Scelzi out in first round against teammate Bazemore

DON SCHUMACHER RACING
NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series
Round 5 of 23
O'Reilly Spring Nationals presented by a Dutch oil company.
HOUSTON RACEWAY PARK
Race Date: April 11-13, 2003
Sunday, April 12, 2003

SCELZI OUSTED IN FIRST-ROUND MATCH-UP WITH TEAMMATE BAZEMORE

HOUSTON (April 13, 2003) -- It's always a bummer on a three-car NHRA Funny
Car team when you have to face your teammate in the first round of
eliminations. This year Scotty Cannon had to do it twice against his
Schumacher Racing partner Whit Bazemore, and he lost both times.

Today, at the O'Reilly Spring Nationals at Houston Raceway Park, it was Gary
Scelzi, in the Oakley Time Bomb Funny Car, paired against Bazemore in the
first round for the first time this season. They had only met once before;
it was here in Houston in 2002, when Bazemore beat Scelzi in the second
round.

Scelzi had the edge at the starting lights by a full tenth of a second and
was ahead at 330 feet, until he encountered the bumps in the right lane
which caused the car to lose balance, drop cylinders and smoke the tires.
Bazemore went around him to win with his own smoking run of 5.098/283.85.

"It's always unfortunate," said Scelzi, the three-time Top Fuel champion.
"We got behind in qualifying. We made changes to race Whit and we did race
him. The car was running fine and then it hit the bumps, started to unload
to car and started putting cylinders out and then it smoked the tires. I
pedaled it, got back on it and then Whit went by and I shut it off. One of
the parachutes had sheared a pin and it fell out and it cocked the whole
parachute pack."

Scelzi was vocal about the track conditions here. "It's tough. This track
definitely needs a facelift. It needs some lighting and it needs to be
repaved. Hopefully, NHRA will do the right thing and get this thing handled
so we can have some good, close racing for the fans, because that's who pays
the bills for everybody. We're going to test tomorrow and try some things
and see if we can get down a bumpy race track in case we end up with some
more of these. I know there are some more out there."

Racing your teammate is never easy. "Whit has been very good to me since I
came to this team," added Scelzi. He's given me a lot of help driving. We
race hard; there's bragging rights at stake and both teams get along very
well. So, it's unfortunate we had to meet in the first round. But it's going
to happen. It will probably happen a couple of more times this year and
hopefully the results will be different. Either way, a Schumacher car is
going into the second round and Lee's (Beard, Bazemore's crew chief) got a
chance to work on his car. We'll help them in any way we can."

Bazemore made it into the semifinal, but lost to Tony Pedregon. Scelzi is
now 11th in the POWERade Drag Racing Series point standings, with 200
points.

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