Greg Boutte Takes Care of Unfinished Business During NHRA Division Event at Famoso Raceway
- May 31, 2011
"The track is always very good there," noted Boutte. "They always prep it very well and while the weather didn't change a whole lot over the four days, the track temperature did. We would go from having an eighty degree track temp to one-hundred and forty. We also had a little tail wind from time to time, but it didn't get over five-six MPH, though." Boutte's very consistent time runs on Friday and Saturday gave him all the confidence he needed going into eliminations. "The car was 8.911 to 8.898," he pointed out. "The car has been that good since the first race in Phoenix, the driver just hasn't had his act together." He has also made a promise to himself, "By the end of the year, I will be a much better driver than I have been. I'm working on that every race, more and more. The toughest thing in Super Class racing, is realizing that you have a good car and not changing it. When you can predict your sixty foot, based on the tune-up and staging properly, you know you have a good car. So just leave it alone and trust it." The event at Bakersfield was Boutte's third NHRA division claim for 2011 and he was looking to start making a move in the points. And as the rounds went, he got a chance to do some good for his plight, all while keeping the current NHRA Division 7 Super Comp points leader from gaining too much ground on the rest of the field. First round was the most important to Boutte. "The first round is like a first date," he explained. "You don't really know what you are going to get. When I looked over and saw a car with a small block Chevy, I'd never seen the car before, ever. That is the person you do not want to race first round." "You know nothing about them," he continued. "You don't know how they stage, if they can drive the finish line and just because it's a small block, you don't know if the car is going to go one hundred fifty or one eighty. I had an eighteen and he had twenty-two, so he did his job at the starting line. He just missed the tune-up and I had a better one, so I won that first round. That was the tough one." Boutte worked his way through four more rounds before he found himself in his eleventh NHRA Division final and this time to meet up with another tough competitor, Aaron Kinard. Kinard gave him a run for it at the tree and took a full .013 starting line advantage, but the race was long from over. Boutte trusted his car and drove the stripe extremely well taking just six thousandths of a second at the finish line for his eighth NHRA Division event Wally. Boutte uses numerous K&N products on his Super Comp Dragster from the HP-3002 Wrench-Off oil filter to the second generation K&N Composite Dragster Scoop, (100-8512) that also includes the K&N high flow air filter. Find K&N products for your vehicle using the K&N application search then use the K&N dealer search to find a K&N dealer in your part of the world. |
