Press Release from www.ADRL.us
(Mar. 16, 2010)—Canada’s Mark Martino and his Martino Motorsports team are committing their resources toward running a full-time schedule within the American Drag Racing League’s Extreme Pro Stock (XPS) division this year, beginning with this weekend’s ADRL Universal Technical Institute Dragapalooza VI presented by Safety-Kleen at Houston Raceway Park, in Baytown, Texas.
Martino entered one ADRL event in 2009, at Columbus, Ohio, but will remain in contention for the series’ Rookie of the Year award as he goes after a spot in the Speedtech Battle for the Belts that will determine the 2010 ADRL Extreme Pro Stock championship.
In an effort to maximize his chances at being an instant contender in the XPS class, Martino has formed a strategic alliance with the veteran ADRL Extreme 10.5 team of Titan Motorsports for the 2010 season. Not only will Martino and Titan share resources in preparing their cars and at the track, they will both look to the experience of Titan crew chief Eric Luzinski to establish them as top contenders on a weekly basis.
During early season testing at Bradenton Motorsports Park in Florida, Martino’s team, including Luzinski, quickly realized the potential of their eighth-mile set-up, ripping off a stout 4.06-seconds, 178-mile-per-hour pass, only fractions of a second away from the current ADRL Extreme Pro Stock record.
“That test session was a great opportunity for us to put some laps on the car in ADRL trim and see what we had to work with going to Houston” Martino said. “It was also a good tune up for me having been out of the seat since October of last year and I feel that as a team we’ll be very competitive right out of the gate.”
Qualifying for the ADRL Universal Technical Institute Dragapalooza VI presented by Safety-Kleen gets underway at 11 a.m. Friday, Mar. 19, with eliminations scheduled to begin the next day at 1 p.m.