JUSTIN HALEY | KAZ GRALA
Chicago Street Race Advance
Event Overview
● Event: Grant Park 165 (Round 20 of 36)
● Time/Date: 4:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday, July 7
● Location: Chicago Street Course
● Layout: 2.2-mile, 12-turn street course
● Laps/Miles: 75 laps/165 miles
● Stage Lengths: Stage 1: 20 laps / Stage 2: 25 laps / Final Stage: 30 laps
● TV/Radio: NBC / MRN / SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
Justin Haley, Driver of the No. 51 Pinnacle Home Improvements Ford Mustang Dark Horse
● The NASCAR Cup Series takes to the streets of Chicago Sunday for the Grant Park 165. Justin Haley, driver of the No. 51 Pinnacle Home Improvements Ford Mustang Dark Horse, started last year’s inaugural event on the 2.2-mile, 12-turn circuit in 37th after contact with the wall in practice, then fought through heavy rain and standing water on the course to take the lead during a caution on lap 48. Haley led 23 laps before giving up the top spot to eventual winner Shane Van Gisbergen with just four laps remaining and crossed the start-finish line near Buckingham Fountain in second for his best finish of 2023.
● Chicago marks the third of five road-course events on the 2024 schedule. In the season’s first, at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas, Haley was running 17th on the final lap before the team’s result was disqualified during postrace technical inspection. Haley qualified 13th and spent most of the 68-lap race in the top-10. The second road-course event, at Sonoma (Calif.) Raceway, also saw the No. 51 Rick Ware Racing (RWR) machine in the top-10 before power steering issues ended Haley’s race 12-laps short of the checkered flag.
● In 21 Cup Series road-course starts, Haley has two top-five finishes and three top-10s. In addition to last year’s runner-up finish in Chicago, Haley finished fifth at the Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway Roval in 2022.
● Haley is fresh off a 13th-place finish at Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway, his best result at the 1.333-mile, concrete oval and his second top-13 finish in the last three races. The 25-year-old driver was faced with a prerace inspection issue that required the team to serve a pass-through penalty. Haley passed leader Christopher Bell prior to the conclusion of Stage 1 to regain a lap. The move placed the No. 51 just one lap down to the leaders and in position to wavearound at the stage break to rejoin the lead lap.
● With 19 races complete, Haley is ranked seventh among drivers in laps completed (5,406) and first among Ford drivers.
Kaz Grala, Driver of the No. 15 Remixers.com Ford Mustang Dark Horse
● Kaz Grala, driver of No. 15 Remixers.com Ford Mustang Dark Horse, will make his street-course debut in the Cup Series on the circuit surrounding downtown Chicago’s Grant Park. In last year’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race on the temporary, 12-turn layout, Grala started 25th and passed Connor Mosack for 10th place on lap 23, only seven laps into the second stage. Just two laps later, the race was red-flagged for lightning in the area. The race was eventually called with just 25 laps completed and Grala emerged with his third top-10 of the 2023 season.
● In four Cup Series starts on road courses, Grala owns one top-10 finish, a seventh-place result earned in the 2020 event on the Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway road course.
● Grala earned a 27th-place finish in the first road-course event of the season at COTA and followed that up with a 23rd-place run at Sonoma in which he was plagued by power-steering issues.
● The 25-year-old Grala cut his teeth racing sportscars before making his way to NASCAR’s premier series. The experience making left- and right-hand turns led Grala to a pair of top-fives and five top-10s over nine road-course starts in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, and four top-fives and eight top-10s in 19 Xfinity Series starts.
Rick Ware Racing Notes
● Modified driver and RWR Suspension and Driveline Specialist Tim Brown earned his 100th win at the famed Bowman Gray Stadium (BGS) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina last Saturday to become the first driver in NASCAR Regional history to accomplish the feat at a single track. It was Brown’s second win of the season and a victory earned by besting rival Burt Myers in a 25-lap sprint race. The winningest Modified driver in BGS history, Brown claimed his first win on May 8, 1993 and his first BGS Modified championship in 1996. In his more than three decades of racing at BGS, Brown has collected a record 12 Modified titles, the most recent coming in 2022, and 141 race starts from the pole.
