CHEVROLET RACING IN NATIONAL HOT ROD ASSOCIATION
LUCAS OIL NHRA SOUTHERN NATIONALS
ATLANTA DRAGWAY AT COMMERCE, GEORGIA
POST-RACE DRIVER QUOTES
SUNDAY, MAY 7, 2017
BO BUTNER, JIM BUTNER AUTO, BUTNER AUTO SALES CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 1 qualifier; earned second career Pro Stock victory; first two-time winner of the season; all seven Pro Stock events have been won by Chevrolet Camaro SS):
Q: WHAT DOES THIS WIN, FOLLOWING YOUR WIN TWO WEEKS AGO, MEAN TO YOU?
BO BUTNER: “I have to thank KB Racing for giving me one fast race car. I have gained a lot of confidence this year, especially on the Tree. It’s a very tight field among the Chevrolets in Pro Stock, so to win two times in seven races is an accomplishment that I don’t take lightly.”
Q: THE KB TEAM HAS GIVEN YOU A CAR THAT CAN COMPETE WITH ANYBODY.
“This is a shout out to (team owners) Ken and Judy (Black), (KB Racing teammates) Jason (Line) and Greg (Anderson) because they gave me this opportunity. It’s bene amazing. They want me to win as much as I want to win. Maybe more. Jason has taught me a lot in the last few races since I won. Of course, it was a little downer last week in Charlotte, but this is a good rebound.”
TOP FUEL
BRITTANY FORCE, JOHN FORCE RACING, MONSTER ENERGY CHEVROLET DRAGSTER (No. 16 qualifier; fell in first round): “It doesn’t matter if we’re in the No. 1 spot or the No. 16 spot, we want that ‘1’ at the end of the day. The Monster team, they’re fighters – all of us are. We’re going for that championship in the long run. We’ve gotten off to a rough start, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t turn out to be a good ending. I felt confident going in to today. I’ve got an awesome team behind me, awesome crew chiefs in Brian Husen and Alan Johnson. These guys have been hustling, and they have not stopped. The hauled the car to Indy in between races and getting it back here in time, I’m proud of them. I know how much they put into this car. We’re going to end up in the winner’s circle soon enough. It’s only a matter of time. We may be struggling, but we’ll claw our way out and move on up and end up in the winner’s circle.”
FUNNY CAR:
COURTNEY FORCE, JOHN FORCE RACING, ADVANCE AUTO PARTS CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 1 qualifier; fell in quarterfinals): ““I think our Advance team has done a phenomenal job, considering we were forced to run a spare car this weekend. To be able to make a few solid passes and then get that No. 1 spot – at the time setting a track-record ET – it’s a great feeling. The fact that my team and my crew chiefs, Dan Hood and Ronnie Thompson, have been able to get this thing put together and ready to go and to be out-running the field in qualifying definitely shows what kind of a team I have. We were able to get that first-round win, and then we had a tough matchup in the second round against Robert Hight, my teammate. We saw that he actually stole that track record from us in the first round, so we knew we had to give it our all. We didn’t have lane choice over him; we were stuck over in that left lane. If we wanted to run better than his .88, we had to really give it our all and unfortunately in that left lane our car spun the tires when we hit that bump down track, and it was game over for us.”
ROBERT HIGHT, JOHN FORCE RACING, AUTO CLUB OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 9 qualifier; fell in semifinals): “Awesome runs early on. We just didn’t back it down enough in the semis. We keep doing this and the wins are going to come. We’re working hard, everyone is doing their job and we’re racing aggressive. That’s how (crew chief) Jimmy Prock races. I really thought this was the day, though. I’m driving good, but we’ll move on to the next one. I we get conditions right at Topeka, you might see the first 3.70 (second) Funny Car.”
JOHN FORCE, JOHN FORCE RACING, PEAK COOLANT & MOTOR OIL CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 5 qualifier; fell in quarterfinals): “We know the road to the championship. We’ve been there before. Our sponsors believe in us because we know how to produce. We turned the corner, we believe, in the parts that we need to win. We need some time to run these cars to figure them out. We’re fast. The point is we don’t have consistency. If we find that we’ll be OK.”
PRO STOCK:
ERICA ENDERS, ELITE MOTORSPORTS, LUPE TORTILLA ELITE CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 6 qualifier; fell in final): “Today didn’t start necessarily as we had planned. I went to fire this morning for warm-up and just turning the starter over I could hear that something just wasn’t right. We pulled the valve covers and had to swap (engine) before first round and then hurt a motor in first round and had to swap the motor for second round. For the performance gains that all my guys at Elite Performance have gotten with these Chevy powerplants is pretty awesome. This is just the tip of the iceberg; there is a lot to be optimistic about. The really cool part is they know we are here now.”
JEG COUGHLIN JR., ELITE MOTORSPORTS, JEGS.COM ELITE CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 4 qualifier; fell in semifinals): “We had a great Chevy Camaro this weekend. The whole Elite Motorsports team has been pecking away at the competition. The last couple of races we’ve fallen into a nice kind of groove in being consistent and fast. We had a great car today and in the third round we knew Bo (Butner) would be tough.”
