Insider's View: Elliott Sadler

Sadler sorts out Richmond, his hometown track

Everybody has a special place that they want to win at. Actually, I'd probably rather win at Richmond than any other race that we race at, probably other than the Daytona 500, but this would be second on my list because it's so special.

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I remember coming and sitting in the stands at four, five, six, seven, eight years old -- all the way up until I start racing. I was buying tickets just like everybody else here watching my favorite drivers go round and round -- even when it was the half-mile race track. I even watched them tear down the walls when they made it a three-quarter mile, so there's a lot of history here for Elliott Sadler and my family.

If I was able to win a race here it would be just greatly appreciated. It's so much fun and, hopefully, that day will one time come.

We've got a lot of confidence on this race team, and we've pretty much had top-12 and top-13 cars every week. We've struggled a little bit here at Richmond in the past, so we decided to take a two-day test. They've made a few changes to the track. They've got a new tire here, which anytime there's change, that gives you some time to catch up if you've been struggling here in the past.

I don't know why we've struggled at Richmond in the past. If I knew, I'd fix it. Maybe I just haven't had the feel that I need to be a successful racecar driver here at Richmond.

I've never been able to qualify that great or finish that great, so now I've just got to work on my feel, and that's why tested for two days. We qualified so bad here last year both races and took provisionals, so we had to come here and really learn and get on top of this race track and get me acclimated to it.

I was the same way about Martinsville. I went to Martinsville this year and qualified ninth and finished 12th, so it can happen. I think you've just got to get me in something that I like. My crew chief, Todd Parrott, knows the feel I'm looking for, and that's kind of the direction we're working in and, hopefully, it'll pay off for us in Richmond.

We've built a brand new racecar just for Richmond to come here and try to put on a great show in front of my hometown family and friends. Right now, we're pretty happy with everything, and we've got some great momentum, so we think we've got a good shot at it. We think we can come up here and be competitive and, if the ball bounces the right way, we should have just as good a chance as anybody else.

They did a great job repaving the track. It's very smooth. There's not one bump in the whole racetrack. There's no sealer on it. I think it's the same type of asphalt that they used at Homestead, so they're not having any problems with the heat or anything like that.

I have to commend Richmond on a great track. It's very, very fast. We're running a lot faster now than what we ran here in the past, so they had to bring the Bristol tire, which is pretty slick the first five or six laps, but after that there's not much fall off in it. We have 70 or 80 laps on our tires right now and we're running as fast as we can run.

That means track position is gonna be huge. That's gonna be the word of the weekend that you're gonna hear from everybody when talking about the difference between winning this race and running 20th -- it's gonna be good pit stops and two-tire stops and things like that.

	Credit: Autostock

Qualifying is gonna be big. Everybody knows when we go to a track for the first time after it's been repaved and it's new that one-groove racing is probably gonna be more apparent here this time than what we've seen in the past because there is so much grip on the bottom. I think once the Busch cars run on the track Friday night and maybe slicken it up a little bit, we might see a groove-and-a-half or hopefully two grooves by Saturday night.

Everybody is having a ball working with each other, and we've got some confidence. Some little things have been hurting us here and there during the races, but we're gonna try to overcome them. We're one of only a few teams that has been in the top 10 the whole season, and we want to try to keep it that way.

I've got a big event coming up May 25. It's the Elliott Sadler Race for Hope, a charity function that will benefit the Autism Society of America and the Victory Junction Gang Camp.

The reason we do it is that the Autism Society of America is very close to our family now ever since my niece, Halie Dru, was diagnosed with autism a couple of years ago. That's one reason why we try to do the charitable things that we do. I think all the drivers do. There's always something special to their heart, so we're gonna try to give back to them and also the Victory Junction Gang Camp.

Everybody knows what that is and what Kyle and Pattie Petty have done with that is absolutely unbelievable, so we're gonna give half of the donations to them. It's a pretty neat deal. It's taking place May 25 at Concord Mills Mall and the NASCAR Speedpark.

We've got Outback Steakhouse coming with food, Coca-Cola is giving us drinks and we've got a lot of great drivers coming in. It's a chance for the fans to have three different options. One, get an autograph from your favorite driver. Two, to have dinner with your favorite driver -- a good 30-40 minute sit-down dinner with your favorite driver, which I think is a pretty good deal.

And also, fans can race against their favorite on a go-kart, so there are a lot of different options that the fans can do and give. The drivers have been great to give their time up for that day to come and help us out, so it's gonna be a neat deal. I think the fan accessibility to the drivers is gonna be not like anything else we do.

We do the event to bring awareness to people about this puzzling disease, which is growing in kids rapidly over the last 10 years. It's been amazing how much it has kind of spread throughout the population. It's a very frustrating disease. There's a lot of special schooling involved.

I come from a very fortunate family that can afford to send Halie to some special schools, but there are families that are less fortunate than us that don't have that chance, so that's why we do what we do to give back to them. We want all the kids that we can to have the fair chance that they deserve at such a young age to try to get this diagnosed and figured out so they can have as close to a normal life as they can.