Funny Car points leader Tim Wilkerson took part in a national NHRA teleconference to assess his thoughts and plans for the final two
events remaining in the six-race NHRA Playoff, the Countdown to 1: the ACDelco Las Vegas NHRA Nationals next weekend and the Auto Club Finals November 13-16 at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona. The following is a transcript from that press conference.

Q: Tim, you've been one of the great stories this year in NHRA if not in all of sports. You've won more races this season, six – including two of the four playoff races – than you'd won in your first 12 years of racing. Of course, you're in the points lead now for the first time in your career as well. Are the last two races business as usual for you, or are you doing a little scoreboard watching, watching what the drivers behind you are doing?

Wilkerson: I'm trying not to watch what they're doing. Let's put it that way. I think it's hard not to. You try to just do your own deal and whatever happens happens. That's what we've done all year. I heard Jeg talk about being on offense. I remember talking with (NAPA crew chief Ed) Ace (McCulloch) and (NAPA driver Ron) Capps in the past, when they were doing so well. It come down to the last few races, they ended up getting beat by a little bit. I believe that's exactly what happened to them. They started playing defense. Let's just run good enough, let's get in the show.

Funny Car points leader Tim Wilkerson took part in a national NHRA teleconference to assess his thoughts and plans for the final two events remaining in the six-race NHRA Playoff, the Countdown to 1: the ACDelco Las Vegas NHRA Nationals next weekend and the Auto Club Finals November 13-16 at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona. The following is a transcript from that press conference.

 

 

Q: Tim, you've been one of the great stories this year in NHRA if not in all of sports. You've won more races this season, six – including two of the four playoff races – than you'd won in your first 12 years of racing. Of course, you're in the points lead now for the first time in your career as well. Are the last two races business as usual for you, or are you doing a little scoreboard watching, watching what the drivers behind you are doing?

Wilkerson: I'm trying not to watch what they're doing. Let's put it that way. I think it's hard not to. You try to just do your own deal and whatever happens happens. That's what we've done all year. I heard Jeg talk about being on offense. I remember talking with (NAPA crew chief Ed) Ace (McCulloch) and (NAPA driver Ron) Capps in the past, when they were doing so well. It come down to the last few races, they ended up getting beat by a little bit. I believe that's exactly what happened to them. They started playing defense. Let's just run good enough, let's get in the show.

But we're not going to do that. We're going to run as hard as we can. I know we haven't qualified as well as we had been the last four or five races. But if you look at the qualifying shows, like the last race, we run (a 4.079). There were five (4.07s) and we were the slowest .07. We really didn't qualify that bad. It just didn't look that good on the piece of paper.

It's been an exciting year. There's no doubt about that. We're just going to keep our nose down and hopefully we can get some help from some of the other cars, take one of those other hot dogs out before I have to get to them.

Q: Tony, to clinch your fifth straight and sixth overall championship is qualify at Las Vegas. Talk about this record-setting season and the bigger picture, which is with the six POWERade Series championships, you would join Kenny Bernstein, Warren Johnson and Dave Schultz for third place on the all-time NHRA career championships list.

Schumacher: I think it's truly unbelievable. Just being in the position to win five in a row, it's a blessing. We've probably assembled the greatest team, and I know there's other records out there that are a little better. Greg Anderson winning 15 in a season. I'm sure they had a wonderful team. This team is just absolutely dynamite. They've done things and won races when we weren't running a 10th of a second ahead over and over again. They're good quality, hard-working people with good morals. It's just been so fantastic to get buckled in that car knowing that these guys built it and go after these records. The records just kept falling this year.

It's been great. That's a great list to be on. With our team breaking up at the end of the year (crew chief Alan Johnson is leaving to form his own Top Fuel and Funny Car teams), we're trying to get every bit out that we can. We'd like to win the next two races and set the bar so high that it's impossible to break. I mean, the records we broke this year, I'm sure years ago people thought were impossible to break, too. That's what records are meant for. In junior dragsters, there are people that are going to be setting their sights on these records we're setting right now. There will be different crew chiefs and teams. Just want to set that bar awful high.

