Chip King

Inexplicably, the turbocharger racers who have been demonstrating a performance advantage over the nitrous and supercharged cars, Brad Personett, Roger Burgess, and Melanie Troxel, all failed to qualify at Norwalk. But the turbo racers did manage to set the Top Speed mark from a racer not known for speed records when Chip King’s turbocharged Hemi-powered ’69 Dodge Daytona ripped off a 5.968/253.28 while qualifying in the 10th position.

But the turbo racers did manage to set the Top Speed mark from a racer not known for speed records when Chip King’s turbocharged Hemi-powered ’69 Dodge Daytona ripped off a 5.968/253.28 while qualifying in the 10th position.
 
Part of the reason for the poor qualifying by the turbo cars can be traced to cool weather and a lot of time spent in the staging lanes waiting to make one of only two qualifying passes the Pro Mods got at the rain-shortened event. 

For the first qualifying session air temperature was 67 degrees, adjusted altitude was 2,265 feet, and the track temperature was 74 degrees.

One of the racers using turbocharged power (who asked not be identified because he didn’t want his peers to think he was making excuses) said that on his first qualifying lap he waited so long in the lanes that his engine temp when he fired it in the lanes was just 80 degrees.

“The combination of a cold motor and alcohol fuel won’t allow a turbocharged engines to make power. I saw quite a few turbocharged cars that couldn’t even do a burnout in the first round because they were down on power,” he said.

The first round of Pro Mod eliminations Saturday night showed just how tough the competition is in the Get Screened America Pro Mod series. If a car couldn’t make a five-second pass it was trailered. Every winner in the first round of eliminations made a five-second pass. 

Castallana, one of the Al-Anabi nitrous cars, had Low ET of the round with a 5.900 win against Chuck Cheeseman, who made his competition debut in Pro Modified at the Norwalk event. Cheeseman, a career Alcohol Funny Car racer, recently made the switch to a blown doorslammer and, like most of his peers, found that going from a center-steer, non-suspended car to a suspended, left-hand drive car isn’t all that easy.  He had trouble getting his car stopped on at least one of his laps, but got progressively more comfortable as the race carried on.