TANNER GRAY, GRAY MOTORSPORTS, VALVOLINE CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 7 qualifier, fell in semifinals): ““I really enjoyed the rivalry between my dad (Shane Gray) and I in the first round. It made the nerves of racing first round not so noticeable. What made it even better is I came out on top. My guys gave me a really fast car and I just got left on. I’m excited to get in the 2017 Chevrolet Camaro (for Topeka). I like the body style and it’s a really nice car. I interested in testing and see how it works out, and hopefully it all drives out OK so we can take it to Topeka. It was good to go to the semifinals, and now I just have to get past that. All in all, not a bad weekend.”
DREW SKILLMAN, RAY SKILLMAN AUTOSPORTS, RAY SKILLMAN CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 2 qualifier; fell in quarterfinals): “We unfortunately didn’t make a good enough run in the first round to get lane choice for Round 2. The car was real loose and I missed a shift by a little bit, so that killed us. Tanner (Gray) is great on the tree; he was .022 and I was .033, so I have some work to do there. We haven’t been home in three weeks, so we’ll go home to try to get everything back together.”
JASON LINE, KB RACING, SUMMIT RACING EQUIPMENT CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 3 qualifier; fell in quarterfinals): “”I lost the only way that I could, on a holeshot, and that means I was faster than the other guy. We didn’t run great this weekend, but we didn’t run terrible with my Summit Racing Chevrolet Camaro by any means. The KB Racing team was able to put Bo Butner’s car on the pole, so even though we had a couple of snafus and the rain threw us a little wrench there, there are certainly positives that we take away from this weekend. One of the positives is that we finished this three in a row and now we get to go home and work on our stuff. You’re going to have days like this, but it’s just one of those things. We move on from here and push forward.”
CHRIS MCGAHA, HARLOW SAMMONS RACING, HARLOW SAMMONS OF ODESSA CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 5 qualifier, fell in quarterfinals): “You create your own luck out here with performance, and we’ve definitely have had the performance the past two weekends. We still have a few little issues to work out, but the performance, yes. I have to miss Topeka because I promised a little girl I would go to her dance recital. I can’t miss that, and we had a few plans anyway. I’ll be back at Norwalk.”
VINCENT NOBILE, MOUNTAIN VIEW RACING, MOUNTAIN VIEW TIRE CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 8 qualifier; fell in quarterfinals): “We were on the short end of the stick (losing by one-thousandth of a second), but a good race. We made a bunch of changes before that round to our car, and it actually made a pretty good run for what we did. We’re happy with that. We’ve been having issues all year, and it seems like the move we just made is putting us in the right direction. I think we’re going to try to test before Topeka and continue to go in the direction we just tried and fine tune it.”
GREG ANDERSON, SUMMIT RACING, SUMMIT RACING EQUIPMENT CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 12 qualifier; fell in first round): “It got off on the wrong foot (Saturday) and I made a mistake on the first qualifying run or I would have certainly qualified a whole lot better. I didn’t make a good run (Saturday night) so that put us in a hole and had to run a really fast car in the first round. You have to beat them all sometime. The bottom line is I just didn’t make a good run first round; we lost by a hundredth of a second. Just didn’t quite execute this weekend. I made a mistake in qualifying that I don’t ever make and learned a lesson from it. We’ll write this one off. (With a week break) we are lacking performance with our race cars. They’re not quite fast enough right now. There are cars that can run as good or better than us and we don’;t like that. We’ll go home and use the week to try to find some performance. It’s hard to win out here, especially without a performance advantage. We just need to find a way to get that performance advantage back and win like we used to last year. That’s the goal and we have a week to work on it.”
SHANE GRAY, GRAY MOTORSPORTS, VALVOLINE CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 10 qualifier, fell in first round): “(Racing his son Tanner for first time in eliminations) It was awesome. It was probably one of the most fun rounds of racing I’ve ever had. We had a problem with the clutch in the car. Something came apart; it just didn’t even leave the starting line. Maybe we’ll get to run each other again sometime and we can get this car from A to B and give him a race. If all goes well, (Tanner) will race the ’17 Camaro in Topeka. We’ll try to test with it this week. I won’t be entered in Topeka. I’ll go and watch Tanner. I think I’ll go to Epping (New Hampshire).”
SHANE TUCKER, TUCKER RACING, AUZMET ARCHITECTURAL CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 13 qualifier; fell in first round): “When you’re running a limited schedule, every run counts. We don’t test either, so you really put yourself behind the eight ball because you really need every run you can get out here. We had a game plan coming in to the weekend. We just finished our new motor and didn’t have a chance to dyno it properly, so we were going to use it for Q2 through 4. As it turned out, we had to put it in for first round because we bent an intake valve on our first motor. We had a positive weekend all around. I’ll fly back (to Australia) to spend some time with family. I’ll take the Kansas race off and be ready for Epping (New Hampshire).”
JOHN GAYDOSH, GAYDOSH RACING, GAYDOSH PERFORMANCE CHEVROLET CAMARO SS (No. 14 qualifier; fell in first round): “We had a good weekend and saw some performance gains. We made a good run in the first round (.002 reaction time against Jason Line) and leave here feeling good with our program. We won’t be at Topeka because we lack the funding, but will be at Epping (New Hampshire) with hopefully more power.”