Talladega Testing

The Gumout team tested at Talladega Superspeedway Jan. 18-20. At the end of the testing, Derrike Cope said he's happy with the results for the #30 Gumout Pontiac. "It's been a real pleasure so far," said Derrike. "It's been a long time since I've had this much fun. They have been real receptive to different ideas that I have. They are a very open-minded group of guys."

The team was one of the few teams in January to get three consecutive days of testing at the 2.66-mile track. "We've been very fortunate with the weather," Derrike said. "We've had three great days here and we had good weather at Daytona. I can't say we've found an enormous amount of information that we didn't already have, but I feel we've made some productive runs. We made some runs with everything blocked off and all in all we're relatively pleased."

"I think we're going to be okay at the tracks like Daytona and Talladega," continued Derrike. "We'll be able to do some things to the motor that will help us. Racing at Talladega and Daytona is different from anywhere else."

At the request of the teams involved in testing, Talladega did not release test speeds.