Q. Tim, when you got your first win of the season here in April, you said you might have had an advantage because your car was always one of the heaviest, and with the added weight, it didn't affect you as much. Five wins later, what is your excuse?

Wilkerson: Well, I think the word "excuse" was what the other guys were using (laughter). The word "reason" is what I'm trying to use. I appreciate that. At that time it my have been a good reason and excuse for the rest of them. Hundreds of runs later, I think they've used that one up a little too long.

Now, I think you're right. As my grandma used to say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. That's our deal. We have a good car. I think we've proven that through the year here. Not to beat our chests, I don't do a lot of that. You guys know me, I'm not a guy who beats my chest about how good we are. I do have a terrific group of guys. They've made my car good. They've allowed me to make runs with me being the guy that has to make a mistake. And that's how we've won races this year.

We've just had an extremely good, consistent car. As I've said in the past, my driving's probably the weakest part of it. But we're proud to be in the position we're in.

Q. Are there any advantages to being a one-car team? Everybody talks about the multi-car teams out there having a big advantage. You've kind of destroyed that.

Wilkerson: I think the only advantage we have to being a one-car team is we don't get lost in all the mumbo-jumbo. We're a smaller circus than the Schumachers or the Forces. We don't have all the politics of four crew chiefs. We don't have 20 blowers to pick from. We don't have all the five different sponsors. This one didn't quite get taken care of. You know what I mean? I know that sounds facetious, bass-akwards, but it's not. That stuff goes on. I think people that have all those cars know that. Force has asked me a hundred times how come I can whoop him this year. I don't really know what the answer is totally, but I believe that having a single-car team, sometimes you can focus on your car and the few sponsors that you have, and you can take better care of them because you don't have all the politics. You know what I mean? I know sometimes with multi-car teams, there's some clashing that goes on in the different crew chiefs. It's just the way it is. That's the way it happens.

I think if I only had four dragsters instead of two, he would see some of that, too. That's just part of it, in my opinion.

Q. Tim, you mentioned Team Force. I think your record against Force cars is 15-5 this year. Twice you've beaten three of them to get to a title. Is some of that motivation, if not for you, for the crew?

Wilkerson: Oh, yeah. Of course, it is. Nothing worse than seeing one of them guys first round. That's happened to us a couple times where, you know, we took them a little lightly there at Charlotte and then lately we haven't.

But they're, of course, great motivation. I guess you hit the nail on the head. When you have to race that caliber of organization, and to go up there and even think you could run with them first off, and second off that you can even imagine to beat them, would be a feather in anybody's hat. For us to have done that a couple times this year, yeah, my guys, they strut around like some peacocks over there when that happened. But that's good. That's good for them. Because I've always said, everybody out here needs to win a race. I mean, the crew's whole atmosphere is based around how the car runs. Their attitude is based on the ET slip. When you can have a crew that does well, Tony even hit on that, his guys do such a terrific job with their car, it seems like the better the car runs, the better job they do. I don't know if it's psychological for the crew chief to believe that, but I believe it. I see it in my guys. When our car runs bad, they're pissy-acting, they're not having fun. It's not the same. When things go well, I get them all together and say, 'See, this is what we can do. When you guys pay attention to your job, let me be the guy that makes the mistake, this is what we can do.' We have been fortunate enough to get that job done a few times this year.

Q. Tim with your hometown of Springfield giving you a day of honor, if you win this championship, are they going to give you a key to the city?

Wilkerson: That would be good. I asked them if I could renege everyone's real estate taxes for one day. They told me they wouldn't let me be the guy of the day if I ever asked that again. We just had another kid, Justin Allgaier, win the Nationwide championship here in town. Now the pressure's on me to bring the Funny Car title home to Springfield. Hopefully we can get that done. That would be fun, though. I think it would be a good day for all of us.