Bazemore out early in Houston

DON SCHUMACHER RACING
2006 NHRA POWERade DRAG RACING SERIES
Round 4 of 23
O'REILLY NHRA SPRING NATIONALS
Houston Raceway
Race Date: March 31-April 2, 2006


BAYTOWN, Texas (April 2, 2006) - Whit Bazemore and crew chief Brian Corradi
are baffled by the difficulty they've encountered in tuning the Matco Tools
Iron Eagle Dodge Charger R/T Funny Car lately, based in some part on
adapting to the newly-mandated tire by NHRA.

This was evidenced this weekend at the O'Reilly NHRA Spring Nationals, where
Bazemore produced two of four sound qualifying runs for No. 9, then
experienced tire shake in first round of eliminations, losing to Tony
Pedregon (6.819/137.85 to Pedregon's 4.869/316.67).

"It's very disappointing," said Bazemore. "The Matco Tools Dodge Charger
just didn't make it through the 1.5 (-second) problem area that we've had,
and it shook and smoked the tires. It didn't recover either; it's like the
tire had oil on it.

"For us, right now, the way we run our car the car has no traction. If it
shakes just a little too much it won't make it. It should have recovered
easily and it didn't. We still wouldn't have won.

"The Matco Tools Dodge team has made good progress, but we struggled. Right
now it's very, very frustrating because we are making progress, but we're
not getting the results. And the progress we've made deserves better
results. 

"I told Brian the other day. We can't worry about winning rounds; we just
have to get our car to run good and it's running a lot better than it was.
When the car runs well the results are going to come. The problem is the
tune-up window is so small that we can't tune it."

Bazemore is 12th in the Funny Car point standings.

Next up is the NHRA Summitracing.com Nationals at 'The Strip' at Las Vegas
Motor Speedway, April 6-9.