Cooner qualified in third for Limited Street, behind only Justin Curry in his Crosby, TX-based, first-generation Camaro, and Darrin Hoyle, who secured the number-one slot with a 4.961-seconds pass in his ’69 Camaro. Twenty-six teams qualified at MMP, rounded out by Jason Etheridge at 6.377 seconds in his 598-equipped Mustang from Corinth, MS.
With help from team owner Sharpston and crew chief Derek Fannin, Cooner had just reinstalled the freshened 426 Ford small-block on Wednesday night and arrived at MMP on Thursday with the same tune-up they’d used to win an ORSCA race at Atlanta Dragway early last month. Their slowest pass at Atlanta was a winning 4.96 in the final, so when the car delivered a 4.97 straight out of the trailer in the heat of the day at Montgomery, Cooner said the team was encouraged. After stepping it up to a 4.89, he ran a final 4.92 in testing before qualifying began, but was unable to improve in Friday’s two sessions.
“Then we got to [last-chance] qualifying on Saturday and thought that we had broke something because we had the exact same tuneup in it, but it just wasn’t going as fast,” Cooner said. “We ended up putting another 150 more pounds in the trunk, so we actually weighed 3,350 all weekend. And we still had tons of power out to get down the track. We actually took out seven more degrees of timing than we did in Atlanta to get down the track. We just wanted to be consistent and get down the track. We know the car is faster—everyone knows the car is faster—but we raced the track.”
 Carl Gilbert (near lane) and Cooner left together in the Limited Street final, but Gilbert had to settle for the $2,000 runner-up check when it was all over. |
The strategy obviously paid off, as after a first-round bye, Cooner made it past Mark Woodruff, David Reese, and Chad Revia in the semis. On the opposite side of the ladder, after qualifying eighth, Carl Gilbert steered his ’04 Mustang past Mike Collins, Jerry Gunter, Hoyle, and then won with a holeshot over fellow Floridian Carlton Thompson in the semi finals.
In a close final-round match, Cooner prevailed over Gilbert with a 5.216-seconds effort, his slowest of the day thanks to a loss of traction in the first half of the run. The Townley, AL-based driver later explained he noticed in the preliminary rounds that his engine had “a little miss or a pop to it” about half-track. “We come to find out before the final it had a plug wire off, laying on the header, and it had been like that all day,” Cooner said. “Then in the final, about 200, 250 feet out it started to smoke the tires and I pedaled it and got it to stick. So if it wasn’t for that [plug wire being off], who knows what could’ve happened.”
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