Around The Track: Tight is bad at Kansas

Only four races away from his 800th career start, Motorcraft Racing Ford Taurus driver Ricky Rudd describes a qualifying lap around the Kansas Speedway 1.5-mile tri-oval, the next stop on the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit.

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You're coming off Turn 4 to come to the start/finish line for your green-flag lap. You come off right up against the wall and let the car drift, using almost the entire racetrack. You nearly brush the right quarter panel on the wall and as soon as you get the chance, you straighten the wheel and aim straight to free up the motor a little bit to accelerate.

Even though the frontstretch is very wide, you drive all the way down to the flat of the apron, clipping it with your left-front tire right at the start/finish line. It seems like it is downhill and it gives you momentum coming off the corner. That is probably the only reason you would do that instead of following the actual arc of the racetrack.

You come down to the start/finish line, clip the inside of the apron and then drift back up to the fence. You want to be wide and sort of into the corner, what I call late apex, to make that entry into Turn 1, probably as late as possible to be able to still get the car to turn and hit the mark you are looking for, the clip point for the left-front tire.

If you miss that clip point, it will kill your lap. And if you turn in too early, your car gets to pushing so if you time it just right and clip that inside corner just at the right point it is worth about a tenth or so. So that is the preferred line, right on the bottom. Once you clip that inside apron you want to leave that left-front tire on the white stripe.

Keeping the momentum of the car going, you lift the throttle right before you get to what I call the full compression point, which is your apex -- the mark you are shooting for with the left-front tire. You're out of the gas just before you get to that point, about three car lengths, and you want to stand right back into the gas. You're out of the gas about a second and a half, and you flat foot it again.

Kansas has a tendency to have the exit of the corner tighten up. By that I mean you start losing front grip. It is just the nature of the racetrack. You want to exit that corner with all the momentum you possibly can, spilling that momentum into the straightaway so you enter the straightaway at the highest mile per hour possible.

The whole time you are running down the backstretch you are looking at your marks in Turn 3 waiting to square the corner. Even though the corners are different from one another, you sort of enter them the same way, making a late apex, square the corner. Once you get to the full compression point of the chassis, you want to be right back wide open on the throttle. You've got to get your car really free so that you don't push the exit of the corner.

What helps after some rubber gets down on the racetrack you can actually see the rubber tracks that other cars leave behind. That's really your only reference point to know where to really arc it into the corner. You use those rubber marks that other cars have laid down as your reference points.

Coming off Turn 4, you just about clip the right rear corner on the wall and then stand on it as quick as you can and come back to the start/finish line.

Ricky Rudd's Motorcraft Racing Ford Taurus Team has admittedly struggled on the intermediate speedways since the first of the 2003 season. But, following a two-day test last week at Kansas Speedway, Ricky says he is optimistic about this week's visit to the Midwestern 1.5-mile tri-oval.

We went to Kansas to test last week. I thought it went really well. There were a lot of good cars there and that is good when you go test. You need to be able to have a lot of cars to compare yourself to.

We were one of the better cars out there consistently, but we weren't the best car. Bill Elliott was consistently the best car on all of his runs up until the last two runs. Sometimes you get a false read because the sun goes down or something. We believe we found something out there that will allow us to come back and run well, so I'm really looking forward to going back to Kansas.

Ricky Rudd drives the No. 21 Motorcraft Racing Ford Taurus owned by Wood Brothers Racing.