Qualified in the fast half for the first time since Sonoma, where he started a career-best 6th and made his first Pro Stock final, Cory Reed didn’t have to do anything special to go rounds here. He just needed to do his thing. But how was he supposed to know?
No one has any idea what kind of light the other driver is about to cut or how his or her car is going to run, and this would have been a perfect time to be late, short-shift, or shake the tires. Anything would’ve done – anything but a red-light, which, unfortunately, is exactly what happened. Gunning for a killer light, Reed came within thousandths of a second of a perfect one, but instead of a near-perfect .006 light it was an imperfect -.006 foul.
Camrie Caruso advanced with a 10-second run, coasting silently behind Reed while he blasted across the finish line at 204 mph thinking he’d won. “I was really trying to kill it that time,” he said. “.010, .012 – something like that. I figured if I went .010 all day long I could win the race. That double-0 red-light wasn’t a mistake. I wasn’t like, ‘How could I do that?’ It felt good. I’ve had enough good lights now to know a good one, and that really felt like one.”
Reed/Caruso shaped up to be a close matchup – the closest possible, actually. Not only was it the No. 8 qualifier against No. 9; both ran exactly the same e.t., right down to the thousandth of a second, at virtually identical speeds: 6.631s at 205 mph. (Reed got eighth and Caruso ninth on the speed tie-breaker, 205.57 mph to 205.38.)
The foul made it a moot point and Caruso’s shake-riddled shutoff pass made it that much harder a loss for the J&A Service/YNot Racing driver to take. “I knew going up there it was going to be the flip of the coin, .00 green or .00 red,” Reed said. “That’s how this game is played.”