(Ian Tocher photo)

“The round before we got lucky. We backed up from the burnout and when I went to pull forward the car just cut off. Well, it’s a manual fuel pump on that fuel injection and when it gets low on pressure it just cuts off, so I switched over to the electrical pump that we use to start the engine with and left it on and we made the run like that.

“So when we came back we put a new fuel pump on. And we’d been fighting the car, it’s been real sluggish down low all weekend, wouldn’t accelerate; the motor looked like it wanted to hurt itself, but it wouldn’t and I couldn’t really figure it out,” Smith said. “And now I know because when we put that new fuel pump on there it accelerated no problem through low gear and went out there and blew the tires off completely.

“So I think the fuel pump may have been bad the whole time because we had been running mid-.990s (to 60 feet) and it went out that time and ran a .981 and when it went into second it just had way too much tire speed.”

So that left only Hoover and his battered Camaro left to face Castellana, who was going after his second-straight NHRA event win. Unfortunately, Castellana left ..018 too soon, handing the race to Hoover, who made a solid 5.95 pass at 240.51 mph to seal the deal.

“We caught a few lucky breaks today because a lot of nitrous cars couldn’t get down that right lane, the lane I wrecked in, but we’ll take it,” Hoover said. “I’m real happy for our team owner, Paul Trussel. We’re just a small, one-car team out here, but I’ll tell you, there’s no one who puts more into this deal than he does and I’m just real happy to get the win for him.”

Round five of the NHRA Get Screened America Pro Mod Drag Racing Series is scheduled for June 2-5, as part of the 42nd annual NHRA SuperNationals at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ.

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