Added weight could be Wilkerson's problem
SONOMA, Saturday: The Fram Autolite NHRA Nationals may be held in the beautiful Napa Valley, but there was no beauty at Infineon Raceway this weekend for Funny Car veteran, Tim Wilkerson. The well-liked driver and tuner was not able to get his Levi, Ray & Shoup Chevrolet Impala SS into the program. But the reason for Wilkerson's problems may lie under the surface, waiting to be uncovered.
It's been a long time since Wilkerson smoked the tires, but surprisingly, he did it on all four runs this weekend. In yesterday's first qualifying session, even though he dropped a cylinder around half-track, Wilkerson was able to make it down, posting a 5.076. But things changed in the evening session. Wilkerson smoked the tires at the hit, and that problem continued to plague Wilkerson throughout the weekend.
"We have a dilemma," explained Wilkerson. "The car smoked the tires on every run and no matter what we did, it wouldn't have anything to do with it. There's no way it should have smoked them because it was weak. It was so weak it just waddled down through there like a duck.
"We don't know what's happened for sure but we think it's the body. Roush, who makes all the bodies, took ours after Seattle. After the way Tommy's (Johnson Jr.) came apart in Seattle they wanted to fix it. So, they strengthened the front end and in doing so, they added weight. They said it wasn't much, but it's 22 pounds heavier. So, we think the car is out of balance. It's so heavy; you can hardly pick it up. The added weight probably ruined the integrity of the car. It couldn't transfer the weight properly on the run, so it smoked the tires.
"It sure made for a tough weekend," said Wilkerson. "It made us look like we didn't know what we were doing. But I really don't think it was us. When we get home we're going to take it apart from stem to stern to make sure there is nothing mechanically wrong. And we'll scale the body. If it's the problem, we'll have to decide what to do with it. We can move the fire bottles to the back, if we want to add weight back there. There's a couple of things we can do. We'll just have to wait until we get home and see what we discover."
