Raines having stand-out season
By Ryan Smithson, Turner Sports Interactive
June 1, 2001
11:42 AM EDT (1542 GMT)
DOVER, Del. -- Tony Raines isn’t going to let a stripped transmission slow down his best NASCAR Busch Series season to date.
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Raines' best finish so far this year is second at Richmond.
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Raines, in his third season driving the No. 33 Bill Baumgardner Chevrolet, sits eighth in the standings with six top-10 finishes heading into Saturday’s MBNA Platinum 200 at Dover Downs. He finished 24th last weekend at Lowe’s Motor Speedway after losing third gear on a restart.
“We stripped it (the gear),” Raines said. “That probably had a lot to do with me. Things were rattling around. We were surprised we finished.”
Finishing races is something Raines has done with regularity in 2001. Raines started off the season dismally -- he crashed at Daytona and finished 36th, and another crash the next week at Rockingham sent him to a 38th place finish.
Since then, Raines has been among the most pleasant surprises in the Busch garage. He won his first career pole at Nazareth two weeks ago, and he finished second at Richmond in a race dominated by Jimmy Spencer.
He has steered clear of points-robbing crashes since Rockingham and has an outside shot of finishing the year in the top five in points -- he is 124 points in back of Mike McLaughlin.
We are having a better season than last year, that is for sure,” said Raines, who won four Truck Series races before moving to Busch full-time in 1999. “We did not really wreck a whole lot last year, we have run a lot smarter and we are higher in the points. We just need to knuckle down and get that first win.”
Raines knows that trouble lurks at every corner of the high-banked, one-mile concrete surface at Dover Downs International Speedway.
“It’s a tight track that is hard to pass on,” Raines said. “You have to race the racetrack. Racing other guys will just get you in trouble.”
The MBNA 200 gets under way at 1 p.m. Saturday and can be followed on NASCAR.com with RaceCast.
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