Hamlin to Compete in 2021 eNASCAR ProInvitational Series

Season Outlook: Denny Hamlin will compete in the 10-race 2021 season of the eNASCAR ProInvitational Series, the iRacing series that showcases top-level NASCAR drivers performing in simulators on virtual racetracks. The series launched in 2020 during NASCAR’s nine-week hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving drivers the opportunity to continue competing while working from home.

Hamlin won two ProInvitational Series races in 2020 – the inaugural event at Homestead-Miami Speedway and the series finale at North Wilkesboro Speedway. Just as memorable as the wins was an incident during the Talladega Superspeedway race when Hamlin’s seven-year-old daughter inadvertently turned off his simulator’s monitors mid-race, causing him to finish last.

FedEx, the primary sponsor of the #11 Toyota in the NASCAR Cup Series, will once again carry over into the iRacing series as Hamlin kicks off the season Wednesday in the virtual FedEx Freight Toyota.

Hamlin iRacing Statistics:
Starts:169
Wins: 32
Top-5s: 77
Poles: 31

Series Schedule (FS1):
Wednesday, March 24 – Bristol Dirt (8 p.m. ET)
Wednesday, April 21 – Talladega (7 p.m. ET)
Wednesday, May 5 – Darlington (8 p.m. ET)
Wednesday, May 19 – COTA (7 p.m. ET)
Wednesday, June 2 – Track TBD (8 p.m. ET)
*Second half of schedule (NBC) to be released at a later date

For more series information, visit www.enascar.com.

Toyota Racing – Kyle Busch
NASCAR Cup Series Quotes

BRISTOL, Tenn. (March 24, 2021) – Joe Gibbs Racing driver Kyle Busch was made available to media via videoconference prior to the Bristol event today:

KYLE BUSCH, No. 18 M&M’s Messages Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing

What do you think about Ty Gibbs?

“I think Ty is very passionate. His family – ever since he has been alive – he’s known his family in racing, so he’s grown up in racing, just being around a race team and what Joe (Gibbs) has always done, having Coy (Gibbs) now a bigger part of the organization. It’s been really cool to see him grow up, get to know him. I remember Jackson (Gibbs), which is the oldest one of J.D.’s sons, I remember him coming to the racetrack at nine, 10 or 11 years old, something like that, and sitting with Samantha (Busch) on the pit box. I guess I’ve been around a long time with these kids, and it’s neat to see them grow up and having the passion for the sport that they still do, especially with Ty and Ty wanting to be involved in racing. He’s been a huge part of the iRacing stuff and helping me get into the iRacing thing last year and now seeing him full-fledged in ARCA and having the success that he’s had there, and of course having early, great success in the Xfinity Series. I think it’s just been amazing to watch. He’s grown up in the short tracks, he’s grown up on the go-karts that Brexton (Busch) is doing. It’s been fun to see him grow up the ranks to where he’s at today, still having that same type of success.”

What is your outlook on Bristol?

“For me, I’m not a dirt guy. I didn’t grow up like Kyle Larson. Kyle Larson is known as a dirt guy, but I did race dirt when I was a kid. I raced Legend cars, modifieds, all on dirt, and then pavement ever since. I did run the super late models on dirt with the Prelude races that Tony (Stewart) had years ago. I was able to finish first, second, third in a few of those, so it was pretty fun. Those cars are made for dirt. Every time people ask, why won’t you race a truck– these things are just so heavy, and the tire is not at all indictive to producing grip. It seems like it’s a full-fledged ice rink, like literally, you are just out there on ice, trying to make your way around the track. That’s why I’ve never given much participation to it, but obviously now, I have no choice. It’s in the Cup Series, so we will go out there and give it everything we’ve got and see what we can do. Our team has really relied heavily on Kyle Busch Motorsports (KBM) as to what we’ve done with the trucks and the Truck Series with the success that we’ve had. We’ve won with Bubba Wallace. We’ve won with Christopher Bell. We could have won another one with Christopher, I feel like, but we had some things happen in that race. It’s just going to be a learning experience for sure. These vehicles are nothing like I’ve driven on dirt, probably, so it’s going to be interesting.”

