'SO WEAK IT WADDLED LIKE A DUCK': WILKERSON'S IMPALA BIG QUESTION MARK

Funny Car driver Tim Wilkerson is having an out-of-body experience.

His Levi, Ray & Shoup Chevy Impala body is parked this Sunday at Infineon Raceway, for he didn't qualify for the Fram-Autolite NHRA Nationals. And the culprit, he's pretty sure, is . . . the body.

'SO WEAK IT WADDLED LIKE A DUCK': WILKERSON'S IMPALA BIG QUESTION MARK

Funny Car driver Tim Wilkerson is having an out-of-body experience.

His Levi, Ray & Shoup Chevy Impala body is parked this Sunday at Infineon Raceway, for he didn't qualify for the Fram-Autolite NHRA Nationals. And the culprit, he's pretty sure, is . . . the body.

He smoked the tires on all four qualifying passes this weekend, and that is soemthing he rarely does even once in a weekend. In Friday's first session, even though he dropped a cylinder around half-track, Wilkerson was able to make it down the quarter-mile, posting a 5.076-second elapsed time.  But things changed in the evening session. He smoked the tires at the hit of the throttle, and that problem continued to plague him throughout the weekend.

"We have a dilemma," Wilkerson said. "The car smoked the tires on every run. And no matter what we did, it wouldn't have anything to do with it. There's no way it should have smoked them, because it was weak. It was so weak it just waddled down through there like a duck."

And he has some high-powered help in trying to find the problem. Wilkerson indicated his car needs to go on a diet.

"We don't know what's happened for sure but we think it's the body," he said. "Roush [Roush Racing], who makes all the bodies, took ours after Seattle. After the way Tommy's (Johnson Jr.'s) came apart in Seattle they wanted to fix it. So they strengthened the front end and in doing so, they added weight. 

"They said it wasn't much, but it's 22 pounds heavier. So, we think the car is out of balance.  It's so heavy; you can hardly pick it up.  The added weight probably ruined the integrity of the car.  It couldn't transfer the weight properly on the run, so it smoked the tires," Wilkerson said.

"It sure made for a tough weekend," he said. "It made us look like we didn't know what we were doing.  But I really don't think it was us. When we get home we're going to take it apart from stem to stern to make sure there is nothing mechanically wrong.  And we'll scale the body.  If it's the problem, we'll have to decide what to do with it. We can move the fire bottles to the back, if we want to add weight back there. There's a couple of things we can do. We'll just have to wait until we get home and see what we discover."