A pair of much-anticipated debuts will occur this weekend in the Busch Series' Circuit City 250 presented by Funai at Richmond International Raceway.

Third-generation racer Bobby Santos III of Franklin, Mass., a Bill Davis Racing development driver, will attempt his inaugural Busch start in a No. 91 Toyota fielded under the auspices of Riley-D'Hondt Motorsports.

This weekend's entry, sponsored by team co-owners Bill and Bob Riley's engineering company, Riley Technologies, is a unique collaboration between notable entities from sports-car and stock-car racing.

The car comes from Davis' shops and will be crewed by a combination of BDR and RDM employees, overseen by veteran crew chief Gene Nead, who went to work at Davis' operation at the end of 2006.

Davis, who fields pairs of full-time Toyota teams in both the Nextel Cup and Craftsman Truck Series, wanted to broaden Santos' stock-car portfolio without stretching BDR's resources too thin.

Since announcing in August 2006 they'd enter NASCAR's national tours the Rileys, who have a long legacy of sports-car championships and team co-owner Eddie D'Hondt, a former Northeast Modified stock-car driver who more recently has worked in Cup team management and as a Cup spotter, wanted to advance their plans.

"It took a lot to make it occur," D'Hondt said. "We've been working on quite a bit of stuff behind the scenes and it was a long time for it to come to fruition.

"BDR had new drivers on both the Cup and Truck sides of their program and with all the Car of Tomorrow development they have to do, there would have been an overabundance of priorities if you added in trying to raise a young guy [Santos].

"What we felt we could bring to the table was the ability to tutor Bobby along, work with him and develop him and, we hope, run him full-time next year." (Continued)