Allen Johnson
At the Dallas NHRA event I went in two days early. I had a group of Sportsman racers headed by Greg Odom that had been asking me to play in the Greg Morris Memorial Golf Tournament for the last two or three years, but I haven’t been able to make it. This year I made a point of it. Greg Morris contracted cancer and died, leaving behind his daughter, Heather, who was seven years old at the time. Every year this golf tournament is held to support her. I think they’ve raised like $30,000 over the years to help with her education and things like that. The tourney was at the Old Brickyard Golf Course in Ferris near the Texas Motorplex. I went and played in it and I had a really good time with a lot of really good people.
We qualified really well in Dallas—and then first round I made a mistake and got beat. I pulled the ’chutes early in my run against Justin Humphreys and lost by four thousandths of second, which was a heartbreaker. I left there really mad, personally, and looking forward to going to Memphis and kicking some hind end.
We stayed after the race at Dallas on Monday and tested three or four different combinations on the Mopar®/J&J Racing Dodge Stratus R/T Pro Stock car. It seemed to payoff, as we took the No. 1 Qualifier Award at Memphis. It meant a lot to my dad Roy, who is the engine builder for my team. It was our third No. 1 Qualifier award of the year, and proved our combination was coming together. It’s unfortunate we got beat in the semis. The track, for some reason, changed between the second round and the semis and everybody had a fit with it in the semis and in the finals. There was no reason for the track to change. We’re still questioning what happened to the track.
We got a week off before we go to Richmond. We’re going to go up and go to a Baltimore Ravens/Tennessee Titans NFL game this Sunday. My wife Pam and I are going to spend the weekend with Justin Humphreys and his wife Gina. Then we’ll test at Budd’s Creek Maryland on Wednesday, Oct. 8 and run in the match race up there. We used to go every year but they haven’t had it in a while. They give you a free day of testing and then you run a three-run match race that night. There will probably be eight to ten Pro Stockers there. It’s only an hour from the Richmond track.
Richmond is the first place I ever won a Pro Stock race [in 1999]. It’s always been pretty special and it’s our type of climate and races. It’s usually cool and fast there, and we perform well on a cool and fast track. Our goal is to make ground up and come out of there maybe sixty points behind the top guy and have a really good chance going to Vegas. We have to go to the final round. We almost met that goal last week at Memphis. By the top guys getting knocked out early, it worked out pretty good. But we must go to the final round at Richmond.