ST. LOUIS (Sept. 27) - Wanting to harness recent-found speed, Pro Stock driver Rodger Brogdon is more than optimistic about his chances during the AAA Insurance NHRA Midwest Nationals at Gateway Motorsports Park.
After repeat engine changes throughout qualifying, the Owens Corning Chevy Camaro came alive in Q4 to make its best pass of the weekend, 6.558 at 211.43 mph.
"Well Q2 we actually put in a different engine, our spare engine," Brogdon said. "It's a spare for a reason though; it's not as good as we would like it to be. Because of that, last night the guys put a new lifter in the first engine and put it back in the car.
"It's definitely a good piece. There's nothing wrong with the engine, it's the car's setup. This car wants something totally different than anything we have ever ran. There are a lot of notes we have that don't seem to be correlating at all. We're kind of lost but we made a big move the last time and it responded to that. We could have went 6.53 pretty easily. We're going to go in that same direction in the morning and make it a race."
While he may have qualified in the 11th spot, Brogdon knows that he has more power left in his Elite Motorsports engine that has yet to be demonstrated. Lining up alongside No. 6 Vincent Nobile in the first round of eliminations, Brogdon plans on showing exactly what he's working with.
"We've got a lot better hot rod than what we've shown," Brogdon said. "You can't take us for granted. We were up to a .55 in Q4 and it was way heavy on clutch all the way through. I had to short-shift out of low gear at 300 rpm because of it.
"If I can go up there, do a better job driving tomorrow, and get a little bit of clutch off of it, we could run at least a .535 tomorrow. It'll be a good race for sure."
Eliminations will start at approximately noon, Sunday, with action broadcast on ESPN2 on tape-delay basis.
