Road Trip
PHOTOS: DRAG ILLUSTRATED ARCHIVES
While a winning outing at his local
Richmond Dragway is a casual occurrence for Verdi, his trip to the Spring
Fling Vegas Million was anything but
easy. Fortunately, he worked out all of the
technical difficulties before making the
trip home with wife Susan by his side.
entry locked in months before.
“I was riding around on the four-wheeler and I
thought, I already have a free entry into the race,
so I’ll buy some raffle tickets myself,” remembers
Verdi. “I bought two tickets and I heard them call
my name out as a winner, so there I was with another $2,000 entry ticket for the Million. I ended
up selling mine to Anthony (Bertozzi) for $1,500
and Jerry sold his to Anthony for $1,000. Basically, it cost me about $600 to race the Million.”
June 2016
S
everal other races-withina-race were contested before the
Million on Friday, so Verdi had
plenty of opportunities to dial in
his entry. First he competed in a
shootout race for an enclosed trailer on Tuesday, and then lost in the
first-round during Wednesday’s race. He went
deep into eliminations on Thursday’s race before a red-light sent him back to the pits in the
sixth round.
“I had a run where I could’ve won, but I blew it
when I missed the tree,” he admits. “I beat myself
up pretty bad. Jerry was like, ‘We’re going to talk
about it.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not going to talk
about it.’ Honestly, I just wasn’t confident in my
decisions with the delay box. Jerry kept hounding
me, saying that I was making the right decisions,
and that I needed to trust them. I wasn’t having
any of it.”
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