HOT. That's one word that I would describe the running of the NHRA Northwest Nationals. Very hot. It may have only been in the upper 90's but the Pacific Northwest had been having below normal temperatures for most of summer. When you go from high 60's to high 90's virtually overnight it's a shock to the system. And in typical Northwest fashion it was back down to low 70's by Monday. With only 13 Top Alcohol Funny Car's on the premise we knew we were going to qualify as long as we took the green, but it would be really nice if we could qualify in the top half of the field. For Q1, with track temps reaching the high 120's, Jeff goes out to clock off a 5.797 at 245.14 mph to place him 3rd at the time but eventually slipped to 6th after all the other teams ran. Jeff had said that although the pass was real smooth he had thought the run was a mid 5.80 something. He was quite pleased when we told him what it actually ran. With the outside temps soaring near 100 and track temps approaching 136 degrees the team decided to sit out Q2 with the thinking that we wouldn't be able to improve on our current E.T.

Saturday was a tad more pleasant with a nice cloud cover in the morning to keep temperatures mild. We were hoping that it would last until after Q3 but that didn't happen. We towed to the line around 1:30 or so and Jeff said the car was moving around quite a bit and blurry out the window but still managed to run a decent 5.844 at 242.98 which put him 10th. Not quite what the birthday boy or his crew wanted but we didn't hurt anything. Last year we had a mad thrash right before E1 but this year it was just normal routine maintenance. Our first round opponent was the number 5 qualifier Sean O'Bannon out of Division 7. Sean had out qualified us by 2 tenths so we knew we had our work cut out for us. But this is Top Alcohol racing where anything can happen.