What is the importance of the heat races and the practices?

“I don’t know. I don’t really know what to expect. The biggest thing is just what the track is going to be, what state is the track going to be in. They talk about heavy, and in our team meeting yesterday, I was talking about heavy, and Christopher Bell looked at me and was like what are you talking about. The dirt race we had the other night, it was never heavy. He’s talking about mud getting plastered to your visor and you having to do tear-offs every straightaway, but the heaviest it was when we ran the other night was just little specks kind of hitting you on the visor. You can’t really have that with our cars, because you are just going to get mud on the windshields and then you are not going to be able to see. You don’t have the opportunity to pull visors, so it’s going to have to be more dry slick, more slippery through much of the event and you are just going to have to be ready for whatever conditions come on the track, knowing those conditions are always going to change. I don’t know if it’s really going to be much car and setup and stuff like that involved, as much as it’s just going to be the race car driver and trying to figure out what lines your car works best in and making the most of the opportunity.”

Can you talk about your Twitter interaction with Denny Hamlin?

“Fortunately, I got to the meeting literally like 30 seconds before he did, so I shot that picture before he got there, just to make sure I had ammunition to call him out, and as soon as I was done taking the photo, he walked in the door. I made sure before the meeting started to blast that out there and get it going. We are just having some fun, digging some points at each other. It’s crazy what people do and say on social media all of the time. They have no representation of what the truth is or anything else. Somebody was talking about how none of our desks face each other, well, the picture was only half of the room. The other half of the room looks the exact same way, so there is half of the room looking at the other half of the room with screens on all four walls. It’s a great dynamic that we have there. We were just poking fun at one another and obviously, he’s helping me out and trying to make Kyle great again.”

Do the drivers with dirt experience have an advantage?

“The dirt guys I would say definitely have an advantage. The more experience you have on dirt, the more trust you have in what the vehicle can do on dirt and what your driving style is or what your driving technique can be and how you can trust the grip level that the dirt has versus what your car has. I think there’s a lot of things that the dirt guys can really pick up on. You always see in those truck races the guys that are good at it, that put some time into it, are better than the ones that are not. I can’t name them all, but (Kyle) Larson, Christopher (Bell), (Tyler) Reddick, even Bubba (Wallace). Bubba never really had any dirt experience, but he did a good job in the Eldora race for us. (Stewart) Friesen, I think he will actually do a really good job. He’s obviously known as a dirt guy. Those guys will shine, and I think that they will be faster during points of the weekend, but I think it’s all going to be circumstantial on how it comes down to the end and what exactly happens towards the finish.”

Did Joe Gibbs Racing lean on Kyle Busch Motorsports with their dirt experience?

“Definitely. We were an open book as far as all the experiences that we have had with Eldora and the races that we’ve run on dirt over there. Setup stuff, I don’t know how much of that can be the same, but definitely some of the pieces and components, and the things that we would do in order to prepare for the dirt race. One of them is as simple as just knowing that you need a Swiffer in your car. The cars build enough dust and dirt and there’s enough static electricity on the windshield, the plexiglass, that it will pick up and keep the dirt on the inside of the windows, so you need something to clean off the windows under yellow, so it’s just little stuff like that, that I think is imperative to your success at the Bristol dirt race.”

Do you feel like you are finally turning things around with the No. 18 team?

“Yes and no. Certainly, I don’t want to get too far ahead of anything, but I will say the guys – Ben (Beshore, crew chief) and Jaik (Halpainy, race engineer) and Seth (Chavka, race engineer) did a great job of working on a good setup for Atlanta. We were fast right at the start of the race. We drove our way up towards the front. We kept clawing all day long, every time we had setbacks too, we’d get back towards the front. It was nice to have that speed in our race car that we could perform like that – to be ourselves and be in a position to have a good run, just trying to make up too much on pit road with us having a new guy on the pit crew, we are kind of a little bit behind on pit stops this year. I was trying to make sure we didn’t lose too many spots, and we sped. I say we, because we are a team, and we win, and we lose as a team. We’re trying to figure all of this out together right now and make sure that we can continue to improve as the year goes along in order to be the best when it matters most.”

What is that pit crew member change?

