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BRAINERD, Minn. – It has been a slow and steady climb for veteran Funny Car driver Tim Wilkerson, who has clawed his way into position to make the Full Throttle Countdown to the Championship, NHRA’s six-race playoffs. At one point during the season, the Levi Ray & Shoup Ford Mustang driver was mired as low as 14th in the standings.

The Springfield, Ill. driver had a great Western Swing, posting a runner-up finish at Sonoma, Calif. and claiming his first victory and No. 1 qualifying position in more than a year at Seattle. The net result is that Wilkerson jumped to ninth in the standings and now appears solidly in the mix as the final two races of the regular season approach.

For insurance, Wilkerson will focus on moving up another points position or two by trying to keep his final round streak going at the 30th annual Lucas Oil NHRA Nationals, Aug. 18-21 at scenic Brainerd International Raceway. Larry Dixon (Top Fuel), Bob Bode (Funny Car), Jeg Coughlin (Pro Stock) and Andrew Hines (Pro Stock Motorcycle) are the defending winners of the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series event, which will be televised on ESPN2HD.

Wilkerson realized that if he was going to make a move to get into the playoffs it would need to be during the Western Swing, a part of the season where he’s had some recent success.

“There’s no doubt about it that we got hot at the right time, although this year I think we strung it out a little too far,” Wilkerson said. “We got to the point where it really was ‘now or never’ and that just happened to line up with the time when we were really getting a good handle on the car. It’s been a challenging year, and it was almost like you could throw away a bunch of our early races when we weren’t getting much done. Before Denver, the car was showing what we have now, but we didn’t have any racing luck and that can wear the team down faster than running bad. We had to stick together as a team while we kept the car running strong, and we managed to do that.”

Following a final round effort at the VisitMyrtleBeach.com NHRA Four-Wide Nationals, Wilkerson posted five first round losses over the next seven races. His fortunes started to turn in Denver, when he qualified 10th and advanced to the quarterfinals. He followed that with the runner-up at Infineon Raceway and then won for the third consecutive year at Pacific Raceways.

“We have as much confidence, right now, as we’ve had all year,” said Wilkerson, who enters the penultimate race in the regular season 46 points in front of 10th place driver Bob Tasca. “We’ve got a real good handle on the car, and on things like the clutch that were driving us nuts earlier in the season, so we feel pretty good about our chances every lap now. It wasn’t that way earlier, so that’s a big step forward for us.”

During his back-to-back final rounds in Sonoma and Seattle, Wilkerson knocked off some of the category’s top competitors in head-to-head meetings, including defending world champ John Force, second place points sitter Robert Hight and Jack Beckman, who is currently third in the standings. As an independent team owner, he knows he’ll have to continue to beat the top cars from the John Force Racing and Don Schumacher Racing stables to contend for victories and the championship as the season moves into its latter stages.

“I won’t kid you and say it doesn’t mean anything to us when we knock off the biggest hitters out here,” Wilkerson said. “It means a lot to me, to Dick Levi and LRS, and to our guys. There’s some good mojo in playing the David vs. Goliath thing and coming out on top, and you can see our guys strutting around with some pride right now. They earned it, and that sort of intensity and pride can keep building.”

Wilkerson trails eighth place driver Jeff Arend by less than one round and his goal is to move into that spot before the playoffs kick off. He knows that his LRS Mustang is sitting directly in the sightlines of both Tasca and 11th place Johnny Gray. Tony Pedregon, who won at BIR in 2008 and 2009, will need to create some more “Minnesota Magic” if he’s going to make the Countdown, as he’s in 12th, 119 points behind Tasca.

“Momentum is a funny thing in this sport, because the car doesn’t care,” Wilkerson said. “It’s good for the crew guys, because I don’t think there’s any getting around the fact that they work a little bit better, harder, and with more focus when they’re feeling good about the results. So that’s good, and hopefully we’ll continue to have some success on the track. The thing now is that we have a real chance to move up to eighth if we can keep doing any good, so that’s what we’re after, and after that we just want to feel good about ourselves as we enter the playoffs.”

What a Western Swing it has been for Tim Wilkerson. He entered the Denver race looking for improvement and any sort of improvement, stuck outside the Full Throttle Top 10 and hoping to find a way in. There on the mountain, he earned a fortuitous chance to race the No. 10 driver, Johnny Gray, in round one and when he crossed the finish line first he had sneaked ahead of Gray, into the Top 10, but only by a hair (19 points).

