Mr. Goodcents 300

October 9, 2004
Kansas City, KS

Derrike Cope and the #49 Advil Ford team head to the 1.5-mile Kansas Speedway, located just west of Kansas City, Mo., this week for Saturday’s Mr. Goodcents 300 NASCAR Busch Series race.

The thoughts of #49 Advil Ford driver Derrike Cope heading into Kansas:

"I guess some of these mile-and-a-half tracks have taken something of a beating from a few in the media over ‘cookie-cutter’ tracks or whatever. I don’t really have a feeling on either side. Sure, I like running places like Bristol and I like running places like Daytona. If everything we ran was a 2.5-mile superspeedway, it would get boring after awhile. Still, if everything was a half-mile bowl-shaped track like Bristol, 36 of those would get pretty boring too.

"Variety is cool, and it’s the basis for our whole sport. The thinking is if you are going to run well in NASCAR, you have to be good everywhere and on every kind of track. In the Busch Series, you have to be good at Daytona and Talladega, and you have to be good at Richmond and Bristol. And you have to be good at Kansas and Charlotte and Chicagoland and everywhere else.

"Once you crank the engine, you don’t think ‘cookie-cutter.’ You think, ‘How can I get around this place as fast as I can?’ It might look cookie-cutter to some but it doesn’t look that way through the windshield. All of these tracks are tough and the competition is tough, week in and week out.

"If all of these tracks were the same, you would figure a guy who was good at Charlotte would be good at Chicagoland and be good at Kansas. But it doesn’t work that way. Every week, you start all over again. The same distance doesn’t make the same race track. Bristol is seven-thousandths of a mile longer than Martinsville, but nobody claims those two are similar.

"The front is the place to be at Kansas, and because of the way aerodynamics come into play, that goes without saying. The front is usually the place to be if you can get there, regardless of the track, but the way the air can play with your car, it makes a bigger difference at the mile-and-a-half tracks. That’s one of the reasons Kansas is such a ‘track-position’ track.

"These days, just about every track is a ‘track-position’ track. Qualifying has become more and more important because of that. The closer you start towards the front, the fewer cars you have to mess around with getting there.

"The reason the leader can pull away at so many of these track is because he doesn’t have to mess with other cars, he doesn’t have those ‘Advil moments.’ While the second-place and third-place cars might be going side-by-side for five laps, the leader is pulling away and going on. Same thing with fourth and fifth and sixth. . . everybody is fighting each other but the leader, unless he has a lapped car on the inside or the second-place car gets beside you on the restart, has nothing but clean air for a long time.

"That’s going to be key for everyone, and it’s going to be key for this Advil Ford team. We’re going to work hard, give it a good run and see what we can do with Kansas Speedway . . . and everybody else."

In the first practice, Derrike was 37th fastest with a time of 31.625 and speed of 170.751.

In Qualifying, Derrike produced a fastest lap of 31.998 and speed of 168.760. This was not fast enough for the top 38 so the team took a provisional and Derrike will be starting in the 40th position.

In Happy Hour, Derrike was 37th fastest with a time of 32.583 and speed of 165.731.

Derrike started the race in 40th position and finished in 31st position.

Derrike talked to us after the race. "The Kansas race did not go as planned or at least as we would have hoped. We took a car that we have not run this year. Right off the truck the car performed relatively well, but the cars tendencies were to be loose in handling. The weather conditions were cloudy all through practice and we were still on the loose side. But while waiting to qualify the sun appeared and the track heated up. I should have made some air pressure changes and elected not to because we had already made some changes to the chassis, but it was not enough. The car was extremely loose in qualifying which forced us to use a provisional starting spot. When the race started we were too tight with setup, but then broke a rocker arm in the engine. We had to go behind the wall for repairs, which the guys performed really quickly, and allowed us to pick up 10 spots or so. The car ran pretty well after we fixed the engine.

"So, it is off to Charlotte. Hopefully things will go better there for us."