Wilk Aims To Earn An "A" On E-Town Exam
Posted by: Team Manager Bob Wilber
ENGLISHTOWN, N.J. (June 2, 2015) -- Three races ago, when Tim Wilkerson lost a heartbreaker in round one at Houston, he left Texas with a 3-6 record while also being mired in 12th place on the Mello Yello points sheet. Now, as he heads to New Jersey for this weekend's NHRA Summernationals, he owns a won/lost record of 8-7 and he sits eighth in the standings. That would be classified as a rapid improvement.
The oddity of that resurgence is that Wilk's Levi, Ray & Shoup Shelby Mustang didn't just flip a switch and turn into a winner when it reached Atlanta, where he dominated all weekend and picked up his first victory in nearly four years. The LRS Ford had been running strong since Gainesville, but it seemed cursed with a string of hard luck losses, whether they were of the 10,000th of a second variety (semifinal loss to Ron Capps in Gainesville) or of the "I've never seen that before" sort (round one at the 4-Wide Nationals in Charlotte, where Matt Hagan timed out and Wilk never left the line). Whatever the scenario, it simply seemed like Wilk and his young team had a car with which they could win, but not the breaks they needed to make that happen.
"It was just one thing after another, and it was pretty frustrating," Wilk said. "It seemed like weird things were happening every time we came up to the line, but for four or five races there we were as quick and as consistent as anyone. So, in Atlanta we just flat beat everyone and never let the breaks get to us, and that was really what the doctor ordered.
"We went to Topeka after that, and as everyone probably knows it was a race for the ages, in terms of conditions and performance. We had never gone quicker than 4.01 before, but we got our first three in Topeka, by jumping all the way up to 3.97, and then we ran another one in round one. We got nipped in round two, but that felt more like just getting beat by a very fast car with a great driver, rather than a bad break. Del Worsham just outran us."
That pair of threes in Topeka raised more than a few eyebrows across the sport. Wilk has long been known as a "hot weather winner" thanks to his uncanny ability to tame the same hot tracks that flummox other tuners, and even his previous best of 4.013 seemed to indicate that those eye-popping three-second runs were not in his playbook. Until now.
"I hope I'm still a good hot-weather tuner, to tell you the truth, because it's June now and we're going to have plenty of them," Wilk said. "I don't think running in the threes at Topeka changes who we are or how we race, and I plan to keep it that way. It just showed that when it's all there on the table we can run with anybody. It was a record-setting race, with seven cars qualified in the threes, but we weren't just part of that pack. We were qualified second. That's outrunning a whole bunch of great teams, and we were proud we could do that.
"Now, we'll just move on to Englishtown and see what the track gives us. Every run is different, and every day is usually different, so you have to approach it like 'What can we do on this track, on this run?' rather than 'How fast can we go?'. It's pretty hard to go any faster than the track wants you to go, and we've usually been fairly good at figuring that number out. If Englishtown only wants us to run 4.10, we'll try to win the race with a string of them. Look at it this way, in Atlanta we won the semifinal running a clean 4.16 and in Topeka we lost in the second round running 4.00, so it's all about what the track will let you have. Plus, hopefully now the breaks are going to be with us."
Old Bridge Township Raceway Park always presents a stern test to the Funny Car class, but it also has a reputation for being a fair and equal race track. Wilk's sole goal for this weekend is finding the edge and staying on the good side of it. If he does, the round-wins will keep coming, and he might just ace another exam.
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