Food City 250

August 27, 2004
Bristol, TN

Derrike Cope usually has tremendous insight into which teams are running well, and which teams aren’t, at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway – site of Friday night’s NASCAR Busch Series race. "The guys running pretty well I don’t normally see at all. The ones having some problems getting around the place, they are usually over at our transporter, saying hello pretty quickly and then helping themselves," he laughed.

Cope drives the #49 Advil Ford on NASCAR’s Busch Series, and free samples of the product are on the back of the team transporter each week. "It’s like good news-bad news," Cope laughs. "The bad news is we’re going to Bristol. The good news is we have plenty of Advil." Regardless of the joke, Cope is looking forward to the .533-mile, high-banked speedway.

"Seriously, Bristol can be a fun place to race and I know the fans love it," he said. "When you are running well and running towards the front, Bristol can be a blast. On a night when you are not running so well, well, it’s obviously not so much fun. It might be a half-mile but things go back as quickly at Bristol as they do Talladega or Atlanta or any of the superspeedways," he said. "And when things go wrong, you can hit as hard at Bristol as you can anywhere.

"Bristol is an Advil track, through and through. You need it before the race, and most of the field needs it afterwards too."

Cope said patience and "cautious aggressiveness" were the key to success at Bristol. "You can’t get impatient, and that’s really, really hard," he said. "You get in a line of cars and one or two guys are holding everybody up, and then the guy behind you is beating on your rear end; it’s really hard to be patient. A little ‘chrome horn’ isn’t so bad but if you try to do more than that, you’re taking a chance at wrecking him and yourself. So you have to think things through a little bit – which is pretty difficult to do in a business built on instinct.

"Smart driving doesn’t always win you the race but dumb driving is usually going to lose it for you," he added. "’Smart’ means being patient when it is time to be patient, which is most of the race. It also means knowing when to go."

Derrike will be driving the #49 Advil Ford in Friday night's Busch race.

In the first practice, Derrike was 46th fastest with a time of 16.148 and speed of 118.826.

In qualifying, Derrike produced a lap of 15.805 and speed of 121.405. This was not fast enough for the top 38 so the team took a provisional and Derrike will be starting in 40th position.

In Happy Hour, Derrike was 36th fastest with a time of 16.135 and speed of 118.922.

Derrike started the race in 40th position and finished the race in 26th. He ran 23 laps in the top 10.

Tim was at the race and provided a live report. Tim's Live Report