Johnson still has his game

Thursday, April 3, 2003 | 10:19 a.m.

The impressive nitromethane-burning Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars are the showcase categories of the National Hot Rod Association but arguably the most intense racing takes place in the Pro Stock car class.

With as many as 45 cars attempting to qualify for the 16-car final eliminations, qualifying no longer is merely a tune-up for Sunday race, but almost a race within a race said veteran Pro Stock driver Warren Johnson.

"Without a doubt," Johnson said as he prepared for this weekend's NHRA SummitRacing.com Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "Nowadays, you're focusing on qualifying but then you're also taking all the information that you're gathering during this qualifying period and trying to figure out how to apply it when you're in race mode.

"You really can't separate (qualifying and the race) anymore because if you just focus on qualifying and then don't focus on racing, then what good did it do to even qualify because you're probably not going to do very good racing. And you can't race unless you really focus on qualifying, too. It's a Catch-22."

No one in the Pro Stock category has mastered the qualifying-vs.-racing issue better than Johnson, a six-time NHRA Pro Stock champion who qualified at an amazing 303 consecutive national events before missing eliminations last August at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif. It marked the first time Johnson, 59, had not qualified since the 1987 season.

Although Johnson already had won a race at that point in the season, there were rumblings in the pit area that the veteran driver might be "losing it." Johnson, who has won at least one national event in 22 consecutive seasons, said he never paid attention to the talk.

"The proverbial Monday-morning or armchair quarterback always has the answer but never knows how to ask the right questions," Johnson said. "We don't really pay any attention to any of that because anytime you let those kinds of rumors and gossip and observations by uninformed individuals affect what you're doing, all it's doing is detracting from your focus on what you really should be doing."

Johnson and son Kurt, who also competes in pro Stock, turned the corner late last summer. Warren posted a runner-up finish at the fall race in Las Vegas and Kurt won the following weekend at the season finale in Pomona, Calif.

This season has seen a continuation of the team's progress as Warren earned his 89th career victory in the season opener in Pomona and Kurt won last month's Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla.

"Between Kurt and myself, we've won three out of the last four and two out of the last three so we're at least headed somewhat in the right direction," Warren said. "We had certainly been working toward being more competitive at the end of last year. You saw that after Indy, the last three or four races, Kurt and I qualified one or two at all the remainder of the races and he won one of them and I was runner-up at another one.

"Overall, our performance improved and we were just hoping we could take it from there and either improve upon it or at least maintain, hoping that nobody else picked up substantially. We're mildly pleased with where we are performance-wise but there's obviously room for improvement."

Johnson said he is cautiously optimistic as he heads to Las Vegas, where he has runner-up finishes in both the spring race in 2000 and the fall race last year.

"With the closeness of this category, just winning one of these races nowadays is a monumental task because, in reality, any one of those 16 qualified cars win when you're only talking two to three hundredths of a second separating the field," he said. "This thing is so competitive, it's basically the fastest bracket category there has ever been.

"I've been the runner-up twice in Las Vegas, so the surface obviously suits our GM Performance Parts Grand Am well. It's now just a matter of Kurt or myself taking it to the next level and reaching the winner's circle."