“Our old front tire changer was injured late last year and through the offseason just never was able to fully recover, so I have a new front changer. Honestly, I’m not even sure of his name. We haven’t met yet with protocols and everything right now, it’s kind of hard to get too close to those guys. We will hope that we can pick it up.”

How do you feel about your program going into Martinsville?

“I look forward getting to Martinsville. Ben (Beshore, crew chief) last year was crew chief for Harrison Burton, and it was the first time the Xfinity cars had been to Martinsville in a long time, so there was no practice, they literally just lined it up and raced at Martinsville, and they were super-fast. Harrison was able to win that race. Ben was with me when we were successful at Martinsville, the years that we won in ’15 and ’17, so I’m looking forward to getting there, and hopefully we have some things in store for us to be fast.”

What are your thoughts on the Noah Gragson/Daniel Hemric incident?

“Noah (Gragson) is a fiery guy. He’s had his personality out there for a long time, and he’s always been a fun, easy going type of guy that likes to have a good time but does focus on his work and tries really hard at his work. I don’t think he’s any different than any other race car driver. They want to win. They want to be their best each and every week. I’m just not sure that he knew the exact situation that was happening on pit road, because certainly my visual coming down pit road is that I focus on my pit sign and that’s where I’m trying to go to get into my pit box. When the 18 (Daniel Hemric) was turning into his pit box, there was another car there. I don’t know if Noah saw the full picture of all of that, and just assumed that the 18 was messing with him. Sometimes you’ve got to take things with a grain of salt, go back and watch the film and talk to a guy, but right then and there in that instance, he backed up, backed up too far, whatever, and made a situation happen out of something that didn’t need to be one. I think that all of us our guilty of that. I’m guilty of that. I’ve probably seen things from inside the race car that weren’t exactly what they looked like on TV, so it’s a matter of growth. He’s been into with it with a few of the drivers out there, fortunately, he and I haven’t had any issues. I think it’s kind of the driver etiquette, driver code. You race those how you expect to get raced, and when that changes, the dynamic between those two drivers changes.”

Do you think this is good for the sport and what would be your advice to Noah Gragson?

“It’s a slippery slope. You certainly want to be careful. There’re ways you can climb your way to the top of that mountain, but if you slip too big, you are going to have an avalanche down. Just be careful in the ways that you do it and what you do. I don’t think he’s done anything wrong per say, it’s just a matter of building that persona and how much of that persona do you build. The biggest thing for me if I were giving advice to Noah (Gragson) is you need to put a little more focus on you, yourself, your team and less on everybody else and go out there and win races. He was super-fast at Homestead, highly impressive with what he was doing there, and he should have won that race, but ultimately, it didn’t happen. There are hundreds of YouTube videos out there of Kyle Busch after a race which he dominated and didn’t win where he’s pissed off afterwards, so I’m guilty of it too. It’s a racing incident. It’s stuff that happens. I’ve grown to understand a little more of that as I’ve gotten older, so I’m sure he will too.”

Are you using what you are getting from the simulator?

“I guess to answer your question, I don’t need to go to the sim any more, because I’ve actually been on the West Coast, so I haven’t been in town to go to the sim the last two week, so there was no pre-Phoenix test prep and there was no pre-Atlanta prep on sim. That’s some interesting points that are out there. I just wasn’t around to be able to do it. We’ve certainly built our notebook so far and we will continue to build our notebook. (Martin) Truex and I looked really close in the first run of the race at Phoenix, where we were handling the same. He hit the wall off of turn two about two laps after I hit the wall off of turn two, so they just came to pit road and made some wholesale adjustments to their car that really made it take off. We made some adjustments to our car this weekend in Atlanta that literally was a half a round out of the right rear during the race and we went from being kind of okay, like a fourth-place car, to a 12th place car with a half a round adjustments. There’s a lot that can happen with those adjustments on pit road, so we are learning that stuff right now. I know Ben (Beshore, crew chief) is learning that stuff. He doesn’t have that experience. Jaik (Halpainy) and Seth (Chavka), my engineers, they’ve been in the Cup Series for a couple years on the 20, so we are all debriefing and talking about each and everything that we do and what magnitude those things feel like to me so that they can help build their knowledge in what we need to do going forward.”

