Update as of 10/18/99
Shreveport, La- What a fun weekend at the Mopar Parts IHRA World Finals !! It was a long week as it began on Tuesday parking our rig. We then found our pit space on Wednesday and teched our car on Thursday. After passing through tech, we looked forward to making some very good runs during Friday qualifying. However, that is not what we experienced.
The first two runs produced very poor elapsed times. We had really expected the car to run the best that it ever had. After having two qualifying passes on Friday, we went back to our pit area scratching our heads. We decided to make some changes to our squirters in the carbs. Low and behond it did the trick as we wound up running 7.75 at 174 mph on our final qualifying pass Saturday morning. Even with such a good ET we only qualified number 32 in the 32 car feild. This matched us up with newly crowned IHRA Top Dragster World champion and weekend pit neighbor, Benny Ulmer Sr. It turned out to be a great race even though we ended up on the losing end.
That was the most scared I have been all year during a race, said Ulmer. The Tompkins Racing dragster had the Kick Booty entry covered going towards the top end. Ulmer hit the brakes and so did driver Tommy Tompkins, only to break out by two hundreths of a second handing the win to Ulmer.
It was about to be a really quick run. I feel that it would have been the quickest and fastest run by the car, said crew cheif Tom Tompkins Jr. We now feel that we have a car that can be competitive so we will more than likely race at the eighth mile event to be held next weekend at Red River Raceway. We hope to see you there !!
