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.”