Jeff Lopez Wins IHRA Super Rod Races in 1963 Chevy Corvette at Dallas Raceway
- Jul 25, 2013
Lopez started his drag racing season with wins in the NHRA Lucas Oil series in Houston and Dallas. But he has gone winless in his past five NHRA events. "We started off really hot. Then we went through a couple races where we didn't win," said the 35-year-old Lopez from Dallas-Fort Worth. "That's part of it." He entered and raced in his first and only IHRA event in July. He said his team experimented with set-ups and strategy which resulted in a winning run in the Super Rod races at the Summit Racing Equipment Pro-Am Tour event. "That was pretty neat," Lopez said. "We weren't really expecting to win. We were just looking to go out and try a couple different things. We'll try to apply that to our NHRA stuff also." Lopez, driving a 1963 Corvette, beat James Carter from Forney, Texas, by 0.017 seconds in the final round.
"I'm not going to complain at all," Lopez said. "We've had a really good year in the Super Gas car. Everything is looking pretty good so far. We can't complain about anything." Five weeks prior to the IHRA event in Texas, Lopez and his team raced in the NHRA Jegs All Star event at Route 66 Raceway in Illinois.
The Jegs All Stars event pitted the top drivers from the seven divisions in the NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series. Lopez reached the semifinals of the Jegs All Stars event "I was happy with the result. It was the first time we did the Jegs All Star race," Lopez said. "It was a neat experience to be racing guys from California to Washington, Florida. It was neat to have everybody at one track that will never be at one track again. That's the one time of year that everybody goes to one location and races. It's just basically the best racers out there." He also raced in the Super Gas division and reached the semifinals as well. A cracked piston in his car hampered his weekend. "We just did what we could," Lopez said. "The car stayed together, but it just got considerably slower and slower."
Lopez, the 2012 NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series national champion in the Super Gas division, is ranked fifth nationally this year. He has a little break between races and said he wants to work his way into the top three before the end of the season. "It wasn't anything that was expected to me to win it last year," Lopez said. "It's not like anything I would ever expect to do again. There's over 1,000 different racers around the country. To come out on top, that's a great accomplishment." With two race cars, Lopez said one of the reasons he like using K&N filters is because of the consistency in performance the products deliver. "You want everything to be the exact same every round," Lopez said. "Something as simple as dirt in the carburetor, a bug flying by, anything can get in a carburetor, we're talking about thousandths of a second here. As long as you got everything covered up, as long as you got everything filtered, that's a big key in what we do. You gotta do everything you can to help yourself win and K&N definitely helps do that." |
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