Patience is a virtue in most cases, but for crew chief Brian Corradi it isn’t – at least when it comes to the safety of his driver.

Corradi, crew chief for Mike Ashley’s Gotham City Racing team, along with co-crew chief Mark Oswald, have retained the services of Dr. Rory Davis as well as Chuck Haase to test the safety of their chassis.

Corradi said they’ve delivered a chassis already to Haase for a stress analysis this week.

“They are just testing to see where we can improve on it,” Corradi said.

John Force is at least one team that has said they plan on building their chassis in-house. Corradi said Ashley’s Torco Race Fuels-sponsored Gotham City Racing doesn’t plan to take their program that far, at least not at this stage in the game.

Mike Ashley crew chiefs Brian Corradi and Mark Oswald step forward with chassis safety testing …

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Patience is a virtue in most cases, but for crew chief Brian Corradi it isn’t – at least when it comes to the safety of his driver.

Corradi said they’ve delivered a chassis already to Haase for a stress analysis this week.

“They are just testing to see where we can improve on it,” Corradi said.

John Force is at least one team that has said they plan on building their chassis in-house. Corradi said Ashley’s Torco Race Fuels-sponsored Gotham City Racing doesn’t plan to take their program that far, at least not at this stage in the game.

“If we can help to make these cars safer as a whole, for the class, we will,” Corradi said. “That’s our goal. We have no interest in building our own cars at this time.”

Corradi said it was necessity that has pushed his team to seek answers.

What prompted us to do this is we aren’t getting any answers from anybody. Nobody is doing it for us, so we are going to have to do it ourselves. That’s how we look at it. Nobody has come over here telling us what we should to and basically we are under the assumption that people can use this information. Dr. Davis is going to help us out. - Mike Ashley Crew Chief Brian Corradi

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Corradi said that Ashley is having new chassis built at this time under the guidance of Murf McKinney using normalized tubing.

“The new spec will be .095, inch-and-a-half tubing bottom and top, normalized,” Corradi said. “It is basically the same car with a heavier upper and lower frame rail. We are going to start there.”

The NHRA has legalized a new chassis specification for the Top Fuel division and labeled it as SFI Spec 2.3N and it will become effective as of April 21, 2008. The gives all teams the opportunity to have new cars or existing ones brought into spec by the NHRA Southern Nationals in Atlanta, Ga.

However, the Funny Car spec has yet to be announced as of the posting of this article. The forthcoming spec is expected to be a carbon copy of the Top Fuel SFI Spec 2.3N.

Corradi pointed out the chassis that is at Haase’s shop is the one that Ashley drove in 2007 up until the Richmond event.

“We are going to put the frame rails in it,” Corradi said. “We are going to see how it reacts and then make changes according to that. We are going to find out where the real problem is. We just don’t know what the real problem is at this time.”

Corradi said he’s still in the dark if there has been any testing done by the NHRA.

“We’re waiting and waiting and waiting,” Corradi said. “We have to race shortly.”