Toliver Falters in First-Round at U.S. Nationals

The good news for Jerry Toliver and the Jim Dunn Racing is they turned in their best qualifying effort of the season at this weekend's Mac Tools U.S. Nationals at O'Reilly Raceway Park to start in the top-half of the Funny Car field for eliminations. The bad news is their CANIDAE/Lucas Oil/WileyX Chevy couldn't quite match that performance today and fell to Jeff Arend in the first round.

Entering eliminations as the No. 10 qualifier, Arend had an elapsed time of 4.174 seconds at 301.47 mph to edge Toliver who steered the CANIDAE car to a 4.194 e.t. at 294.56 mph.

"A couple of guys were smoking the tires before us, so Jim (team owner/crew chief Dunn) slowed it down and backed it off a little bit, but the car just didn't run the number we needed," Toliver said. "Even though Jeff's car outran us, I also got tattooed on the light and that doesn't make me feel any better."

Toliver made an impressive run with the the third-quickest pass in yesterday's final qualifying session, bested only by the 4.095 elapsed time of No. 1 qualifier Robert Hight and the 4.098 e.t. of Cruz Pedregon to qualify seventh for Funny Car eliminations.

"All in all, it was still a good weekend even though we hurt a motor on that run," Toliver said. "That wasn't good. But the real story is we ran a good number yesterday (third-quickest pass in the final qualifying session). The good thing is the car responded and did what Jim asked it to do. We've got a good hot rod here and I'm excited going forward."

The next stop on the 24-race NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series is the 2nd annual NHRA Carolinas Nationals on Sept. 17-20 at zMax Dragway in Concord, N.C., the first of six races in the NHRA Countdown to 1 for the 2009 Full Throttle Series championship.

Kirk Weeks