Daytona Beach, FL – February 18, 2011. The NASCAR Camping World Truck Series 2011 season began with a bang Friday evening as three multi-truck accidents took their toll on the 36-truck field. David Starr caught up in a multi-truck incident on lap 77 causing extensive damage to his Zachry Toyota Tundra. The SS Green Light team was able to patch up the No. 81 sufficiently to allow David to finish the season opening race thirteenth behind winner Michael Waltrip.
Following a pair of top-five speeds while drafting in the two practice sessions, David qualified the Zachry Toyota 25th on Thursday evening with a lap of 51.75 seconds at 173.89 mph.
The SS Green Light team elected to run a very conservative race early on hoping to avoid trouble by running at the back of the field. The strategy paid off as David was able to avoid a fourteen-truck pile-up on lap 76. Unfortunately, David was involved in a three-truck accident on lap 84, being hit in the left side by another truck that caused the No. 81 to spin through the front stretch grass, heavily damaging the nose of his Toyota Tundra.
Three stops during the ensuing caution by the Jason Miller-led crew got David back into the race without losing a lap. Starr restarted well behind the field with his wounded mount hoping to salvage a decent finish. Without a drafting partner, David fell down a lap to the leaders as a pack of twenty trucks passed him with five laps to go in the 100-lap race.
Just as the field came by the start/finish line with four laps to go, the second huge crash happened right in front of David’s Zachry No.81. The race was red flagged while track crews cleaned up the mess from the nine-truck pile-up that severely damaged several contending trucks. David was able to navigate the debris and spinning trucks to earn the lucky dog award.
With the clean up complete, a green-white checker would determine the outcome of the race. David was able to get into the draft in the outside line, but was unable to make forward progress due to the damage to the nose of his Toyota. Starr came across the line in 13th behind Michael Waltrip who narrowly beat Elliott Sadler at the checkers.
“Its kind of hard to describe my feelings, we came here with pretty high expectations.” Starr said. “Bobby Dotter, Jason Miller, my engineer Matt Faulkner, our sponsor Zachry and myself all got together and made the decision to hold back when the race started. When they dropped the green we just dropped to the back; we just wanted to ride and come to the last 20 laps we were going to go race hard. It worked out good as were able to avoid a couple of big crashes we figured would happen.”
“With about 19 laps to go coming out of turn four I finally went wide open. I really hadn’t run wide open the whole race; I was just cruising, taking care of our equipment, but now it was time to go. Then coming out of turn four I was on the high side with a couple other trucks starting to pull up to the lead draft and the next thing I knew a truck got turned right into me and sent me spinning. It took us out of contention for the win, but we never gave up. The guys on the crew did an excellent job working on the truck all night long. We were able to get the lucky dog and we brought it home 13th.”
“We had an excellent, excellent truck and we wanted to bring home a better finish than that. All in all, it was not bad. We would have liked to get a top-five finish but that wasn’t to be, it could have been a lot worse. When you look at all the torn up trucks in the garage area our truck is not bad, it’s mostly cosmetic damage and the guys will get this truck fixed so we can take it to Talladega.”
“All in all it’s not bad; not quite the start we wanted but we’re ninth in the points and we can go to Phoenix and go really racing now, I think we’ve got a good race truck for next week.”
Starr and the SS Green Light Racing team will head west to Phoenix for a Friday night showdown in the Lucas Oil 150.
For more information on SS Green Light Racing visit www.SSRacingonline.com or email: pr@ssracingonline.com.