About Toyota

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Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Ford Zoom Media Availability | Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Chris Buescher, driver of the No. 17 Fastenal Ford Mustang in the NASCAR Cup Series, is coming off his best finish of the season, a seventh-place run at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Sunday. Buescher was a guest on this week’s Ford Zoom call, where he answered a variety of questions from the medial.

CHRIS BUESCHER, No. 17 Fastenal Ford Mustang — TALK ABOUT THE PRACTICE SESSION ON FRIDAY AND QUALIFYING HEAT RACES ON SATURDAY. “The practice will be the most important thing and trying to figure out how to get something that drives decent, really to get us in the ballpark. We’re going in very unknowing in so many of the situations here. I ran a 604 crate late model there last week and it was a similar draw a number, run heats and build points from there and, to be real fair, I really didn’t like that system at all, so I’m not looking forward to the heat race part of it. I really wish we would have qualified more like we do everywhere else and set the field like that, but I say that because I ended up torn up in those heat races and made for a really tough start to that week. I think a lot of it is gonna be survival, trying to do decent in the heat races to get a good starting position. I don’t completely understand the system, but I haven’t done much dirt racing in my past at all, so, like I said, we’ll work on practice, we’ll get it driving decent, we’ll go into the heat and try to get some points without tearing our race car up and that way we’ll find ourselves ready for a really long dirt race.”

HOW DO YOU LOOK AT THE IRACING PRO INVITATIONAL? “We’re gonna be doing quite a few of those this season, so the first one on dirt will be an interesting way to kick it off. Roush Fenway has been working hard on getting an e-sports room setup at the shop so that we can actually go in and run these iRacing invitationals, so that we can be more prepared and try and learn what we can from it. I know with iRacing they typically scan all the racetracks and everything is very accurate to what the track surface is, but to my knowledge the dirt hasn’t been here long enough for them to go through that process to do it that way. My understanding, and this was several weeks ago, was the surface is kind of a best-guess and artist rendering of it, so I don’t know that we’re gonna learn as much from it in that regard, but it will still be fun and a very interesting way to kick off our iRacing league.”

AFTER YOUR EXPERIENCE LAST WEEK ARE YOU LOOKING MORE FORWARD TO IT OR LESS FORWARD TO IT? “Actually about the same. I had a really good time last week running that 604 car. I think I’m gonna do a little bit more dirt racing when we get time and some of the events like Talladega we’re already there. The dirt track is right behind the speedway, so it’s a good opportunity to go get a little bit more seat time in, so I had a blast doing it. From that aspect of it, I’m looking forward to it. I’ve enjoyed the dirt racing part of it. I’ve enjoyed the handful of ARCA races I’ve done in the past. We were fortunate enough to get one of those ARCA wins at DuQuoin, I believe it was, so it’s something I like doing. It’s kind of like road racing. It’s not in my background at all, but I just like doing stuff that’s a little bit different from time to time, so I am looking forward to it. Like I said, the heat races and the points added up from passing and cumulative finishing position and all that other stuff, I don’t like that just because it’s very far away from what we usually do to set our field. My only experience with that was last week and a lot of luck went into it and a lot of bad luck ended up for us having a rough week. Other than that, I am looking forward to it. I think it’s gonna be pretty neat. I’ve been wishing we would go to a dirt track since I’ve been in the Cup Series and since the trucks have been doing it I think it’s put on a pretty good show every time. I think it’s gonna be fun. I think I’m gonna enjoy it because it is something new. I hate that we lost a concrete Bristol race. Bristol being my favorite racetrack I wish this one would have been added onto our other two races at Bristol and we would have had those opportunities, but at the end of the day it’s neat that we’re gonna be giving something a shot.”

