Scelzi shoots for No. 6 in points at NHRA finale
DON SCHUMACHER RACING 2003 NHRA POWERade DRAG RACING SERIES Round 23 of 23 Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals Pomona (Calif.) Raceway Race Dates: Nov. 6-9, 2003 Contact: Judy Stropus, 203-438-0501; cell, 203-243-2438 SCELZI SHOOTS FOR NO. 6 POMONA, Calif. (Nov. 4, 2003) - Gary Scelzi is eager to get onto the quarter-mile at Pomona Raceway with his Oakley Time Bomb Dodge Stratus this weekend following a successful test session at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Monday, Oct. 27. He'd also like to close out this season by taking over sixth place in the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series Funny Car point standings from Ron Capps, with whom he's tied for that position. The plan for the Oakley Dodge team at the Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals, the last event of the 23-race season, is race testing the new combination he and his crew chief Mike Neff came up with in Las Vegas. "We had a great test session on Monday with a completely new combination," says Scelzi, who holds the Funny Car top-speed national record of 329.18 mph, set in Joliet, Ill., this year. "Hopefully, it's a more forgiving combination than we've run all this year. "We've been testing different things all season and we finally got all the parts and pieces we've been waiting for and we ran really, really well. We ran a 4.82 (-second elapsed time) at 322 (mph) testing in our first full run. "The car was nowhere near in trouble early like it has been when we've run those kind of numbers. So Mike Neff and (team owner) Don Schumacher decided to run this combination in Pomona, because this is the setup we were going to test in the beginning of next year anyway. "Everything looked really good and really promising. We figured we might get a jump on next year by actually testing this combination in race-day conditions. So that's what we're going to do. "It's kind of a gamble, but it seemed to have more controllable power. We're really excited about it." Scelzi, who has won one race in 2003 so far, in his first full season of Funny Car competition, would like to move into sixth place in the point standings, and is not concerned that this "testing" plan could backfire. "It's always a gamble," says the Fresno, Calif., native who has won at Pomona three times in Top Fuel and is a three-time runner-up as well. "The points are so tight from 10th to sixth that you never know if you're going to be opening up a can of worms. We don't think so because the car responded to everything we wanted it to do and it was really stable." Weather conditions in Pomona and the fallout from the recent surrounding wildfires are factors the teams are taking into consideration. "The fires are just about all gone, but my heart goes out to all the people who have suffered losses in these fires," he adds. "The weather is going to be cool; it's going to be in the 60s. So it's going to be a typical Pomona. It's a really, really good race track," says Scelzi, also a three-time winner here in The Budweiser Shootout for Top Fuel Dragsters. "It's really tricky. If you get to the final on Sunday, between the semifinals and the finals the air gets really good; it cools off 10 to 15 degrees in like an hour. So you've got to be really on top of your tune-up. We've got a lot of experience in that area. Actually, I have a lot of experience in that area. There are a lot of things I can warn Mike Neff about because we've done some things wrong here in the past. "If we can get ourselves qualified in the top half of the field and go some rounds on Sunday it could be a great finish to a good year." ***