In Sonoma, he powered his way to the final round by winning three races the hard way, always running just well enough to take the stripe, and his points total began to build. In the final round, he made a stellar lap that came up just short, but the way his Levi, Ray & Shoup Shelby Mustang was running, and the way his LRS team was finding ways to win rounds, gave him and his crew some much needed confidence and a serious morale boost. He also strengthened his grip on 10th place, leaving Wine Country 52 points up on Gray.

Finally, at the third stop on the Swing, in Seattle, he put it all together and simply did it the right way. He qualified No. 1, he won four straight rounds, and after just getting by a very game Brian Thiel in the opening round, he trailered three superstars by simply blowing away the competition. In round two it was Tony Pedregon, in the semifinal it was Robert Hight, and in the final round it was Jack Beckman. All big wins, all big points, and all won by the driver who was clearly the class of the field on this day in the Great Northwest.

And now, Wilk finds himself no longer on the outside looking in, and no longer clinging to a precarious spot in 10th place. Instead, Wilk leaves here solidly in 9th, with a 46 point lead on Bob Tasca, and his gap over Gray in 11th has ballooned to 141. In addition, he can now look up the list and clearly see 8th, as he leaves Seattle only 18 points behind Jeff Arend. What a difference a Western Swing makes.

“That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it,” Wilkerson said. “Two races ago we were hoping to somehow get by Johnny Gray and get a toe-hold on 10th place, but when that was over we still had such a tiny little lead you could sneeze hard and lose it. We go on to Sonoma and Seattle, and the whole world has changed. It’s hard to believe. We can’t let up now, though. We have to keep charging and keep going after every point out there, to clinch our spot and give ourselves the best possible chance in the playoffs.”

Wilkerson’s day began with a nerve-wracking race against Thiel, who qualified 16th but has been turning heads as a newcomer to the tour. Knowing there are no walk-overs in the Funny Car class, Wilk tried to coax a solid but unspectacular tune-up out of his LRS Ford, figuring Thiel was sure to go A-to-B and likely to run a mid 4.20. Thiel did just that, running a solid 4.25, and Wilk edged him out by running a 4.213. It was the last truly close race of the day for the popular driver from Illinois.

In round two, without lane choice, Wilk lagged a bit behind Tony Pedregon at the hit, but made it up almost immediately before tearing away to a big 4.166, which tied Matt Hagan for low of the round.

In the semifinal, Wilk and Hight were neck and neck off the line, but Wilk powered to a stunning 4.145 in the heat of the afternoon, powering away to take the win with air to spare and again posting low e.t. for the round.

In the final, the LRS Ford stunned them again, putting a flawless 4.146 on the board as Beckman smoked the tires. From the No. 1 position, Wilkerson had simply dispatched some of the best Funny Cars in the world by making flawless runs in very tough conditions, and for the third consecutive year he made his way to the Winner’s Circle in Seattle.

“Three years in a row here just tells you we have a pretty good idea how to run on this track, and in this air,” Wilkerson said. “We got on a little bit of a roll, and it just seemed to come to us, really. I just got to the point where I felt we could keep putting that sort of tune-up in it, and it would make it, even on a track that was giving a lot of people fits. If they could outrun us, they could have it, but we kept outrunning them instead.”

Wilkerson was emotional after the win, which comes a full year after his last trophy. The victory was much needed, the performance very welcome, and the points practically priceless, but the boost to his team and the support of the Seattle fans were what meant the most to him.

“These fans went absolutely nuts for us, and I about got choked up going up on that stage with the trophy,” he said. “Seriously, that meant so much to me, and this track has been so good to us. But this also meant the world to my guys, and that’s a very important thing. We had such a miserable start to the season, and then when we started running better we still couldn’t find a way to win. We just kept running the wrong guys. You do that for a few months, and the guys start to put there heads down and get very frustrated.

“In Sonoma, they really got a boost and it was visible. Here, they were all so energized and so focused, the car was put together right every time, in every way. To see the looks on their faces was just great. The energy in our pit was on max all day. I’m just so happy for these guys, and they earned every bit of it. I’m thrilled for Dick Levi, everyone at LRS, my wife Krista, my kids, and all the people who mean so much to us. John Fink couldn’t be here, and we missed having him in the Winner’s Circle, too. But let me tell you, this means the world to my guys. This was a huge win, and they got a lot of frustration completely erased here. They’re the best.”