HOW PHYSICAL DO YOU THINK THIS RACE WILL BE COMPARED TO A REGULAR SHORT TRACK EVENT? “It’s gonna be way less physical than a concrete Bristol. The loads that are put on you are going to be a lot less. You’re gonna have more breathing room as long as you’re not hacking up dust. I think from the physical side of things it’s also half the distance. Our lap times will be significantly slower, so the time in the race car will probably end up netting out close. You think of Atlanta, for instance. We just came back from there. Atlanta you would think would wear you out way more than a high-grip racetrack like Texas or Charlotte or any of these other mile-and-a-halves, or Vegas, but Atlanta, even though you’re working the wheel a lot more, the pace falls off and the loads that you get in your body are actually a lot less as you get through a run, so it ends up not being quite as physically draining. That’s been my experience anyway. Other drivers might tell you something different, but I don’t feel like the physical aspect of Bristol on dirt is going to be harder than it would be on concrete, especially at half the distance.”

WHAT ABOUT CONTACT BETWEEN CARS? WILL THERE BE MORE OR LESS? “It’ll be way more. We’ll have cars looking even rougher than they typically do leaving Bristol, I believe. The bright side of that is we do not have splitters on the cars, so I think typically when you have issues hitting fenders or running into each other the splitter wins every time over a tire. There’s just no give to them, so I think all the time you’re worried about cutting tires down from contact with the splitter, we won’t have that. The noses are pretty flexible now that that piece is gone, so I think it does open it up to being able to push and shove a little bit more. That being said, you’ve got to make it to the end still, so I don’t know that the dirt turtles that were on the inside of the track will still be there for our race that were there last week. I’d imagine they will be due to the circumstances that they were put in and the reasoning behind it, so that will be something that you will watch out for. That was an issue for cars tucking noses up under, tearing stuff up with essentially it’s turtles like we had at the road courses, but they’re piled in with clay so they’re very aggressive and very destructive as well, so we’ll be looking out to try and stay off of those and try and stay off of other cars as much as possible, but you’re gonna have a lot of beating and banging that’s not really going to be on purpose. It’s just gonna come with everybody trying to figure this out.”

WILL IT BE MARTINSVILLE BEFORE YOU HAVE A GOOD HANDLE ON WHERE YOUR SHORT TRACK PROGRAM IS? HOW DO YOU ENVISION THAT RACE GOING? “It will definitely be Martinsville. This Bristol dirt race is not going to tell us anything from where we believe our short track program is. It’s completely a one off. We’re doing things to our race car that we never even thought of before. It’s just completely outside of our wheelhouse, so we’ll take it for what it is and it’s an exhibition of sorts, so we’ll go and enjoy that, but it’s gonna take getting to Martinsville to really figure out where we’re at and what we think we have, so what I will say is some of the road racing parts and pieces seem to carry over to short tracks and we felt like the Daytona Road Course went really well for us this year, both of the races we got to run, and we had speed. We didn’t quite get the finishes that we should have, but we definitely had speed and so that makes us hopeful when we go to short tracks that we’re gonna have the grip in the car and we’re gonna have the forward drive that’s gonna make us pretty competitive and Martinsville is a place that I’ve steadily gotten better at and I think that we had pretty good runs last season as well, so we are looking at that as our telltale for those short tracks. You can’t really get a read off of just one race, but it’ll definitely help point us in the right direction and head towards what we feel like is gonna be our biggest focus.”

IS THROTTLE CONTROL GOING TO BE A BIG FACTOR? SOME DRIVERS WISH THEY HAD LESS HORSEPOWER. DO YOU AGREE WITH THAT? “I don’t know yet, but I would say the information that I’ve heard from some of the truck teams and truck drivers leaving Eldora is they did detune their motors or the carburetor to make less power. More than likely, that’s gonna be the case at Bristol as well. The only asterisk I’d put next to that is the amount of banking that is still in the track with the dirt it is less than our concrete track, but it is a lot for a dirt track. I watched the tractors out there trying to prep it last Saturday and literally slide down the hill unable to even get to the top, so there’s still a ton of banking and I believe that will put a lot of load in the cars and make it to where you might be able to use more power than you think, more than Eldora for sure. It will really kind of depend on where the track goes as well, so that’s the big thing. I have no clue of what to expect as the track goes from wet to tacky to dried out to slicked over and sealed off to rubbered up. There are so many different factors that are going to go into how much throttle you can use, but at the end of the day if you have the power, you don’t have to use it. That’s gonna come down to control with our right foot and how we feel we’re able to manage our power and tires and manage the racetrack.”

