Chrisman ready to take advantage of warm weather at Las Vegas

A weather forecast calling for a sunny, warm weekend in Las Vegas makes Steve Chrisman smile.

He isn’t planning to relax by a hotel swimming pool.  The sunshine simply guarantees he will be making two qualifying runs on Friday and Saturday as he attempts to put his Nitro Fish Top Fuel dragster into the 16-car line-up for Sunday’s SummitRacing.com Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Inclement February weather and a few mechanical problems interfered with his qualifying runs at the Winternationals, and he wound up a reluctant spectator during eliminations.

“It will be nice to get in some qualifying runs without bad weather,” said Chrisman.  “We had a new five-disc clutch and a different fuel system (to start the season), so we needed to make runs at Pomona.  One of the magnetos didn’t work on our first run and rain washed out the second one.

“We will have both magnetos working at Vegas.  We found out a wire came loose inside the mag on that run.  There are a lot of things that can go wrong with these cars.  We are always learning from things like that.”

That wasn’t all.  Chrisman was surprised when the automatic fuel shutoff unexpectedly went into action on his third run

“The car’s performance came around on that run even though the motor shut off early,” he reported.  “We had a very good 60-foot time.”

And that provided crew chief Kevin Meredyk with more tuning data for Friday’s qualifying.

Chrisman, a self-described hobby racer who enters 8 to 12 races a year, loves to race.  “We should be okay this weekend,” he concluded.  “There were positive things that happened at Pomona and we are looking forward to racing at Las Vegas.”