Allen Johnson
The Phoenix race was a challenge. It was one of the most trying weekends that I’ve spent as a racer for a lot of reasons, but mainly because of the tragic accident.
We were right on track all weekend in the new Mopar® Dodge Avenger. Unfortunately, on the last qualifying pass we had the left lane. We would have stayed No. 2 or No. 3 if we had the right lane, but we ended up No. 4. That left lane was just really, really treacherous for all us Pro Stockers. Vinnie Deceglie’s wreck was horrendous. Everybody was skating around in that lane. It was a weird deal.
I won first round and then eliminations were postponed. NHRA did everything it could do to make that lane better. Actually, they gave us the option, after it turned out they couldn’t make it better, to go to Gainesville and finish the Phoenix race during Gainesville qualifying. It says a lot about the NHRA as far as looking over us for safety.
Vinnie has his car from last year, the Stratus. He’ll have that out at Bradenton before the Gainesville race, with my dad Roy supplying his HEMI® engines. We’re going to test a couple three days. His Stratus should be just like it was last year. It’s a good car, maybe not as good as the Avenger, but it’ll do for three or four races.
Gainesville should basically be like the K&N Horsepower Challenge deal. It should be exactly the same format, a sort of race-within-a-race. We won the K&N a couple of years ago, so maybe it will play right into our hands. It would be huge if we could win both the Phoenix event and the Gatornationals in one weekend! With our experienced team, our new Mopar Dodge Avenger and all the help and assistance we are getting from Mopar—hey, it could be ours.
The Mopar Dodge Avenger has just been awesome in its first two races. After seeing all the efforts of the Mopar and Dodge engineers in the wind tunnel, and seeing how much better the Avenger was, we thought for sure that it would be quite a bit better on the track than the Stratus. Now, have we got the full optimum output out of it? No, we have not—it’s still got a little bit left. It’s not performing at the 60-ft. mark as well as our old car did. We were always No. 1 or No. 2 in 60-ft., and now we’re down to No. 5 or No. 6 in the new car. If we can get it up there to the top at the 60-ft and 330-ft. mark, I think you’ll see it show off even more.
As far as a social life, I pretty much don’t have any plans between now and the Gatornationals. I might go into Bradenton early before testing and play some golf with the guys down there. After two straight weeks of flying back and forth on the West Coast, and testing the week before that in Vegas, I need a weekend or so of R&R just to get my feet back on the ground.