WHAT SURPRISED YOU ABOUT BRISTOL AND WHAT ARE THE PROS AND CONS OF A 250 LAP DIRT RACE THERE? “Let’s start with the cons. We don’t know what durability is gonna be for a dirt race this long for track conditions and how the track is gonna change throughout that. There are just a ton of unknowns in it, so what I noticed and what caught me off guard really was the amount of dust. I’ve been to dirt races and it’s gotten dusty, but not quite to this extent. We were there racing from, some of the days we were racing at 9 a.m. all the way until the curfew at 1 a.m. It was a ton of racing on track and what I noticed during the day and in the afternoon, which is when we’re going to actually be starting, is they can’t keep enough moisture in it so the dust is just insane. I was fortunate enough that I got some Wiley X safety glasses that actually have some foam seal around them that helped me be able to see. It took a lot of working on the helmet to try to get it to where I was able to keep dirt out of my eyes early on in those afternoon races, and then once we got into the night it was significantly better, but still on the dusty side. Again, a lot of unknowns, a lot of what we don’t know — 250 laps at that track with the stage breaks. I’m sitting over here thinking we’re gonna have to prep the track in between stages or water it to keep up with it. I don’t know that that’s gonna be the case, but from what I saw it seems like it’s just about inevitable.”

WHEN YOU WERE GROWING UP IN TEXAS DID YOU EVER GO TO DEVIL’S BOWL SPEEDWAY? “I’ll give you a two-part answer. I did make it to Devil’s Bowl, but the impression that it left on me is almost non-existent because I was way too young. I can’t remember the experience at all. I remember I got a t-shirt from there and had it until I was way too big to be able to wear it, but I really can’t remember much out of it. We did very little dirt track racing growing up. I ran motocross for a couple years out there and none of that applies. It’s so wildly out in left field compared to even what we’re doing now seems strange to us, but that was on a whole other level.”

IN THE LAPS YOU WERE ABLE TO RUN LAST WEEK AT BRISTOL, WHAT PART OF YOUR EXPERIENCE DO YOU THINK WILL TRANSLATE TO A CUP CAR? “It’s actually a really good question because I left there wondering the same thing. I purposely ran a crate car that was lower on horsepower than the supers. We were hoping that it wouldn’t have all of the same characteristics of a super that are just so insane when you watch rear end movement, speeds, being able to run right around the top and have enough power and grip to make that work. What we left with was a race car that would wrap the bottom. The rear end would move all over the place and had tons of bite, and tires that were way softer than what we’re gonna have. I mean, it’s just a lot of those variables that I don’t have a good answer. I think that, for me, it was good to feel the track. Nothing is quite like being on the actual racetrack. The same reason when we go to road courses you’ll see drivers go run and IMSA car beforehand. It’s not gonna carry over much from a vehicle dynamics standpoint, but you were on the track, you know your visuals, you know bumps, you know curbs. It’s very similar for the dirt, I think, with the exception that the dirt will change. Now, I do have some knowledge of that and where it went, where some of the holes started and where they will continue to develop as they do more racing there. I think that we will all be watching the truck race very closely. I know a lot of Cup Series drivers chose to try and run the trucks to have something that’s even more similar to the Cup car, and that may end up being the absolute right call or the closest to the correct call that we could have made, but at the end of the day I think I did come out with knowledge of the track, knowledge of a little bit of what to expect and, to be fair, I had a blast doing it to the point where I’m gonna try to pursue a handful more of those 604 races through this season, but I hope I got enough out of it to justify going up there and spending the week and having the late nights and the early mornings, but if it wasn’t enough knowledge, it was a lot of fun.”

