NHRA: Bazemore #1 on Friday in Seattle
29 July 2000
For the second time in as many races, Whit Bazemore and the Kendall Motor Oil/Matco Tools Camaro Z28 Racing Team broke the elapsed time track record in qualifying for an NHRA national event. In this instance, it came during Friday's evening session for the Prolong Super Lubricants Northwest Nationals. Running in the right lane, Bazemore blasted down the Seattle International Raceway in 4.875 seconds with a top speed of 306. 81 mph, easily eclipsing the previous mark of 4.941 seconds set by archrival John Force two years ago. What made Bazemore's achievement even more remarkable is that no other Funny Car competitor came within seven hundredths of a second of his time. Despite this impressive performance, Bazemore explained that his run could have been even better. "To get that result is obviously a tremendous effort by the Kendall/Matco Camaro team. But that run was far from perfect for a number of reasons. First, in the late afternoon here, the sun comes right into your face. With the way these cars are, you can't see very well out the front under those conditions, making it very hard to pick out the groove, the wall or the cones. In addition, this is a very challenging track, particularly in the right lane, which makes it very important to stay in the groove, which as I explained, I couldn't really see. So naturally, you also have to be a little lucky. "Under these circumstances, I believe you have to have a pre-conceived idea of how your run is going to unfold, which is precisely what I did. I drove it to the right a little bit until I realized we were too far over and maybe out of the groove, so I brought it back to the left. At that point, it hit the bumps, which unloaded the suspension, moving it farther to the left than I wanted, so I had to once again bring it back into the groove. Of course, all this happens in 4.8 seconds and then you're at the finish line. "I expected some of the obvious teams such as Force and Toliver to get closer to us than they did. However, you can never count those guys out. Tomorrow is a different day, and if there is cloud cover as often seems to happen when we're here in Seattle, that '.87 could be in jeopardy. But the way we see it, if someone else can improve on that mark, so can we."