Around the Track: Chicagoland Speedway

Nextel Cup rookie Clint Bowyer finished 10th in Saturday night's race at Daytona International Speedway to maintain his position of 18th in the points standings.

It was his first top-10 since the May race at Richmond International Raceway and fourth of the season. Now he heads to Chicagoland Speedway, where in two Busch Series races he's struggled with an average start of 32nd and average finish of 24th.

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In Jack Daniel's "Around the Track,'' Bowyer addresses each week's venue as well as his philosophies on racing and life in general around NASCAR.

I haven't given up on making the Chase for the Championship.

A lot of the guys ahead of us slipped some last weekend at Daytona and we gained some on 10th place even though we're still 18th overall.

Our focus is on getting 10th or better in each of the last nine races before everything is set. If we do that, we've got a chance. We're going all out and won't give up hope until they tell us we can't get in.

Doing well on the mile-and-a-half tracks like this week at Chicagoland will be key. We've had trouble finding the right balance on the 1.5-mile tracks, and I really can't explain why.

You hear a lot about how well Kasey Kahne has done winning four races on intermediate tracks in the same car. It's no different that me in the Busch car last year when the mile-and-a-half tracks were our bread and butter.

Every time we went to one, we knew we were going to be good. We had a car like the one Kasey has now that we ran until its tongue was hanging out. We kept producing results, and when you find a car like that, for whatever reason, it's just easy to drive.

I can't tell you why. We have a lot of resources and engineers to make sure the cars are exactly the same, but they're just not.

Credit: Autostock

Inside the Numbers Clint Bowyer in 2006 Track St. Fin. Laps Status Daytona 37 6 203 running Fontana 32 14 251 running Las Vegas 20 15 270 running Atlanta 16 27 324 running Bristol 27 29 495 running Martinsville 42 22 496 running Texas 12 19 333 running Phoenix 8 5 312 running Talladega 15 40 16 crash Richmond 20 10 400 running Darlington 3 23 365 running Lowe's 15 19 399 running Dover 22 17 400 running Pocono 42 21 200 running Michigan 9 39 86 running Infineon 28 16 110 running Daytona 30 10 160 running

These things are still hand built. They're not machine cut, so there are different characteristics to the body and chassis. Although they still have the same tires and same shocks and setups, there can be little variances that make one car better than the other.

We just haven't found the right combination in the Cup car for me. It seems I like slightly different bodies than my teammates, Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton.

We're bringing a car to Chicago with a little different front end than the other cars, so hopefully that will get us going.

Finishing 10th at Daytona really helped our confidence. Finally, things went our way.

For the last month and a half, we've had fast cars but couldn't get good finishes. The turning point last week may have been when I barely missed this one wreck that could have ended my day.

I just shoved it right up through the middle of the wreck and came out clean. If that had been one of the last four or five races I would have driven right into the side of somebody.

We need that kind of luck to carry over to Chicago, which hasn't been a very good place for me.

We struggled and had some bad luck in the Busch Series. But it's a track I want to be good at because it's so close to Kansas Speedway, which is my home track.

It's your basis mile and a half cookie-cutter track as they like to call them. You've really got to have a car that will roll through the turns and steer good.

We've already had a busy week. I went to Elko, Minnesota on Wednesday to race against all the rookies in a celebrity race, and then spent Thursday night signing autographs at the Sapphire Nightclub near Chicago.

Before I left we had some people over to my [North Carolina] house for the Fourth of July.

We went to South Carolina and bought some fireworks and put on our own little show in the backyard. It wasn't anything over the edge, but there were a few Roman candles shot at each other.

There's always some break-dancing going on across the field trying to dodge the Roman candles.

I hope we can make some fireworks this weekend at Chicagoland.