Outlaw enough for ‘ya? The door of Keith Szabo’s ’93 Mustang sports a bullet hole picked up in the burnout box at a race in Texas a few weeks earlier. Szabo qualified the bullet-riddled ride 4th at Huntsville and after taking out J. Moran and defending class champ Jeff Cooner, fell to Dillard in the semis.
Here’s what losing the hood at 145 mph or so will do. Just as 7th-place starter Jeff Paulk approached the finish line in a second-round loss to Hoyle, the hood and scoop of his 2001 Chevy S-10 blew off, sailing high into the air and landing on the track as Paulk hauled the truck down from a 5-second pass at 145.73 mph.
Eric Dillard put car owner Todd Berry’s ’90 Mustang on the pole with a 4.77-seconds pass at 165.20 mph. Dillard was the only Limited Street driver to reach the 4.70s at Huntsville and he did it consistently, going 4.76, 4.77 and 4.79 in eliminations before slowing to a 4.80 at 162.93 in his final-round win over Hoyle. “We were fighting tire shake pretty much every pass because the car’s making a lot of power now and we’re just trying to control it,” Dillard said later. “We’ve got it better throughout the weekend. I mean, we ran a .70 every run today except the final and the only reason we didn’t do it there is because I had to pedal it back at the starting line.”
