Jim Dunn

Days after Major League Baseball’s annual All-Star Game, Jim Dunn, team owner and crew chief of the Canidae/Lucas Oil Funny Car, doesn’t mind paying homage to one of the game’s greats, Hall of Fame New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, when he says he hopes this weekend’s NHRA Northwest Nationals is déjà vu all over again for his Jim Dunn Racing team. Last year at this race at Pacific Raceways, Dunn tuned the Canidae car all the way to the winner’s circle and presented driver Tony Bartone with his first Professional victory in the Funny Car class. This year, Bartone returned to his racing roots in Top Alcohol Funny Car and Dunn has a different driver in Jerry Toliver, but the Hall of Fame owner and tuner obviously wouldn’t mind the same result for his team in Seattle and adding a sixth win to Toliver’s Funny Car résumé.

“Getting Tony’s first win wasn’t as good as me getting one,” quipped Dunn. “No, that was cool to get Tony his first win; I was glad to get one for him. He had worked hard for it. If you’re right, you’re right, and on that day, we were right.”

Last year, Bartone qualified the Canidae Chevy fifth with an elapsed time of 4.092 seconds at 303.37 mph and faced former Funny Car world champ Gary Scelzi in the first round. Bartone made a solid 4.18 run to defeat Scelzi, who went up in smoke. Bartone then bested Mike Neff in the second round to set up a semifinal match with two-time Funny Car world champ Tony Pedregon. In a good side-by-side contest, Bartone outran Pedregon, 4.25 to 4.37, to advance to the money round against Ron Capps. In the final, the engine started going away on the Canidae car, but Bartone held on to turn on the win light with a 4.45 to Capps’ 4.70.

“The track was loose in the middle last year,” Dunn said. “The only time we ran well was the Friday night session in qualifying. In the first round, we detuned it and ran an .18 and then a .25 in the semi’s. Everybody said we didn’t run very well, and I just tell ’em we had lane choice in three of the four rounds, so it was running better than the guy I was racing.”

Dunn and Toliver are eager to get back on the track and build on the momentum they were gaining before the event in Denver.

“We’ve kind of lost our clutch combination, so we’re going to try and set it up like we did last year and see what happens,” Dunn said. “We’re making power because we’re running as fast as anybody from the half-track mark to the finish line, but it just won’t accelerate for the first 400 feet. We’re usually about 16th [quickest] at the 60-foot mark, at 330 feet we’re about 14th, and then at the 660-foot mark we’re about third, but at that point, it’s too late because you’ve already lost three-tenths of a second.

“We know we’ve got power because we ran 296 on Saturday at Denver, so now we’ve just got to figure it out. That’s why racing’s hard. We’ve got the power; now we just need to get the clutch setup, but we’ll be all right.”