On Thursday, before all on-track activity was cancelled on Friday and Saturday, NASCAR Sprint Cup Series drivers were asked about how the will prepare during practice.
“Yeah, we learned a lot. When we unloaded in race trim and really only made one lap in qualifying trim today just because we needed to run through a bunch of things to see where the balance needed to be and applied all that to our qualifying stuff to adjust the balance. So, hopefully we can hopefully go back, and that’s usually what our guys do the best, is put all the pieces together and apply that to race stuff. So, we’ve already been talking about that some. But it is definitely going to be punching a lot of numbers and going through a lot of things that we did because that’s really what we focused on today, was race trim,” said Kevin Harvick, who will start on the pole position in the Bank of America 500.
“I think so. I think the race track gained a lot more grip than we all thought it was going to. In the past looking at previous years qualifying we haven’t really picked up from practice speeds and we picked up four tenths of a second. Kind of we know a little more of the direction it’s going to go, but at the same time I feel like a lot of the rubber is going to go away with the rain. We are kind of just going to have to wait and see what it does. We could very well be racing in the day on Sunday. I don’t think any of us really know what is going to happen here. Hopefully, it’s a night race, I feel like that is going to suit our car a little more. Charlotte tends to free up at night and we were pretty tight in practice, but either way I think we are going to have a great car,” said Alex Bowman, who will start second, after qualifying.
We unloaded in race trim instead of qualifying trim in order to work on some race stuff and kind of get some of that out of the way. Through this practice, we at least used a set of tires in order to concentrate on that, swapped over to qualifying trim because we do feel like we’re going to qualifying tonight – there’s no weather looming for that – so we needed to make sure that we were going to have a good car for qualifying and that’s pretty much it. If it’s a wash out tomorrow, we got what we got. We’ll just have to go off notes and what we did here in the spring, obviously what the 78 (Martin Truex Jr.) did here in the spring – they were really, really good – so we feel like we’ve got a good baseline to base ourselves off of,” said Kyle Busch.
Today’s Bank of America 500 will be on Performance Racing Network, and simulcasted on NBC and NBCSN at 12:00 p.m. EST. The Drive for the Cure 300 for the NASCAR Xfinity Series will race 45 minutes after the checkered flies in the Sprint Cup race. That race will be on NBCSN and Performance Racing Network.
- Busch Sweeps at Bristol - August 20, 2017
- Busch Wins UNOH 200 From Pole - August 17, 2017
- Busch Scores NCWTS Bristol Pole - August 16, 2017