starting
lights with a stout .078 reaction time to Lee's .143. As No. 2 qualifier to
Lee's No. 15, it should have been Bazemore's round to lose, and that's how
it turned out, as his car smoked the tires at the hit of the throttle,
resulting in a 6.564-second pass at 203.34 mph to Lee's winning
5.162/285.89.

The 2003 Funny Car championship runner-up and two-time U.S. Nationals
champion found himself falling from No. 5 to No. 8 in the Funny Car point
standings, but did not blame the newly-repaved track surface.

"It's not the track," he said. "It's our car and ourselves. We just
overpowered the race track at the hit of the throttle, basically. So we got
beat."

The drop in point standings was not significant at this early stage of the
season, he said. "We're here to win the race, we don't care about points. We
did everything we could do. We drilled Cory Lee on the starting line, and
then we got the thing to hook up finally, trying to do magic. We needed them
to make a mistake too, and they didn't, so we got beat.

"That's how the sport is. It's a brutal game. Budgets sometimes don't
matter. That's the beauty of our sport. When you go to the starting line
underdog or favorite, you only have one car and one motor, and you've
prepared your stuff to the best of your ability and you go race.

"The beauty is that the underdog always has a fair enough chance to win. It
happened to me when I was younger in my career. We beat (John) Force a few
times when he was reigning world champion and we had no business beating
him. That's the beauty of the sport, but at the same time it's also the
dread and it will drive you crazy if you let it.

"We've got a great Matco Tools team. When the driver's perfect and the car
is perfect we're going to be unstoppable. Until then it's going to be hit or
miss. This year when the car has been right I've made a small mistake,"
referring to his slow reaction time at the CSK Nationals in Chandler, Ariz.
"And then when I've been right the car let us down a little bit. That's just
how it goes. We'll work on that."

Next up is Round 4, the NHRA Summitracing.com Nationals at The Strip at Las
Vegas Motor Speedway.