Scelzi 6th, Cannon 9th at Pomona

DON SCHUMACHER RACING
NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series
K&N Winternationals
Pomona (Calif.) Raceway
Thursday, Feb. 6, 2003

FUNNY CAR POST-QUALIFYING

SCOTTY CANNON, OAKLEY TIME BOMB FUNNY CAR, qualified eighth in first round
of qualifying for the NHRA season opener, with a quality run of 4.918
seconds at 318.17 mph, the second best speed of the round, good for ninth
place. Cannon and his new crew chief Phil Shuler, in his first stint as a
Funny Car crew chief, are satisfied with this run following recent test
sessions at Firebird Raceway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

"We struggled in testing. We had lots of gremlins and thought we had them
straightened out in Vegas and actually made some runs to half track that
were better than this. We knew that if we could keep all our ducks in a row
and keep the gremlins out of there and keep bad things from happening to us,
we'd be OK. And it was all our fault. No bad parts or anything, just stuff
we were doing ourselves and we're finally just trying to get the rough edges
ironed off of it and hopefully we have a good baseline. That's what we were
trying to run; not to brag by no means at this point. We were trying to run
anywhere, we said, from .90 to .85. It gave us a .91 and we'll take it."

CREW CHIEF PHIL SHULER, a man of few words: "We hope to improve, but we're
happy with it."

GARY SCELZI, in the OAKLEY TIME BOMB DODGE STRATUS R/T, made his first
qualifying lap in a Don Schumacher Racing Funny Car, and sat No. 1 for a
brief time with a 4.884/311.56. He ended up in fifth: "No question about it.
The hits just keep on coming. Michael Neff (crew chief) just makes me so
darned happy. He's just so cool and calm and he said, you know, we're going
to go down the race track. Even if somebody goes out and runs a .70, which
they didn't before we ran, he said, I'm not going to get caught up in that.
I'm going go get some data, we're going to go the finish line, we're going
to get you a good straight run and we'll work on it from there. I like his
approach. It makes sense. You don't learn anything by smoking the tires and
we didn't. it was a great soft run, an .88 came up on the board. I'm
thrilled to death. The team really is on an upswing right now and I want it
to stay that way."

WHIT BAZEMORE, MATCO TOOLS DODGE STRATUS R/T, qualfied 10th, 4.929/313.07.

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