This weekend at Kansas Speedway, Larry Carter and the rest of the No. 26 Ford team will be on familiar ground.

Trouble is, it's familiar ground to everyone else as well. Kansas Speedway, with a few slight variations, is exactly like Chicagoland Speedway, and close enough to a couple of other speedways that one really can't tell the difference.

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It [Kansas' surface] will have aged some, and the determining factor for the race is, 'Is this a place where we can take two tires or four tires? Is this a track where you have to take four every time?'

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LARRY CARTER

That cuts both ways, according to Carter.

"It's a lot like Chicago, and most of the stuff we've looked at is very similar to what we did for Chicago. It's a good starting spot for us and we'll work from there," he said. "It's pretty much a cookie-cutter track, like most of them we go to. It's about the same, but it's a little bit smoother than some we go to."

Since the tracks on the circuit rarely change from year to year, other than when one is repaved or altered, there's a pretty thick notebook that teams can use to determine how to start the weekend.

Once the car leaves the shop, however, it's a case of continually evaluating variables, Carter said.

"Until we get there and see what the surface of the track is like and if it's aged any, we don't know," he said. "It [Kansas' surface] will have aged some, and the determining factor for the race is, 'Is this a place where we can take two tires or four tires? Is this a track where you have to take four every time?'"

That goes a long way toward setting up the entire weekend's strategy. Teams are allowed three or four sets of tires to practice and qualify on each weekend, depending on the amount of practice time allowed.

If Carter answers the question above with four tires all the time, that means more sets of tires to lease and prepare.

"That kind of plays in," Carter said. "If it looks like you'll be able to put two on, that changes how we are able to call the race and what we would do and what our pit strategy will be and how we set our tire strategy up. That's the big thing there."

Kansas is one of the tracks that NASCAR did not test on, but Carter feels fairly confident that the notebook and the information from Chicagoland in July will give him a pretty good baseline for Friday morning. (Continued)