* Del Worsham is currently fourth in the NHRA Full Throttle Funny
Car point standings; he trails third place by 59 points and first place
by 119 points.
* Worsham has two wins this season; he visited victory circle at
St. Louis and Bristol earlier this season. One race ago at Joliet, Ill.,
Worsham was the No. 12 qualifier and lost to Tim Wilkerson in the first
round of eliminations.
* Last year at Englishtown, Worsham was the No. 5 qualifier; he
defeated Gary Scelzi and Robert Hight before losing to Tim Wilkerson in
the semifinals. Worsham won at Englishtown in 1991 and 2005.
* Worsham has 24 wins in his Funny Car career; he is seventh on
the NHRA's all-time Funny Car wins list trailing sixth place by just two
wins.
Worsham prior to Englishtown:
"We're fourth in points so we lost a couple of spots with our
second-round loss last week, but that's OK. I'm still optimistic about
this weekend in Englishtown; our car showed some good promise in Joliet
for the summer races we are about to start running.
"We've finished racing at the cool-weather tracks for a while now. The
races where you can throw a bunch of power at the track and go fast are
finished until the fall, and we've reached the point where we all have
to kind of finesse the cars down the track. The key is mostly the clutch
set up, but we haven't really been able to work on our hot set up very
much. We tested a couple of weeks ago in Atlanta hoping for hot, humid
conditions, but it was cool and dry. So our team really doesn't have
much of a notebook on hot race tracks and how to race on them yet.
"We also go to Englishtown with some heavy hearts because this is the
one-year anniversary of when Scott (Kalitta) lost his life. Scott's
death got a lot of safety improvements happening. It was shortly after
this race last year that we went to 1000 feet instead of a quarter mile,
and a lot of the tracks are reworking the gravel run-off area at the end
of the tracks. So while Scott's death was tragic, it did prompt some
safety improvements that we'd been thinking about for a while but hadn't
made."
-credit: ajaar
