Tim Wilkerson had troubles as he tried to leave the starting line. His glove got caught on the brake handle and he couldn’t get it off. He drove down most of the track one handed, which is not good in a Funny Car, especially a seven cylinder one. ‘With all these new bars we’ve got in the car, the brake lever is kind of bent over and it got stuck on the corner of my glove,” he said.
“All and all, the first round of eliminations was right where we wanted to be at,” Antron Brown said. “I got the first-round jitters out of the way.”
he staging lanes at Firebird looked like a “Fiberglass Forest!” Credit for that phrase goes to the late, great Steve Evans