Sunoco Rookie Driver Earned Best Truck Series Finish at the Two-Mile Track
The No. 43 WinField Ford team will head to Michigan International Speedway this weekend after a week off from competition. Dakoda Armstrong and the team will head to Michigan refreshed and ready to continue their momentum after earning their season-best finish of 16th at Dover two weeks ago.
Armstrong has a total of four starts at the two-mile track in different racing series. He finished 11th in his lone ARCA Racing Series start and earned one Top-Three and one Top-15 finish in his three starts in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. His best finish of third came in 2012, and he’ll look to improve on that this weekend.
As an organization, RPM has two Nationwide starts and has never finished outside of the Top-20 at Michigan. The team’s best finish of 12th came in 2012 with Michael Annett behind the wheel.
@DakodaArmstrong returns to site of career-best @NASCAR_Trucks finish at @MISpeedway this weekend. #NASCAR
@Dakoda Armstrong earned his career-best NASCAR Camping World Truck Series finish of third at @Michigan International Speedway in 2012. He’ll return to the two-mile track this weekend in the Nationwide Series.
“With the new re-pave at Michigan, the groove really hasn’t gotten off the bottom. It has so much grip, and these Nationwide cars will be wide open. I think it’s starting to lose a little bit and open up the grooves, but I think it’s going to take a few more races for most of the grip to go away. When you go there, the biggest thing is you have to go wide open the whole way around and hope that your car handles well with a bunch of cars around you. I got my best Truck Series finish here in 2012, so I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do in the Nationwide car here.
“I hope this track gets to the point of the old track. It was fun because you could run the bottom for a few laps, then you could go run against the wall and then you could run the middle if you wanted to, so it was nice to be able to do that. I think it will get back, but it’s just going to take some time. It’ll be a fun race though.”
No. 43 WinField Ford
A performance and marketing driven company, Richard Petty Motorsports, co-owned by NASCAR Hall of Famer Richard Petty and successful business entrepreneurs Andrew Murstein and Douglas Bergeron, is one of the most recognized brands in all of motorsports. With a history of over 200 wins and business partnerships with national and global leaders, today the race operation fields two teams in competition in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Aric Almirola pilots the famous No. 43 Ford Fusion with primary partners Smithfield Foods, U.S. Air Force, STP, Strike Ten Entertainment and Fresh From Florida, and Marcos Ambrose drives the No. 9 machine with primary partners STANLEY, DEWALT, Mac Tools and Twisted Tea. In addition, Dakoda Armstrong wheels the No. 43 WinField Ford Mustang full-time in the NASCAR Nationwide Series. The team is headquartered in Concord, N.C.
