Frontstretch.com: The best seat at the track... the best view on the net! Friday, November 20th 2009

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Good Races, Bad Races...and Writer's Cramp

Kenny Wallace · Friday October 30, 2009

Every time we got to Kansas, it seems like it’s the end of the year—it’s September, it’s starting to get cold. It’s only about four hours from my house in St. Louis, so it’s kind of got a home feel to me. This year, I elected not to run my dirt car out at Lakeside, and I had my total focus on the race. It just didn’t go good for us. I finished. It was the type of race where—it was actually the race that inspired us to try different things. We just did not run good in Kansas City—it was not a good weekend. I think that race was the race that gave us a wakeup call. We said, ‘you know, we’ve got to try some different setups here.’ So it just didn’t turn out good there; we drove hard all day long, but did not run as well as we wanted to.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Making It Better On Track and the Time of Our Lives Off Track

Kenny Wallace · Friday October 2, 2009

We’re trying to overcome losing my crew chief, Chris Rice. It’s no secret that we’re not running anywhere near as good as we were when we had Chris, but we’ll overcome it. We’ll keep working on it, and we’ll make things better. One thing we’re looking forward to is a new car for Kansas. We have a new engineer named Chris Dietrich. Hopefully we’ll get things turned around with Chris.

My 25th anniversary with my wife was something I was really excited to do. It was my idea—in the winter I was watching Snoop Dogg’s Family Reunion and Snoop Dogg said, “I love my wife and we’re going to renew our vows,” and I’m still in love with my wife and I love her more than anything in the world, and I thought it was just a brilliant idea to do it.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Birthdays, The Fans, and 800 NASCAR Races Down the Road

Kenny Wallace · Friday September 4, 2009

Watkins Glen was the first road race of the year. I always get excited about road courses-I love running them. Our team does the best we can. We don’t go and test, it’s just not in the budget, so I really have to call on my road racing skills from my early Cup days. I’ve had a lot of laps around Watkins Geln. We qualified fairly well. The race was pretty uneventful. It was normal. Brakes were at a premium. I haven’t been happy with the brakes on my road course car this year, the things keep fading on me. But we were able to finish 19th. That wasn’t too bad. I always want to be better. But with our team right now, consistency is everything.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Hometown Blues, Some Great Runs, and Some Amazing Fans

Kenny Wallace · Friday August 7, 2009

We had a really rough time in Chicago. From the time we arrived there, all the way through practice, we’d just bottom out, destroying our car. That was very strange because we’re usually pretty successful at getting the car up off the ground. We just had a tough time there from the get-go. They dropped the green flag for the race, I went into Turn 1, and we bottomed out again-we bottomed out so hard that it tore the body off the car behind the left front tire. From that point on, it sure was a rough night. Next, my radio went bad—I lost the radio from the connection in my helmet, so I couldn’t communicate very well. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Bad Luck, Better Days, and the Bahamas

Kenny Wallace · Friday July 10, 2009

Milwaukee was just incredibly disappointing. We had such a great racecar. We never qualify very well because we don’t put any effort into it. We’re locked in, sitting 19th in owner points, so we don’t put any effort into qualifying. It costs a lot of money to qualify because you have to put on new tires, and a set of tires costs $1,700. So we qualified 25th at Milwaukee, but then they dropped the green flag, and my oh my, here we come. We knew we were good in practice. We got all the way up to 9th, all by ourselves, with no caution flags, only to have the oil pressure line come loose. It put oil all over the motor, so it started smoking and they black flagged me. The finish was devastating, but we knew we had a good car, so we just had to move on after that.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Good Luck, No Luck, and Two Milestones

Kenny Wallace · Friday June 12, 2009

Charlotte was one of the luckiest races I’ve ever run. I’ve never, ever been lucky-ever. But at Charlotte, I was playing the fuel mileage game and got down a lap, then got the lap back when the caution came out at the right time. Then I was sitting there running 16th on lap 125 of a 200-lap race, and on lap 125 I blew the motor-broke a rocker arm and lost a cylinder. So I’m running around the racetrack on seven cylinders when I should be on eight. I was thinking, “Oh, my God,” and dropped back to 18th and then it started pouring down rain. So I finished 18th with a blowing up motor. The rains came at the right time! I hope I didn’t use my luck up right there, but what a race.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Getting Better Every Week

Kenny Wallace · Friday May 15, 2009

Our team put a lot of effort into a new short track car. We went to Phoenix with it, and I really thought we were going to have a good run. We had an unexpected motor change before the race, and when they dropped the green flag, we made one lap and a darn coil wire fell out, of all things. We came in and put the coil wire back in, and then went back out. The car was fast. But it’s kind of hard to go out when you’re nine laps down and you don’t want to get yourself in any trouble.

After that, we went to Talladega. We had a good run there, and drove the car accordingly. My car owner thought there would be a big wreck, but it was a smooth race, uncharacteristic for Talladega. Everybody wanted to finish. We’re so used to going to Talladega and everybody wanting to wreck so we approached the race in wreck mode. My car owner can’t afford me to be wrecking cars. If we wreck too many cars, it puts us out of business. Although I love to race and put myself up there, we had to go ahead and race on defense.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: The Mysterious Nationwide Schedule, Nashville, and Why I Love Baseball

Kenny Wallace · Friday April 17, 2009

Mexico City was taken off the schedule this year. We’re making up Mexico City with the Iowa date. I’m thrilled to death to be going to Iowa-I’ve tested there a couple of times and it seems like a really nice racetrack. We ran at Mexico City for five years, and it seemed like it was a good time to leave Mexico.

It was a little bit hard to get any rhythm going at the start of the year. At one time we had two complete weeks off. It dawned on me how the drivers in the Camping World Truck Series must feel—guys like Todd Bodine and Ron Hornaday. They must feel like they don’t ever race. When Daytona starts, you pretty much know you’re going to race every week, but this year, the Nationwide Series had such an odd schedule.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: I Love Being a Racecar Driver

Kenny Wallace · Friday March 27, 2009

Here’s what I want to make sure everybody knows. I’m a racecar driver. All of this started with the weekends at the racetrack. I have a hundred people come up and tell me how good I did, but there were always that one or two people who asked me if I was still racing. I said to myself, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ It bothered me a little bit. I tried hard not to let things bother me that are negative. I work really hard at staying positive, although I will admit it’s a lot of work.

Kenny Wallace Driver Diary: Road Trips, Being a Movie Star, and Sorry, Officer...

Kenny Wallace · Friday February 27, 2009

I had a really good time in Daytona. It was fun for me, driving the motorhome down to Ocala. We won some races in Ocala and then we went over to Volusia. We were like a traveling dirt team—like the old days—setting the motorhome up and just feeling normal again.

Then we started 2009 off with a really competitive run and finished 16th in the Nationwide Series race at Daytona. Of course I was completely worn out after 100 hours of Speed TV. We did a lot of TV—it felt like we did a year’s worth of TV at Daytona! We also did the Sit With Kenny campaign. We sold out the section, so that was a really big success. I look for other teams to follow up with something like that to help sell some tickets. They reduced the tickets to $55 down there, so it was really good.

The Frontstretch: kwallace by -- Friday November 20, 2009

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