Pete Berner made a memorable first trip to Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey last weekend.

As part of the 8th annual ADRL.us Shakedown at E-Town, Berner qualified his Summit Racing-backed ’09 GXP on top of a 13-car field for the inaugural Mountain Motor Pro Stock (MMPS) Challenge and went all the way to the win while also posting the four quickest quarter-mile passes in class history.

After taking part in the quickest side-by-side MMPS passes ever when he and John Pluchino each ran 6.25 in round two of qualifying, Berner briefly lost the top spot to an outstanding 6.23 by rival Cary Goforth in the third and final qualifying session Saturday night. Berner then but roared back with a 6.22 at 224.62 mph to ensure himself a bye run in the opening round of eliminations.

“That last run on Saturday night was probably our best chance to run in the teens and I clicked the thing off at six seconds into the run because I couldn’t see the finish line out there,” Berner said. “So when it went the .22 it actually should have gone an .18 or .19 on that run. I was kind of going by the way the motor sounds at the finish line when it’s accelerating so fast, so I kind of got myself messed up there.

Pete Berner made a memorable first trip to Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey last weekend.

As part of the 8th annual ADRL.us Shakedown at E-Town, Berner qualified his Summit Racing-backed ’09 GXP on top of a 13-car field for the inaugural Mountain Motor Pro Stock (MMPS) Challenge and went all the way to the win while also posting the four quickest quarter-mile passes in class history.

After taking part in the quickest side-by-side MMPS passes ever when he and John Pluchino each ran 6.25 in round two of qualifying, Berner briefly lost the top spot to an outstanding 6.23 by rival Cary Goforth in the third and final qualifying session Saturday night. Berner then but roared back with a 6.22 at 224.62 mph to ensure himself a bye run in the opening round of eliminations.

“That last run on Saturday night was probably our best chance to run in the teens and I clicked the thing off at six seconds into the run because I couldn’t see the finish line out there,” Berner said. “So when it went the .22 it actually should have gone an .18 or .19 on that run. I was kind of going by the way the motor sounds at the finish line when it’s accelerating so fast, so I kind of got myself messed up there.

“But the teens are definitely available with these motors if you get them in the right conditions,” he insisted.

Berner came oh-so-close to proving his point the next morning as he made the quickest Mountain Motor Pro Stock pass in history with a 6.20-second effort at 225.97 mph in round one of racing.

“There were a lot of cars going really fast there and we were just fortunate enough to come up with a combination that worked,” he said. “There were probably four or five cars that were capable of running in the teens if they got everything perfect.”

In round two, Elijah Morton shook hard off the line and had to lift, while Berner streaked to a 6.21 pass at 225.71 , followed by a 6.22 semi-final win at 225.41 mph over the MMPS debut of Canada’s Tony Pontieri, who got away first but couldn’t hold Berner off at the top end.

“We had a string of red lights in the last three or four races and I felt like I had given too many races away doing that and we were kind of struggling with the combination, but I think we’ve got the car fixed and I really didn’t want to take myself out on any of those runs,” Berner said of his conservative approach to the tree all day long. “I was just trying to make good runs because I figured if we could stay in the low-.20s we would be good.”

A brief rain shower and subsequent track prep before the final round left Berner perhaps even more cautious as he left with by far his worst reaction of the day (.097), though he still managed to holeshot Pluchino by .026 before going 6.28 at 224.92 mph to earn the Shakedown title.

“We went a .28 and we were kind of disappointed, but .28 was fast before we got there,” Berner said with a laugh. “It kind of headed to the left and I had to steer and get it back in the groove and lost a bunch of time doing that, so to still run a .28 at 224 miles an hour is pretty cool, I guess.”

With just one Mountain Motor Pro Stock Association (MMPSA) event left in the series’ inaugural five-race season, Berner takes a slim two-point lead over Goforth into Tulsa Raceway Park Oct. 15-16, and one week later he’ll participate in the ADRL’s championship-deciding Extreme Pro Stock Battle for the Belts at Ennis, Texas. The Shakedown win is exactly the catalyst Berner feels his team needs heading toward their two biggest weekends of the year.

“It was fantastic; it’s a pretty phenomenal weekend when you can do things like that. This one in particular it was like the moon and the stars were all lined up. We had pretty near perfect conditions, an excellent track to race on—Eddie Krawiec and his guys really put together a phenomenal race surface—the car was working great and my Summit team made all the right calls all weekend long,” Berner said.

“It gives us good momentum. We’ve got the car right and I feel like we have the best team in the business. We’re really good under pressure and we try to bring pressure on everybody else without putting it on ourselves and I think if we can just make good runs we’ll be okay. I mean, the competition is very tough, there are a lot of great teams and great drivers out there, but I think if we just take care of our own stuff we can come out on top.”

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