EDWARDS: LOOKING TO EXTEND TO SEVEN CONSECUTIVE NO. 1 QUALIFIERS
Virginia NHRA Nationals at Virginia Motorsports Park, if it holds, would be his seventh consecutive and 14th of the season.
“I’m living a dream in a sport I have treasured and enjoyed doing for a long, long time. By the way, Cory is a young pup … I’m 56 and he’s 42. He’s got a lot of racing to go yet. We did achieve a goal and that was to pick up those valuable six [bonus] points. We feel good about that. We didn’t make the best of runs there on the last run, but it was good enough. I’m pleased.
“This is a dream season,” said Edwards, whose provisional No. 1 in the
“I’m living a dream in a sport I have treasured and enjoyed doing for a long, long time. By the way, Cory is a young pup … I’m 56 and he’s 42. He’s got a lot of racing to go yet. We did achieve a goal and that was to pick up those valuable six [bonus] points. We feel good about that. We didn’t make the best of runs there on the last run, but it was good enough. I’m pleased.
“We definitely went hard left and if you look at the [qualifying] sheet, my travel number was down,” Edwards said of his second pass. “Anytime these cars go really crooked to the left [it’s not good], because you are getting all of your ET right off of the starting line. We had a real good 60-foot but the travel number was really bad. I had to jerk it back and get it back in the groove. I feel like we left a little bit out there.”
A check of the sheets revealed Edwards spot on assessment. His 60' time of 0.967 was clearly the best of the session. Dave Northrop posted an identical 60' time but his overall run of 6.665 was on 13th fasted of the day. Greg Anderson, second quickest of the day, fan a 0.983 60' time, .016 seconds slower than Edwards and nearly two thirds of the total difference overall between Edwards' 6.606 and Anderson's 6.627.
Issues with the timing lights during the first session, didn't rattle Edwards.
“The stage light would not come on. I knocked the top light off and rolled in and kept rolling. It never came on so I finally got timed out by the auto-start. They pushed the car back and did all kinds of stuff. They [NHRA officials] even walked out there and put their foot in the beam and it still wouldn’t come on.
“There was an adjustment off with the lights. One was a little too low but they [NHRA] fixed that.”
Edwards’ slowest start this season was 5th, and that was in Sonoma, the race before his qualifying streak began.
CAT AND MOUSE GAME?– Edwards sets a mark, the field catches the mark and Edwards comes back and sets a higher mark. Ironically, it always appears to be almost two hundredths of a second.
“We are trying to make the best run we can, whether it’s .02 or a .01. At Memphis, I wasn’t always the quickest car. Greg was, and we struggled, a couple of times. We’ve made a couple of fairly good runs here today. Maybe Greg didn’t make as good of a run here. I don’t know. I don’t know what the number is and we try to race the track and the conditions. Whatever it is, I always hope that it’s enough to pick up those valuable points.”
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