As with several of their NHRA Full Throttle peers, Southern California natives Jerry Toliver and Jim Dunn will be racing in front of hometown friends and family at this weekend's 45th annual Auto Club of Southern California NHRA Finals at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona, and the duo would love nothing better than to deliver a season-ending victory for their fans and sponsors in their Jim Dunn Racing entry, the CANIDAE/Lucas Oil/WileyX Chevy Funny Car.
"I love starting and ending the season at Pomona," Toliver said. "It's a great track and it's fun to race in front of so many friends and family that don't normally get to see us. Plus I've run pretty well there over the years, so it's an easy facility for me to like. In fact, I got my first career win at this race in '99 when I beat Force in the finals. I probably could have called it a career right there, beating John Force at Pomona to win the NHRA Finals. But then we turned right around and won the Winternationals to start the season in 2000, so you can see why Pomona is my favorite track."
Toliver, a five-time NHRA Funny Car national-event winner, has had three of his career wins here at the quarter-mile track at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds. The Compton, Calif., native won the NHRA Finals in 1999, and followed up with victories at the season-opening NHRA Winternationals in 2000 and 2004.
"The CANIDAE folks are headquartered right up the road in San Luis Obispo, so I'm sure we'll have a lot of them out here supporting us and I'd love nothing better than to give them a win right in their own backyard. And Lucas Oil and WileyX are California companies, too, so that would be a great ending to the season.
"We have probably two or three really big, historic races at Pomona, Gainesville and Indy. I've been fortunate enough to have won at two of them (Pomona, Gainesville), but I can't think of anything better than to add another Pomona notch on my belt. We're going to give it our best shot."
Another racer spreading the message of Responsible Pet Ownership is one of the owners of CANIDAE, Scott Whipple. Whipple, a regular competitor in the National Sand Drag Association (NSDA), drove his CANIDAE/Lucas Oil Top Fuel sand dragster to the 2009 NSDA season points championship, putting an exclamation point on the championship at the series' season-ending race in Primm, Nev., on Oct. 24-25. The CANIDAE team not only won the event but Whipple broke his own record on the 100-yard track on three consecutive passes during eliminations with runs of 2.278 seconds at 162.75 mph, 2.273 at 160.71, and 2.239 at 164.16 mph.
A two-hour telecast of qualifying coverage for the Auto Club NHRA Finals can be seen on ESPN2 and ESPN2 HD on Saturday, Nov. 14, beginning at 10:30 p.m. (ET). Coverage on ESPN2 and ESPN2 HD continues on Sunday, Nov. 15 when NHRA Race Day kicks off eliminator coverage starting at 11:00 a.m. (ET), and concludes with three hours of final-eliminations coverage beginning at 7:00 p.m. (ET).
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