FUNNY CAR

Two-time Funny Car world champion Pedregon powered his Snap-on Tools Toyota Camry to the win over Tim Wilkerson to take his 32nd career victory.

Pedregon, who serves as the driver and crew chief for his team, covered the distance in 4.246 seconds at 296.96 mph to defeat Wilkerson’s trailing Levi Ray & Shoup Ford Mustang, which lost traction in the finals and ran 6.914 at 102.28. With the win, Pedregon moves into the series points lead, 37 in front of Matt Hagan.

"Today was a challenging day, dealing with the track conditions,” Pedregon said. “We thought we had it pulled back enough for the first round, but we didn't [in his 5.36 to 6.04 pedaling win against Terry Haddcok]. After that, we got the car straightened out and it ran good [with times of 4.18 4.24, and 4.24].”

This is the second career victory at Royal Purple Raceway (also 1992) and he knows that the success they are having this season wouldn’t be possible without a full team effort.

"I had to whack my crew chief just once because he went over-center a bit on the tune-up for the first round, but after that everything was good," said a smiling Pedregon, who beat Terry Haddock, Bob Tasca and Alexis DeJoria in earlier rounds. "It takes a totally different mindset to run a 4.18 and a pair of 4.20s like we did today, and we did some things to the car that we've never done before. It was a great weekend all around."

Tim Wilkerson had an almost flawless Houston race, in his Levi, Ray & Shoup Ford. He put back-to-back brilliant qualifying runs on the board, and then plowed through three rounds of eliminations better than any other Funny Car driver on the property. Then, with the drama of a short turn-around and and "live" television for the final, his tune-up finally slipped, as did his traction.

Like Charlotte before it, Houston featured only one day of qualifying when the other was rained out. Here, it was Saturday that was a wash, but Wilk's two terrific runs on Friday had him sitting pretty in the No. 2 spot.  His initial pass, a 4.161 right out of the box, was good enough for the 2nd spot, and worth two bonus points. He then came back with a 4.103 in Q2, which was also good enough for the No. 2 spot and worth another two bonus points.