On this day, on this track, it was actually Tim Wilkerson who was the best.

SEATTLE (August 3, 2011) — If word begins to circulate that the stars are aligning over the Great Northwest, there’s a solid chance the meaning behind that statement has nothing to do with either astronomy or astrology. It might simply be a reference to the resurgent performance of Tim Wilkerson, in his Levi, Ray & Shoup Shelby Mustang Funny Car.

The newest star in a triumvirate of astral signals would be Wilk’s runner-up performance this past weekend in Sonoma, where he and Ron Capps contested one of the closest, and best, Funny Car match-ups of the day in the final round. Capps took the stripe by a nose, to the win by 14-thousandths of a second, but Wilk had already used his successful day to pick up valuable points in defense of his newly-earned No. 10 spot in the Full Throttle standings. 10 days earlier, at the start of the Denver race, Wilk was on the outside of the Countdown field looking in. After Denver, he was in the 10th spot but with a precarious 19-point lead. After Sonoma, he was 52 points up, and only 25 points out of the No. 9 position.

The other two twinkling lights in the constellation Wilkerson represent recent history, since Wilk and his LRS team are not just the defending Seattle Funny Car champs, but come into this weekend’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Northwest Nationals as the winners of the Seattle event for the last two years. In 2009, it was Wilk over Tony Pedregon in the final. Last year, in a coincidentally reversed match-up of this past weekend in Sonoma, it was Wilk over Capps in an almost equally close race. Wilk’s margin of victory over Capps in 2010 was 25-thousandths of a second.

“For whatever reason, we’ve done well in Seattle the last few years, and I’m okay with that,” Wilkerson said. “And it hasn’t just been about running strong in Seattle, because both of those two wins were part of back-to-back deals that really solidified our seasons. In ’09 we won Seattle and then went down the coast to Sonoma and won there. Last year, we won in Norwalk and then Seattle was the first race on the Western Swing, instead of the last, and we won again.

“This year, we made a lot of progress in Denver and Sonoma, there’s no doubt about that, but we haven’t accomplished anything until the math tells us we’re in the Countdown. Right now, with three regular-season races left, we’re not only not out of the woods, we’re still in a very tight spot and we have to keep pressing. We need to keep winning rounds, and Seattle is a place where we know how to do that.”

Although the famed Western Swing has gone through a variety of schedule permutations in recent years, this season’s Denver-Sonoma-Seattle set-up is a fairly common one, and it still presents tuners with a difficult trifecta of fantastically different conditions. Starting a mile high and in the heat in Denver, the tour then went west to Sonoma, where the air is thicker but the weather’s one consistent factor is that it’s always changing. Finally, the tour heads up the coast to Seattle, where the lush forests create an abundance of oxygen at a place where the track surface itself can sometimes be the biggest detriment to going fast.

“We all bring a lot of spare parts on the Swing, but sometimes you wish you could bring a spare brain, too,” said Wilkerson, who not only drives his Funny Car but tunes it as well. “It’s like the toughest entrance exam you could take, trying to tune these things in three places that almost couldn’t be any more different, all on consecutive weekends. If you pass this test, you’re onto something. Hopefully, we can do the work and have some of the right answers again this weekend. Can’t wait to get there.”

Getting there an enjoyable experience for many NHRA stars, who take to the backroads to explore the upper west coast as a means of traveling from the San Francisco Bay area to the Puget Sound region. Wilkerson and his wife Krista have been doing just that, winding their way up the coast from Northern California, through Oregon, and into Washington.

“We’re having a blast, and we always love this drive,” Wilk said. “It’s got to be one of the most beautiful parts of the country, and it’s a great way to decompress a little between these two tough races. The coastline is beautiful, the air is clear, the Redwoods are gigantic, and there are all sorts of little coastal towns to stop in and explore. On Monday, we stopped at a little airport and I went on a ride in an open-cockpit bi-plane. That was a treat, for sure. It’s been a great trip, and now we’re ready to get back on the track and do some good.”

The way these stars are aligned, the odds of doing some good might very well be stacked in Wilk’s favor, but the proof can only be found in one place. On the race track.