Sore Dillard Has Unoffical Mark, Task Of Prepping Different Car

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Within a period of about four hours this week, ProLine Racing Engines co-owner/driver Eric Dillard acquired four things: an unofficial world elapsed-time record, a sore neck, a client’s wadded-up race car, and a routine repair job at the shop that suddenly slid from the back burner to the front.

Dillard’s wild Wednesday started with a 6.11-second, 229-mph run at Bradenton (Fla.) Motorsports Park that blew out the driver’s-side window in client Willard Kinzer’s Pro Radial Mustang but nonetheless unofficially trumped Roger Holders’ quarter-mile world-record.

IMG_6854_copy(Holder set the standard at 6.12-seconds last November at the Street Car Supernationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.)

“It sucked the window out of the car,” Kinzer said. “It didn’t come plumb out. It just laid over.”

Kinzer, an 86-year-old businessman from Prestonsburg, Ky., had been excited that he had arrived in Florida for his one-day visit to the private test session just in time to witness the all-too-dramatic milestone. Dillard’s incrementals were 1.13 seconds by the 60-foot mark, then 2.87 by the 330 cone, and 4.14 at 196 mph in the eighth-mile. Had the window problem not occurred and Dillard hadn’t gotten off the throttle at the 5.7-second mark, the pass could have been even more stunning.

“It was going to take them two or three hours to get it fixed. So I decided to come on back,” Kinzer said Thursday from Kentucky. “Eric and the crew there, they got it fixed and made a couple more runs. And [then] the tire blew out and he hit the wall.”

He broke the record for E.T. The main thing is that Eric didn’t get hurt. You can get a car back, but if somebody gets hurt, that’s a different thing. – Willard Kinzer

Before the crash, Dillard had registered a 6.101, 239.17 clocking with segments of 1.13 seconds, 4.15 at 191 mph at the eighth-mile, and 5.19 to the 1,000-foot mark.

“He broke the record for E.T. The main thing is that Eric didn’t get hurt,” Kinzer said. “You can get a car back, but if somebody gets hurt, that’s a different thing.

“He took a pretty hard lick. He was doing about 230 miles an hour. He’s OK,” the car owner said.

David Blount, Dillard’s colleague at ProLine, said Thursday the driver complained about some soreness in his neck but added that Dillard “was a little dumbfounded that he’s feeling as good as he is.”

“It was just one of them things. I think it only had about five runs. For a radial, that’s not many,” Kinzer said.

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“They brought the car back to the shop at ProLine,” he said, referring to the Ball Ground, Ga., facility near Atlanta, “and they’re going to look it over real good. But I’m afraid it’s beyond repair. I still got my old Mustang I got off of David Wolfe. They’ve been repairing it. We’ll probably wind up going back to it. We set a lot of records in that car.

“I think we’ll have it ready maybe for the racing season,” Kinzer said. “We were hoping to go back to Bradenton the last of the month. I hope that we’ll have the old Mustang ready.”

About the author

Susan Wade

Celebrating her 45th year in sports journalism, Susan Wade has emerged as one of the leading drag-racing writers with 20 seasons at the racetrack. She was the first non-NASCAR recipient of the prestigious Russ Catlin Award and has covered the sport for the Chicago Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger, St. Petersburg Times, and Seattle Times. Growing up in Indianapolis, motorsports is part of her DNA. She contributes to Power Automedia as a freelancer writer.
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