<img src="http://gallery.nitromater.com/files/6/5/p_burkart06.jpg" alt="p_burkart06" align="left"borders="0"/>
Drag racing is not like card playing, since straights and pairs mean nothing and earn you nothing more than respect when qualifying. Though he showed amazing consistency by posting a pair of strong 4.79s on Friday, the only number that counted for Phil Burkart was the quicker of the two, though it was only stronger by a thousandth of a second. Burkart ran 4.795 on his first lap here at Maple Grove, then backed that up with a slightly quicker 4.794 in session two. He will enter Saturday's qualifying sessions from the No. 9 spot.
"Even though you don't get any sort of credit for running two of those, it's still better than making it down there once and smoking the tires on the other run," Burkart said. "I'm not going to tell you that our guys were trying to duplicate the first 4.79, because we weren't. The idea was to take that first one, and then make some substantial changes to the car in an effort to run 4.72 or 4.73, but it just didn't seem to react to the changes. It actually wasn't very happy at the top end, because I felt a really bad vibration down there.
"We're not complaining, though, because we're getting a better handle on it and we can get it to the other end going fast. There's nothing wrong with that, and if we can tweak on it a little more tomorrow, we'll have a strong car for Sunday."
PAIR OF 4.79s EARN BURKART 9th SPOT
Drag racing is not like card playing, since straights and pairs mean nothing and earn you nothing more than respect when qualifying. Though he showed amazing consistency by posting a pair of strong 4.79s on Friday, the only number that counted for Phil Burkart was the quicker of the two, though it was only stronger by a thousandth of a second. Burkart ran 4.795 on his first lap here at Maple Grove, then backed that up with a slightly quicker 4.794 in session two. He will enter Saturday's qualifying sessions from the No. 9 spot.
"Even though you don't get any sort of credit for running two of those, it's still better than making it down there once and smoking the tires on the other run," Burkart said. "I'm not going to tell you that our guys were trying to duplicate the first 4.79, because we weren't. The idea was to take that first one, and then make some substantial changes to the car in an effort to run 4.72 or 4.73, but it just didn't seem to react to the changes. It actually wasn't very happy at the top end, because I felt a really bad vibration down there.
"We're not complaining, though, because we're getting a better handle on it and we can get it to the other end going fast. There's nothing wrong with that, and if we can tweak on it a little more tomorrow, we'll have a strong car for Sunday."