● The Progressive American Flat Track (AFT) series will compete at the DuQuoin (Ill.) Mile for the 10th event of the season Friday and Saturday after having visited the Lima (Ohio) Half-Mile last weekend. AFT Singles rider and defending class champion Kody Kopp finished second at Lima, ending a three-race win streak. The runner-up finish was Kopp’s eighth podium in nine events completed. He holds onto the top spot in the championship standings by 32 points. Mission SuperTwins rider Briar Bauman finished fifth at Lima, and is currently fourth in the standings with two podium finishes, including a win at the Ventura Short Track in Chico, California.
● Mission Foods NHRA Drag Racing Series Top Fuel driver Clay Millican picked up another first round win in last weekend’s events in Norwalk, Ohio. The racer is eighth in points as the series takes a break before heading to Northwest Nationals in Seattle, Washington July 19-21.
● Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age six when the third-generation racer began his driving career and has since spanned four wheels and two wheels on both asphalt and dirt. Competing in the SCCA Trans Am Series and other road-racing divisions led Ware to NASCAR in the early 1980s, where he finished third in his NASCAR debut – the 1983 Warner W. Hodgdon 300 NASCAR Grand American race at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway. More than a decade later, injuries would force Ware out of the driver seat and into fulltime team ownership. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with wife Lisa by his side, Ware has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that fields two fulltime entries in the NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning successful teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track and FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX), where RWR won the 2022 SX2 championship with rider Shane McElrath.
Justin Haley, Driver Q&A
What do you think will be the biggest opportunity or challenge as the Cup Series visits Chicago for the second time?
“What’s good is we’ve been there. I think it was such a shock last year for the whole industry that you almost couldn’t focus on the racecar or the race. The ‘garage’ is on a street and the driver’s meeting is in a building down the street, you’re in a hotel instead of a motorhome, and you’re walking through a city to get everywhere. Everything was different than what we’re used to every other weekend. Plus, it was raining, and pretty heavily at times. So I feel like this year the initial shock of the whole street circuit is is kind of gone. We know the lay of the land. So now we can go and focus on the racing.”
How important is it to participate in the track walk before practice and quaifying?
“We don’t really know what we’re dealing with until the track walk. What’s changed with the road surface – potholes or other repairs, the location of the manhole covers, bumps, seams, paint – anything that could be an obstacle. Going into the second year, NASCAR probably refined a lot of things like barrier replacement or braking markers. I think the track walk is good at a place like Chicago. The bigger teams all have these big cameras and I don’t know what they do with them, but they take videos of every corner and pictures and stuff. And usually it’s just me and my teammate walking and doing the old foot scrub thing you do on the track. You’re like, ‘Well, you’ve got pavement,’ and then you go on with your day.”
The track was new last year, and weather conditions were not ideal, but you led laps late in the race and finished second. Is there anything you can take from the experience for this weekend?
“Last year was the most unprepared I’ve ever felt as a racecar driver when showing up at a track. We started last after I got in the wall during practice and we were all going into the start of the race having no idea what was about to happen. Thankfully, being at the back, I had a little more room to work with than the guys up front going into turn one. But yeah, I think the overall experience is going to be a big opportunity. We’re all more prepared, but running up front and having the information from last year to lean on really helps. I can say that I’m definitely going in with more confidence this year and I think we’ve been so good lately that we’re going to have a lot of fun this weekend.”
Kaz Grala, Driver Q&A
Passing has been a hot topic. Do you feel qualifying is where the race will be won or lost?
“Rain or shine, that could very well be the case. It’s just so narrow and passing is already very tough to do. You could argue that Chicago may be as bad or worse than anywhere else. There’s not a lot of room to pass. I do think qualifying will matter a lot, but with Chicago being so difficult from a track standpoint, there will be mistakes made. If your Saturday isn’t as good as you hope for it to be, if you can at least get through Sunday mistake-free and execute a really, really good race, then I think that will still pay off. We’ll have to make sure to execute Sunday because what would be a small mistake elsewhere is likely going to be a big mistake in Chicago.”
Were you impressed with the course last year for the inaugural street course event?
“I loved the event and I love the track. I was impressed with how nicely it was put together for being our first attempt at a street course. The track layout was great and I thought they did a nice job setting it up from a safety standpoint. I’m sure they picked up on some things to improve on for this year, but I loved the event. I’ve been looking forward to it all year. Speaking from the Xfinity side, the track raced really well and there were opportunities to make passes and it was just a lot of fun. I’ve been waiting for this race to come up on the schedule.”
