Tim Sauter Quotations

When we unloaded on Friday for practice I felt we were going to be OK, but the tires fall off so fast here it's hard to tell if you're getting better or not. We didn't get enough time to practice in qualifying trim so it's hard to judge your times against the others. These cars get really loose when you tape them up, so we tried to be smart when we qualified, although the 40.85 it was a little slower than what we expected. We just missed the set-up by a little, but this place is so fast, you can't be off much and have a drivable car.

I was pretty happy with the car in race trim. We're not quite sure about the qualifying set-up because our only mock-run was in the middle of the day in the heat. We did a 25-lap run on Tuesday afternoon and near the end we were not too far from top ten speeds. We're a little off at the start of a run, but the car did not fall off as bad and we picked-up a few tenths on the field.

We try and scramble to get them the help they need.

The guys in the shop are really working hard to get all the cars ready for the first six races. Ricky Pearson is a great leader, with lots of contacts and resources. After the Daytona test, we had to do some massaging on the bodies of the speedway cars but the guys stayed on-task and got the intermediate cars ready for Vegas and they never missed a beat.

The Wegner motor was pretty good today, and I could get into the corners alright, but we were binding in the center of the corner just enough that I had to wait to get back into the gas. If I tried to get on the gas when I wanted, the car just slid the nose and pushed up the banking. The car was close, it just wasn't good enough to race with all those Cup guys. I tried the top groove a couple times, but it was worse up there. I would have loved to finish higher, but the points are more important to the team during these first five races.

Ricky really found something that last day, it was a simple change, but it made a huge difference in the way I could get through the corner and get back on the gas. Texas is a totally different track than Richmond, but I think that same adjustment might help us here this weekend. I'm ready to get back to racing.

Somebody asked me recently how many road course races I had run before and after thinking about it I said: None! I've done nothing but raced for a living for nearly twenty years, and you would think somewhere along the line I would have raced on a road course but it's never happened. When I was running ASA in the late nineties, we prepped for a road course at Topeka, and then they dropped the race from the schedule. Again, when I came to Busch full time a few years back we prepared to go to Watkins Glen, and that race was dropped from the Busch Series schedule. I guess the third time is a charm. I finally get to go road racing! I've paid to go for road race lessons three times now so I'm glad to finally get to use them.

Once we figured out what we had, we settled in and got the best finish we could for John and Nancy McGill. Being an independent team, we just can't afford to tear up these cars. We have to establish ourselves in the points and as the team gets stronger we can race harder and push for top finishes.