Toliver Faces Tasca in First Round at NHRA Northwest Nationals

For the second of three consecutive races on the NHRA Full Throttle Series' Western Swing Funny Car driver Jerry Toliver hopes 13 is a lucky number for him as he qualified the CANIDAE/Lucas Oil Chevy 13th on the Funny Car grid for tomorrow's eliminations at the 22nd annual NHRA Northwest Nationals at Pacific Raceways. Toliver matched his qualifying effort from last week at the Mile-High Nationals at Denver when he drove to a weekend-best elapsed time of 4.309 seconds at 276.80 mph in today's fourth and final qualifying session.

"Finally," Toliver said of his fourth qualifying pass. "We just haven't been able to make this CANIDAE car happy. We were obviously too aggressive yesterday but today Big Jim (team owner/crew chief) got a lot closer (with the tune-up). The tuning window on this car is so small, but we made a full pull on that last run so hopefully we can build off of that and carry it over to tomorrow."

The Jim Dunn Racing team is defending Funny Car champs at Pacific Raceways as Tony Bartone earned his first professional Funny Car victory last year when he drove the CANIDAE car past Ron Capps in the finals.

"Jim and the guys obviously have good thoughts of racing here on Sunday with last year's win so maybe we can take a little positive mojo from that into tomorrow."

In tomorrow's first round Toliver faces No. 4 qualifier Bob Tasca for the second time this season. He lost to Tasca earlier this year in the first round at Phoenix. Fellow Chevy driver Tony Pedregon qualified No. 1 with a 4.174 elapsed time at 294.43 mph.

Kirk Weeks