Inside the Garage: No. 1 crew chief Bono Manion

Dale Earnhardt Inc. crew chief and New England native Kevin "Bono" Manion looks forward to every trip "home" to New Hampshire International Speedway, this week's Nextel Cup venue and a place near where Manion and many of his DEI teammates grew up in racing.

But for Manion, a native of Boylston, Mass., and his driver, young New Jersey native Martin Truex Jr., this week's trip is especially anticipated because of the finishes they have been able to put on the board over the past month -- when great promise has been converted into solid results.

In Sunday's Lenox Industrial Tools 300, Truex will drive the same No. 1 Chevrolet Car of Tomorrow that he used to capture his first Cup victory, four weeks ago at Dover.

Q: Bono, having a hot race team aside, how excited do you get when it comes to going back home to New England for a race?

Manion: It's a great time for all of us on the team. I think every road guy but two or three of us are from the New England area, like our truck driver, who is from Vermont.

So like I said, it's that just about everyone is from up there, so it's a lot of fun because you get to see a lot of family and friends. I raced a lot up there in the Modifieds, so going back up there feels like home.

I'll try to catch a Red Sox game, you know, and eat some lobster. There's just a lot of stuff that we're accustomed to, being from up there. And then there's some good racing, so it don't get much better.

Q: How many clambakes you plan on having?

Manion: Aaah -- we usually hit one or two. You know somebody's usually having one somewhere. I don't really have a lot scheduled this week, but for the fall race at New Hampshire we've got a few things going on.

Q: What does it mean to you -- a guy who grew up racing in the Northeast and knowing how tough it was -- to have a homegrown team, if you will, racing and competing at the top of the Cup Series?

Manion: It's cool. It's a lot of neat people. Once in a while, if we're having a bad day, we'll go out and talk about old times and just cheer ourselves up.

It's a tough sport and you can get down really, really quick -- so obviously, the last three or four weeks we've been on top of the world here. We were hoping to come out of [Infineon] with a good finish and then we go on to Loudon.

I think we've got a really good car for up there. We're taking the same car we won with at Dover, but quite a bit different on the setup, so we'll just go up there and see what we've got.

It's a tough place to pass. You've got to go up there and get a good qualifying lap in. It's a short race and like I said, it is tough to pass so kind of like at Infineon, you want to qualify up front and just stay with the lead guys. (Continued)