Veteran racer Alton Clements knows the ups and downs that drag racing can bring to you during any race weekend. Clements is coming into the 2019 World Cup Finals (WCF) as a past champion and he hopes that experience will guide him toward another victory. With a tough Street Fighter field in front of him, Clements has his 1989 Mustang turned up and ready to go.

Clements’ last outing was at the NMRA World Finals where he ran in the Renegade class and recorded a best time of 4.80 in the 1/8-mile. At the WCF, Clements gets to shed some weight from his Mustang and let his Vortech supercharger gulp in as much fresh air as possible. Making the change to alcohol for fuel will force Clements to make some adjustments in the car’s tune-up to keep it happy in the 1/4-mile during the WCF.

Clements believes that leveraging his experience at this event as well as his past success racing in the 1/4-mile with the NMRA will be important if he wants to win at the WCF.

“This event is different than most because of how difficult the competition is. In Street Fighter you have to make consistently fast passes just to get into the field to race; after that there are no easy wins when eliminations begin. When you start getting into the later rounds things get challenging and you have a very small window for error that you need to be aware of,” Clements says.

The WCF presents racers with a unique situation of having near-perfect weather conditions mixed with the best track prep they will see all year. Knowing what he will be working with going into the event, Clements plans on using these conditions to his advantage from the start.

“We aren’t going to totally swing for the fences on every pass because we need data, but we certainly want to be number one qualifier. Being number one gives you a lot of advantages going into raceday, so that’s important to us and our racing strategy. My current tires have about 45 passes on them, and usually that means they need to be replaced before a race, but with Jason Miller’s track prep I can run those tires and do just fine. I think that if we’re able to get some good baseline data early this will be a great race for us,” Clements says.

The World Cup Finals is going to be a great event and will pack the house at Maryland International Raceway. You can watch the racing on SpeedVideo live RIGHT HERE October 30 – November 3.

This broadcast is brought to you by presenting sponsor ProCharger along with ATI Performance Products, American Racing Headers, Driven Racing Oil, WELD Racing, Race Star Wheels, Brisk USA Spark Plugs, Texas Speed & Performance, Gforce Performance Engineering, OSTAR MOTORSPORTS, BoostLine, SPEC Clutch, McLeod Clutches, Nitrous Outlet, Livernois Motorsports & Engineering, Flying A Motorsports, Bullet Race Engineering, and Summit Racing Equipment.