WHAT IS SCELZI SAYING?

If you’re listening, he’s saying that “Wild Thing” is back…

Gary Scelzi says it was as simple as taking a step back to move several steps forward.

It's hard to argue with the results.

The four-time NHRA champion, after struggling through an admittedly disappointing season in 2006, appears to have recaptured the winning mojo that guided him to the 2005 Funny Car title. He has already equaled his 2006 win total and now is ready to be a big-time player in the flopper world again.

"When you have a car that goes down the race track fast and does it every time, it gives the driver more confidence and the whole team more confidence," said Scelzi, who opened the POWERade Series season by winning the CARQUEST Winternationals at Pomona in dominating fashion. "It gives the driver confidence, because you don't have to worry about pedaling it every time, you don't have to worry about a lot of things. It makes life a whole lot easier."

Rewind back to 2006, when Scelzi followed up his championship year with the worst season of his 10-year professional career, winning just once and finishing a career-low seventh in points.

The culprit was inconsistency, which Scelzi attributed to the team's effort to lean on the tune-up of their Mopar/Oakley Dodge flopper a little harder. But instead of moving forward, the team appeared to take one big step back.

"You can't always stay the same. You have to try new things," Scelzi said. "(The car) showed a lot of potential. It was a lot like what Jimmy Prock's (Auto Club Ford Mustang driven by Robert Hight) has done. They've been to the final at two races (this season), but it's not a very consistent car; it's a fast race car. Not that they're doing the same thing, but we were trying new things that showed a lot of progress. We just kept trying to refine these things to go to the next level. But it just never happened.

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"Sometimes when you go to blaze new trails, you have to take a few steps back,” Scelzi said. “That's what really happened. And as bad a year as we had, it may have been bad for the champion of '05, but it really wasn't a horrible year. We won a race and went to three final rounds, and finished seventh. But staying the same doesn't always work. You have to do new things. And that might have bit us a little bit."

So instead, Scelzi and crew chief Mike Neff went back to square one, and the difference has been like night and day. The Mopar/Oakley Dodge is once again a monster that most teams would prefer to stay away from on race day. The solution, Scelzi says, was as simple as 1, 2, 3.

"We just took off all the magical parts," Scelzi said. "We went back to the basics of a clutch program, an engine program that we knew worked. We just tried refining it over the winter and making sure all our parts were the same, and there were no variables.

"It showed right away in testing. We knew we were going to have a good consistent and fast car. And that's the key. A consistent car is good, but a consistent, fast car is even better."

And no Funny Car has been more consistently fast than the Mopar/Oakley Dodge. Of the 13 competitive runs Scelzi has made this season, he's failed to make a clean pass just twice. Once during qualifying at the CSK Nationals and the other during eliminations at that race, which Scelzi said was due to a timing malfunction. The rest have been downright stout. All eight of his passes in winning the Winternationals were 4.754 seconds or quicker, including two sizzling 4.69 runs.

He followed that up at Phoenix with a pair of 4.70 runs and another 4.69 pass before smoking the tires in a first-round loss to Gary Densham.

Scelzi attributes his holeshot start this season to the extra motivation he has to prove that 2006 was more of an aberration than a trend.

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"Mike Neff (in the off-season) was like I've never seen him before," Scelzi said. "I feel the same way. We're tired of answering people who ask us what's wrong with the car. If we knew, we'd fix it. We're just trying to be the best, and sometimes when you're the best, you struggle.

"Last year was just a struggle, and there are no guarantees that we won't struggle this year. But right now, it looks like all the homework the guys have done - Mike Neff and everybody - is going to turn it around for us."

The team even proved that its tire-smoking effort against Densham was more a fluke than the beginning of a downward spiral.

"We tested (the Monday after the CSK Nationals) and we had a timing malfunction (against Densham), Scelzi said.”That's what caused it to smoke the tires, and we found it when we got back to the pits (on race day). We came back out Monday morning and ran under the same conditions, and it ran a 4.73, just like we had planned to run in the first round.

"We feel a whole lot better about what happened, because that was really a shock to us. We found out we had an ignition problem and we fixed it. We brought it back the next day and it went right down the race track. So we feel very confident going into (the Gatornationals) and for the rest of the year. We feel we have a car that's as good as anybody's, if not better."

But Scelzi also knows nothing is guaranteed in NHRA drag racing.

"Winning races is extremely hard," he said. "It's why I'm so grateful, because you never know when you are going to win, or if you are going to win. To win a championship, it's the same thing. You have to be at the right place at the right time. The cards need to fall your way. I'm grateful to be in the position I'm in. I'm thankful we have a great car, and I like my chances."

It's hard to argue with him.

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