MORGAN LUCAS RACES INTO THE NO. 9 SPOT

Morgan Lucas drove his Lucas Oil Top Fuel dragster into the hotly-contested drag race field for Sunday’s running of the Checker Schuck’s Kragen Nationals at Firebird Sports Park and will meet Larry Dixon in the first round of eliminations starting from the No. 9 starting position – his 10th time starting from there. Lucas ran a time of 4.566 seconds, 326.00-mph in his last qualifying attempt after previously recording a time of 4.618 seconds from the earlier session.

In overall competition, Lucas last raced Dixon in the 2007 edition of the CSK Nationals and was defeated in the quarterfinals and Lucas’ record against him is two wins to his three.

“Yeah, it’s definitely consistent,” said a satisfied Lucas. “It was one of those situations where losing those two runs with the rain yesterday really hurt us because we wanted to try some different things on the car for today. We babied the car a little to make sure it got down the track and at the same time, it kind of got us behind a little, but we’ll be all right for tomorrow.

“One thing I was impressed by is the way J.R. (Todd, teammate) and John Stewart (Todd’s crew chief) bounced back from smoking the tires in their first session to wind up running a 4.54 and made it look easy. I’m very proud of the whole team. It just goes to show you that it’s either one car or the other and soon we’ll get them both on the same page.

There’s a busy day of drag racing coverage on ESPN2 this Sunday with the re-airing of the qualifying rounds beginning at 11 a.m. (EST) with NHRA RaceDay presented by Lucas Oil immediately following at 1:30 p.m. Final round coverage of the 24th annual Checker Schuck’s Kragen Nationals starts at 7 p.m.