~Texas Journal~

Hi Y’all! Let me just start off by saying how awesome it was to be back behind the wheel at Texas after two weeks of not racing. The only thing that’s going to be better is to get back into the Busch car at Rockingham this weekend. We finished 16th in the race on Friday night and for our second ever truck race, that’s pretty good. When we decided to race the truck series this season, it was so that I could get more seat time at some of the tracks and so that the team would have more opportunities to work together. Basically the whole reason we ran the trucks was just to get some experience and we accomplished that. Don’t get me wrong I’m going to give it all I got out there on the track, I always do, but I knew that we didn’t have a first place truck on Friday so I didn’t try to race like I did and maybe end up being in a wreck with a CTS regular who was fighting for a championship. As far as the race goes, we had a real comfortable, stable truck all weekend. We really tried to concentrate on the race setup more than where we qualified because we knew that we would make the field. During practice we tried a lot of different setups like making changes to the gear, shocks and trying both sticker and scuff tires. As the track conditions changed during the day, first getting hotter, and then cooling off at night, we learned a lot about what setups worked best at what times. Hopefully some of this will be helpful to us in the Busch Series next year but then again these trucks are different than racing a Busch car. I found out a lot more about running in the draft in the trucks at Texas than at Richmond since Texas is a speedway. It was real tough to run in traffic because the air doesn’t flow over these trucks at all, they just aren’t aerodynamic. When I was running by myself it was a lot easier to hit my corners and make up some time on the those guys ahead of me but it really took some adjusting to get used to trying to run in the draft. There were a lot of cautions at the end of the race, which was unfortunate for us because one of them placed us a lap down because we had just made our final pit stop before the caution flag fell. On the last restart of the race, there were two laps to go and I was in the 15th spot. Jimmy Hensley, driver of the No. 43 Dodge by Petty, got around me I fell back to 16th. You would have thought since granddad owned the No.43, he would’ve told Jimmy to go easy on me, since I’m a rookie and all (LOL)!! This was our last CTS race for this season but maybe I’ll run some next year. That’s the question I keep getting asked, “What are my plans for next season?” There have been a lot of rumors about if I was going to run the Truck Series instead of the Busch Series of if I will run any Cup races. The only thing that is certain right now is that I am running a full season in the Busch Series in the No. 45. I’d like to run some more truck races in the future but we will just have to see how everything works out. This weekend we’re heading to Rockingham. It’s a track I’ve never run at before so it will be interesting to see how we are there. It’s a track that has been real good to my father and so hopefully with some of his guidance, we will see the same results. It seems like every time we try to run there something goes wrong. The race there this past February was real disappointing for us because we had just come off such a strong run at Daytona and to not be able to run because we didn’t have any points was real tough. That’s behind us now though and we are excited to see how we will handle “The Rock.” I just want to say “Thanks” to everyone associated with the Truck Series. It’s pretty awesome to get to run a different series and meet all the people associated with it. It was also cool to see how many fans there are at the truck events that also follow the other series in NASCAR. It just shows how big this sport has become. Well everyone have a great week. I hope that some of y’all can make it out to the four remaining races this season. We’re still planning on visiting Victory Lane before the year is done. Who knows, maybe we will have some “beginner’s luck” at Rockingham. God Bless, Adam