HOW PLEASED ARE YOU WITH THE START OF THE SEASON? “Overall, pretty happy. I think we have discovered our mile-and-a-half stuff has made some pretty big leaps and that’s thrilling. That’s a very large part of our schedule. I think that we have seen that it shows up better at the low grip racetracks, so your Homestead, your Atlanta, we’ll be looking at Darlington and maybe a little bit of Kansas. We would have been looking at it at Chicago, but it’s a lot of plusses from that side of things. We ran, I think it was 14th at Vegas. My memory is shot. I hit walls too hard, but I think our mile-and-a-half program in general is better. At the beginning of the year, the superspeedway, we know we have fast race cars when we go to superspeedways. We didn’t get a chance to show it with the melee that happened 15 laps into the race, so we don’t have anything to show out of the 500, but we know we’re gonna have fast superspeedway cars. Our road course program was way better this time around and we’ve been working really hard on that. I’ve been working hard with some driver coaches as well, trying to learn as much as Ryan and I possibly can getting ready for all of these new road courses. If you term Phoenix into a short track, which I don’t know that we really will, Phoenix was our low point to start the season and it was not good, so we’re working really hard on that, trying to figure out why and how to make that better, how to make that translate into Richmond better, but, for the most part, I’m really happy with the progress that’s been made. Everybody back at the shop worked really really hard this offseason and they always do, but we had a game plan and actions were set into place and we accomplished a lot of our goals. We have a lot more to go yet, but, overall, very pleased and very thankful that everybody was able to find speed in all of the little places that make our cars go a little bit quicker every week.”

WHY DO YOU FEEL THERE HAS BEEN SO MUCH FOCUS AND DISCUSSION ABOUT THIS BRISTOL DIRT RACE? “That’s a really good question because I’ve wondered the same thing. We’ve talked about it a little bit, it is a one off. The best way I can figure is it’s kind of a wild card and we say that knowing you’re gonna have your dirt racers that are gonna be competitive, but the same time anything can happen at that and I think everybody is looking at it as a fairly equal opportunity to win a race and win their way into the playoffs. I think that’s why you’re seeing so much focus on it. Also, I think that it is so new to everyone that it started out with, ‘Hey, we just need to talk to somebody who knows a little bit about dirt racing,’ to alright, the next thing you know we’ve got dirt aces in our shop trying to tell us what to do to these race cars, got us worrying about mud buildup in the grille, knocking oil pump belts or power-steering belts off, dust, dirt, where it goes, all of those other issues and I think it just became everybody trying to take in so much knowledge that it probably looks like we’re doing a little bit more than we really are, but we’re just trying to make sure that we’re prepared to survive the thing and then at the same time trying to make sure that we can be in a position to where we can take advantage if it does become one of those wild card races. You’re absolutely right. It’s a one off. It’s gonna come and go and it’ll be behind us, but everybody is working hard to make sure that it’s a good opportunity for them to go win a race.”

HOW MUCH WAS ATLANTA A CONFIDENCE BOOST FOR YOU AND DOES THAT CARRY INTO A WEEKEND WHERE THINGS ARE A LITTLE DIFFERENT? “To an extent, yeah. I think Atlanta was an awesome race for us. It wasn’t a winning race for us because of what we want and what we’re working hard to get back to, but we had a lot of confidence after Homestead for our mile-and-a-halves. Vegas was pretty decent. It wasn’t as good as Homestead was, but then we had Atlanta circles as a place that’s very similar to Homestead that we thought a lot of this stuff would tie into and carry over, and it ultimately did. We did not have to work very hard to adjust the race car during the day. We hit our balance very close off the truck and we had good speed short run and especially long run, so there was a lot of good that came out of it. To be fair, I think the dirt racing the week ahead of Atlanta probably helped. When you run into the corner at 100 or something miles an hour at Bristol and just sling it sideways getting a little bit loose at Atlanta did not feel so bad anymore, and then with that we had a good run at Atlanta, so we’ll take that momentum and head into Bristol knowing that I’ve already been on track as well and try and enjoy it as much as we can because I do think it will be fun and we should be able to take it for what it is. We’ve got to go race. Things are gonna happen that are gonna be out of our control. It’s not gonna go perfect. It’s not gonna be as smooth as you want it to be, but, ultimately it will be a good time, it will be new. We’re gonna have a bunch of fans that are gonna be able to watch it live and in person and I’m sure tuning in on the radio and on TV that are really gonna want to see this for the first time, so we’re absolutely gonna take that momentum and enjoy this weekend whatever may come of it, but definitely look at it as a pretty awesome opportunity for us to go sling a little dirt.”