PALM BEACH, Jan. 24, 2011-Testing / Practicing lines blurred at PBIR

Jupiter, Fla. (January 24, 2012) –"There's a difference between practicing and testing," Funny Car racer Jack Beckman said this past weekend by way of clarification.
 
Ron Capps, his Don Schumacher Racing colleague, also drew a distinction, between testing and performing, as private sessions here shifted to a show for the ticket-buying public Friday and Saturday.
 
Independent team owner-driver Cruz Pedregon went a step farther and declared, "I don't care what anybody says -- leaving here with one of the top times is important. And anybody who says otherwise is not being honest."
 
Pedregon wasn't disputing anything Beckman or Capps said. And he wasn't calling out anybody in particular. He simply was putting his stamp on the discussion about whether racers came to this South Florida racetrack solely to prepare for the Feb. 9-12 Winternationals at Pomona, Calif., and the 2012 NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series season.
 
"Practicing is making runs down the racetrack, licensing the driver, making sure you go down the lane. Testing is trying new parts and new ideas and seeing if they have the predicted, desired outcome," Beckman said, reminiscent of his classroom instruction at Frank Hawley's Drag Racing School.
 
He spoke for his Rahn Tobler-guided Valvoline NextGen Dodge Charger Don Schumacher Racing team in saying, "We are genuinely testing here.
 
"It's always great when you come out and make a couple of runs to get a new part or system dialed in and then say, 'Excellent. Now we've got the baseline. Let's incorporate a clutch change. Now let's incorporate a fuel change. Now let's incorporate a tune-up change. And you get an opportunity to try a whole bunch of different things," Beckman said.
 
"A lot of people would think that you want to try a new part and go out there and haul butt and go, 'That works,' " he said. "We sometimes learn more from the runs that didn't go as well as you would have liked them to go, because you learn where the edge is, if you've gone too far."
 
Capps, driver of the NAPA Dodge Charger, said his logic and his emotions are playing a tug-o-war with him.
 
"That's the hard part about the test session," he said. "When those guys are throwing [impressive] numbers out like that, you're wishing you could be out there doing the same thing. But you've got to look at the big picture: we're just trying to do testing.
 
"Sometimes it seems like you have a better test session even though the [flashy] results aren't there. We wanted to go up and run 4.0s, like these guys," Capps said while standing in DSR mate Matt Hagan's pit. "But we ha a complete clutch overhaul, or change, down to a whole new batch of discs we have to get into, things [issues] we have to get out of the way now. If we had the same clutch package going into this year, we would have run out of them a couple of races in.
 
"So yeah," he said, "we could have come out and run with everybody else, but we wouldn't have learned anything."
 
Capps -- tech savvy, Internet-aware, and well-versed in the use of social media -- named off communication outlets, including Competition Plus, by which news-starved drag racing fans are clamoring for the latest information. He knows they follow what elapsed times the leaders are running and that those fans generate buzz, whether it's informed or partially informed. And of course he's like his name to be in the mix as a preseason and an early-season favorite.
 
"They're not going to se us running like Beckman and those guys with the 4.0s [including Johnny Gray, Matt Hagan, Robert Hight, Mike Neff, and Cruz Pedregon]," Capps said. "And for the competitive side of you, that's hard."
 
Pedregon defied his new crew chief in his first full pass of the year Friday. Lee Beard told him to run the car just to half-track. However, a grandstand full of South Florida fans who laid down money to come and watch the cars run, motivated him to go for it all.
 
"I decided it felt good enough to warrant taking it all the way to the finish line," Pedregon said. "It's a calculated risk. Even though we're out here to test, people want to leave here with some results. Fans and owners and sponsors are -- everybody is -- looking at the elapsed times."   
 
For the record Hight ended the two-day PRO Winter Warm-Up in dominating fashion, with a 4.034-second E.T. at 316.67 mph in the Auto Club Ford Mustang, taking honors for quickest and fastest in the Funny Car class. Dave Grubnic, of Kalitta Motorsports, led the way among the dragster drivers, clocking the best time of 3.792 seconds at 322.96 mph. That held off Spencer Massey's 3.792, 309.84.
-Credit Competition Plus.com