Marstons Mills, MA -July 25, 2012-Jay Blake’s Permatex/Follow A Dream team
was eliminated by Frank Manzo at the Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series event at
New England Dragway – just like last year. Only this time, it wasn’t in the
Top Alcohol Funny Car final but rather in the first round of eliminations.

The recent spate of bad fortune followed the team to the crew’s home track,
where driver Todd Veney and tuner Tom Howell were scheduled to arrive early
on Thursday for a full day of testing. Bad weather cancelled all early
flights to Boston, and both Veney, who flew in from Indianapolis, and
Howell, who flew in from Florida, where he was attending his father’s
funeral, didn’t arrive until Thursday night.

“We really could have used that day,” Veney said. “Tom had a bunch of ideas
he wanted to try, the whole crew would have been there, and some of the
things that went wrong it qualifying would have happened in testing, when it
wouldn’t have mattered as much.”

A bad spark plug kept the car on seven cylinders in the first qualifying
session and Veney ran just a 5.92 – a full three-tenths of a second from the
track-record 5.62 the team established there in 2010. Violent shake in the
only other qualifying session set off the fire bottles and relegated Veney
to the No. 7 qualifying spot, which set up the first-round match with No. 2
qualifier Manzo, who eventually won the event.