Bob Bode is aware of that cliché that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. But after six straight traction-troubled runs and a body-cracking, burst-panel-launching concussion Saturday, he and his Funny Car team tried to back down the tune-up and “changed a bunch of things.”

However, it simply ran the number to seven.

Bode explained his Saturday problems: “It got out there to 330 feet and spun the tire, blows up, and kicks the burst panel out. It takes the body off every time we smoke the tire. Kind of disgusted. We got the spare body on it and tried to tone the car down so we don’t do that over and over and over. We’ve done it six times in a row. I was an unhappy Funny Car driver at that moment.”

The concussion cracked the body from the bumper all the way back up to the burst panel.

“And I just fixed it from Brainerd. We just got done with 15 hours of repair to come right here and do it again. We changed a bunch of things. So we’ll see,” he said Sunday morning.

“It didn’t hurt the car. It’s just the explosion stretches the body too much, more than it can handle,” he said.

He hauled out his spare body and soldiered on.

“The Toyota’s good. It was a good car. It’s run as good as a .10 [a 4.10-second elapsed time – which wouldn’t make this field at Indianapolis] before. At least we’re back together. We’ll see what our slowing down a little bit does and maybe makes us faster.”

Unfortunately, in the early Sunday pass, the fourth overall, the car smoked the tires again early in the run. The happy news is the engine didn’t blow up. Bode cut it off early. Ultimately, Bode dropped from the unqualified 17th place to dead-last in 18th. He had been trying to run quicker than 4.137 seconds and bump Justin Schriefer from the field. He had one more chance. But it didn’t help him. He and Jeff Diehl were the two racers who missed the cut.