TODD DRIVES TOYOTA TO FUNNY CAR FINAL AT NHRA FOUR-WIDE NATIONALS
CHARLOTTE, NC – Competing in just his sixth Funny Car race, J.R. Todd drove his DHL Toyota Camry to the 
final round on the way to an eventual third-place finish at the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals at the zMAX Dragway in Charlotte, N.C., Sunday.
Todd, who placed fourth overall in last year’s Top Fuel championship before making the move to Funny Car this season, defeated Courtney Force and Jonnie Lindberg in the first round and Matt Hagan and Tim Wilkerson in round two to advance to today’s final, which was eventually won by Ron Capps.
“Honestly, we had a lot of luck today,” said Todd. “The good thing is our DHL Toyota Camry is going down the track and giving us some data to go from to keep making this car better. We’re going to keep chipping away at it and we’ll get it. We’ll start qualifying better and putting ourselves in a better position for race day. We’re headed in the right direction, now we need to go to Atlanta and come out swinging on Friday night and, hopefully, qualify well and then work on our race set-up on Saturday.”
Del Worsham, Cruz Pedregon and Chad Head all were eliminated in the opening round after being unable to make a clean pass on a hot track.
In Top Fuel, both Doug Kalitta and Antron Brown qualified in the top three and each advanced to the second round today before being eliminated in the same run. Kalitta defeated Terry McMillen, Brittany Force and Chris Karamesines in winning his quad, while Brown dispatched Tony Schumacher, Ike Maier and Pat Dakin in pacing his four-car group. Neither Shawn Langdon nor Troy Coughlin Jr., were able to make a clean pass in their opening runs and were eliminated.
“The first round went well and we were able to do exactly what we wanted to do and we felt good,” said Brown. “But, the track was tricky this weekend. We just tried to keep up with it. We learned so much from this race today to take into Atlanta next week. I feel it’s going to be for the betterment of this team. With that said, it was just a shame to go out in round two. We just couldn’t get one lucky round. But this team is driven and we don’t want any lucky rounds, we want to earn it. We’ll suck it up and take it to Atlanta and just do what we do right now. It’s making us get more aggressive and even hungrier. We know what we need to do.”
The NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series finishes off a three-races-in-three-weeks stretch next weekend with the Lucas Oil Nationals at the Atlanta Dragway, May 5-7.
