Go to content Go to navigation Go to recent PR reports Go to search

Raybestos Rookie Coke Zero Advance: Sam Hornish Jr.

Thursday July 3, 2008

 

RAYBESTOS® ROOKIE CONTENDER ADVANCE MATERIAL FOR THE COKE ZERO 400 NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES RACE AT DAYTONA INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY, JULY 3, PAGE 3.

Sam Hornish Jr. leads Regan Smith by five points (162-157) in the overall Raybestos Rookie standings entering Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400. Hornish Jr. was the top Raybestos Rookie in the Daytona 500, scoring 15th-place finish and has claimed top rookie honors six times this season.

SAM HORNISH JR., No. 77 PENSKE TRUCK RENTAL DODGE: YOU RAN VERY WELL HERE BACK IN FEBRUARY. “We were real happy with our car in the race. Right there towards the end we got shuffled back a little bit but I think that we had a real good car. We were really good when it was hotter early on in the race when things spread out a little bit, which it’s going to be hotter this week when we’re down here so I think that that’s going to bode well for the Penske Truck Rental Dodge. The guys on the team and myself have a lot more experience working together right now and I have a lot more experience driving these cars so hopefully things will go real well for us. When it was real slick and hot in the 500 we were right up there and run in the top-10 all that section of the race and even the top-five for a while. That should bode well for us and we’ve obviously found some things that made the cars handle better since we were here then and hopefully we’ll put those to good use. The big thing for us is to maintain the patience, get to the end of the race. Even though it’s the shortest of the superspeedway races that we run it’s still a long race.” WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO HAVE A GOOD FINISH HERE? YOU’VE GONE THROUGH A TOUGH STRETCH THE LAST FEW RACES. “I think that’d be real good. We led a little bit there at Michigan and that boosted our confidence and then we had two bad weeks in a row. Hopefully we’ll get out of that slump and we’ll run well here this weekend. It means a lot to us, especially anytime you can run good here at Daytona is good. I’d like to win a race at some point in time and if you could ever do it here, especially if you can run good and feel like every time you come to the 500 like you might have a chance to win that, that’d be real good. If there’s only one place that you could run well at I’d want it to be here [laughs].” DARIO FRANCHITTI’S TEAM SHUT DOWN EARLIER THIS WEEK. IS THAT AN INDICATION OF HOW DIFFICULT IT IS ON THE TRACK HERE IN NASCAR AND OFF THE TRACK? “It’s very difficult on track but just like anybody else they’ve been struggling to find a full-time sponsor. That’s not a good situation for him. I’m sure there’s a lot more things that he’d like to do. I think it shows a sign of the times and how expensive things are to do here.” YOU HAVE WON THE INDY 500 AND CHAMPIONSHIPS IN OPEN WHEEL RACING TO RUNNING IN THE TOP-20 IN NASCAR. DOES THAT WEIGH ON YOU? “It took me a while before I felt like I could win races and championships over there, too. And everything I did before I went to the IndyCar Series was in preparation to be an IndyCar driver. It was in preparation to be there and then coming over here, I mean, I had probably 15 races of preparation to come over here and be a stock car driver. I was real happy with what I was able to do but if I knew at some point in time I was going to be here you probably would have went a different road. You would have ran late models and ASA, ARCA and Camping World and ran a couple of year of Nationwide in preparation to be here. And I felt if I had done that I probably would have been doing a little bit better at this point in time but that wasn’t the road I took. The decision to come over here was made later on in my career. I’m still learning and that’s the tough thing is that it’s going to take a little bit of time. These cars are so much different, the things that you can tune on ‘em to make ‘em handle, make ‘em handle, make ‘em do what you want them to do is a lot different. I can’t tell the guys the same thing that I did to the Indy car to make that run faster. It just doesn’t work [smiles].” ARE YOU PRETTY MUCH WHERE YOU THOUGHT YOU’D BE AT THIS POINT OF THE SEASON? “Well I told everybody at the beginning of the year if we could finish out the year 20th in points that we’d be happy with that and I keep looking and I kind of try to measure where I made mistakes and measure things where we’ve had things just go wrong, whether it was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I figure that we could fairly easily be 20th-25th right now in points without having a whole lot of things go different. We ran something over at Darlington and went in the wall on the 13th lap on a day that we had a really good race car. The last superspeedway race we had an engine go down when we had been running in the top-10 all day. Things like that, from finishing 37th there, or whatever it was, to seventh is about 100 points. That hundred points moves you up so much. I think it could be turned around and we could be having a really good year but it’s not working that way. We’re just about halfway, or just under halfway, and I think we’ve got some good opportunities ahead of us. We’re starting to go back to some of these tracks for the second time. I think Jeff Gordon has more races here at Daytona than I have in my entire tock car career [laughs].”

®Raybestos® brand brakes are produced by the Affinia Under Vehicle Group, the leading manufacturer of braking systems and components for the automotive industry. The line includes everything from brake drums to rotors, pads, shoes and hydraulic parts. Affinia Under Vehicle Group is at the forefront of research and development in brake technology and operates manufacturing and distribution facilities throughout North America.

FRONTSTRETCH LIVE AT THE TRACK THIS WEEKEND AT LOUDON!
Popular writer Amy Henderson will be tracking all the action at New Hampshire from inside the garage, giving you the stories you’re looking for with a special edition of our Newsletter planned over the weekend. It all culminates on Sunday with her special participation in our LIVE blog during the Lenox Industrial Tools 301, paired with our usual panel of expert analysts! It’s three days of going the extra mile for you … so we hope you enjoy it!

This report was provided by an outside PR source and posted by Kim DeHaven.

 

©2000 - 2008 Kim DeHaven and Frontstetch.com. Thanks for visiting the Frontstretch!