Toliver Misses Funny Car Field at NHRA Las Vegas Nationals

Las Vegas has not been a place of good fortune for the Jim Dunn Racing team this season as Jerry Toliver in the CANIDAE/Lucas Oil/WileyX Chevy will miss Sunday eliminations at an NHRA Full Throttle Series event at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the second time this year. After final qualifying today the CANIDAE car failed to qualify for the 16-car Funny Car field for this weekend's ninth annual NHRA Las Vegas Nationals after also missing the field at the SummitRacing.com NHRA Nationals here in April.

Toliver's first qualifying pass on Friday resulted in an elapsed time of 5.405 seconds at 118.03 mph as the CANIDAE car lost traction just past the 330-foot mark. In the second qualifying session Toliver made a solid 4.241-second pass at 279.15 mph to place the Jim Dunn Racing entry 15th on the provisional Funny Car grid.

Unfortunately the team couldn't build on that performance during Saturday's two qualifying sessions with the CANIDAE car losing traction again in Q3 and slowing to a 7.074 e.t. at 94.22 mph and then going up in smoke right at the start in the fourth and final qualifying session.

"The only luck we've had here at Las Vegas this year has been bad," Toliver said. "but I felt pretty positive coming into this weekend. We've been struggling with the car losing traction just past the 'tree'. We just can't seem to tune it out no matter which way Big Jim (team owner/crew chief Dunn) goes. On that last run we obviously went the wrong way and the car lost traction right at the hit.

"We've got one more race to get it right and I know nobody on this team is going to quit working. I've had pretty good success at Pomona and won a couple of races there, so we'll go there and try to add one more."

The final stop on the 24-race NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series is the 45th annual Auto Club of Southern California NHRA Finals on Nov. 12-15 at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona in Pomona, Calif., the last of six races in the NHRA Countdown to 1 for the 2009 Full Throttle Series championship.

Kirk Weeks