GEICO Powersports rider Karen Stoffer rode her Suzuki to a quarterfinal finish during the 10th running of the NHRA Las Vegas Fall Nationals on Sunday.
Stoffer qualified in the third spot and really thought it was going to be her day to take home a victory. Stoffer kept her GEICO Powersports Suzuki hovering right around that seven-second rage during the weekend.
“Well I thought today was going to be my race day, but it wasn’t,” Stoffer said. “We made some great passes, nothing lower than a seven-second run until the second round.”
She made a run of 7.002 seconds at 188.81 mph in the opening round of eliminations when she took out Steve Johnson. Unfortunately during the second round Stoffer slowed to a 7.046 second run at 186.67 mph in a losing effort to Matt Smith, who ran a 6.999 at 188.17 mph.
“I really think we could have beat Matt,” Stoffer said. “We had him off the tree but we slowed way down in fifth and sixth gear. I had to do a little bit of riding, but it wasn’t bad, it went very straight.”
Stoffer and her team decided to use this race to make some changes and try a few new things for her GEICO Powersports Suzuki and for the most part they were happy with the improvements from those changes.
“We can’t move around too much in points so we kind of used this race to do a little bit of testing for next year,” Stoffer said. “We made some progress but we still have a lot work on.”
Stoffer, who resides in Nevada and considers The Strip at the Last Vegas Motor Speedway, knows that although the team didn’t get to take home the victory, any weekend at the race track, is a pretty good one.
“We were very happy with our GEICO Powersports Suzuki until that last round,” Stoffer said. “All in all this was a great weekend, this is one of my home track sand the fans were really great.”