DRO: Did you learn a lot from your passes on Thursday and earlier today that helped you set the car up for the record?

Rector: The one this morning I did, but yesterday we unloaded and had problems. It was mechanical and had nothing to do with the racetrack or the atmosphere. We would've had the same problems if we had been running IHRA legal or NHRA legal. But we found it yesterday and he and I corrected it and we worked to late last night to get it ready.

I knew going out there this morning, I told Mitch to pull his buckles tight, 'cause I knew we were either gonna' haul ass or not go down there at all. Then when it ran a 6.02 everybody got their hopes up, but I told them, if this was easy, everybody would've done done it already.

As far as the run itself, I knew as soon as it went in second gear, if the motor didn't come apart it was gone. That's probably the happiest I've ever been behind a racecar.

DRO: You talked about finding a problem. Can you describe what you worked on?

Rector: No, I'd rather not get into that point at all.

DRO: No problem. But can you describe how the weight change helped your efforts?

Rector: You know the car weighed about 2,540 and if we'd have been at IHRA or NHRA scales it would've been the same. I mean we figured it would be 2,520 or 2,530 all along, and that's about a couple hundred pounds light because when you run at a legal race you can't go through at 2,700, so it was actually about 170 or 180 pounds off what we usually run. We'd been a .14 legal, and when we ran that .14 I said we could probably run a .12 if conditions were right.

DRO: What do you think you could run today at legal weight?

Rector: Probably about a 6.14 or a 6.15, in these conditions.

DRO: In good conditions, how far away are we from an IHRA/NHRA-legal five-second run?

Rector: Ummmmm, at 2,700 pounds, I'd say a lot of years. It upsets the cars, for one thing. Carrying the 200 pounds, it's not the horsepower that holds it back; it wants to smoke the tires before it moves the car. A whole lot of people ran into that problem last year. And track temperature means everything to a legal Pro Mod today. A hundred degrees and it don't wanna' move, but at 90 degrees you can run 6.15s. It's a fine line and Mitch probably would've won the championship last year if we had learned that earlier. We went out early two or three races in a row after being number-one qualifier, simply because it didn't want to move on Sunday.

Now, Sunday's a whole different day. I give him a racecar that'll run mid-6.20s or better most of the time, and if we win that's great. If not, we'll come back on a different day, but I won all my races being consistent and that's how we're gonna' run this one.

DRO: Are you excited about running this year strictly as a tuner for Mitch and Mark Thomas?

Rector: Yes, I am. And you know, the goal for both is the same: we want to win a world championship for Mark in Alcohol Funny Car and a Pro Mod championship for Mitch and Radiac. Nothing's changed. Like I told Dave Pryor, I'm not giving anyone any guarantees, other than nobody will work any harder at it than I will, and that's the way we've always done it.