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.

"We didn't test there," he said. "We pretty much will use the data we've gathered from the other tracks that are similar."

A midweek test at Lowe's Motor Speedway, Carter said, might play a role in finding some things to help at Kansas.

One critical aspect of tuning the new car -- and the Roush-Fenway Racing cars seem to have solved this in spades -- is the bump-stop settings. If they aren't right when they unload, then it's a cast-iron pain to adjust at the track.

Bump stops are devices that limit travel on the shock absorbers so as to keep the car's attitude at an optimum angle for aerodynamic performance. Considering the new car's lack of downforce compared to the older car, that's important.

If the bump-stop setting is too low, the splitter drags the ground and upsets the handling. It also scrubs speed. If it's set too high, air gets under the car and the nose lifts, which makes it more difficult to steer. That's also important.

"We run this car on bump stops, and the settings are pretty critical on that part," Carter said. "This car is a little more difficult to adjust on, too."

As for the team, Carter said there has been solid improvement in all phases of the game. He did mention, however, that a couple of slow pit stops turned a fast racecar at Dover into a mid-pack finisher.

"I think the No. 26 team is looking forward to Kansas this weekend," he said. "We had a couple slow stops last week that put us in a bad position. So to say that we are looking forward to getting back out there and hopefully having a good run would be an understatement."

Slow pit stops at Dover are nothing new. The narrow pit road is tight, and more mistakes happen as a result. The pit road at Kansas, however, is wide and long and doesn't have an outside wall to choke off traffic.

"Hopefully we can have another fast Ford Fusion from the minute we unload this weekend," Carter said. "That's how we've been for the last few weeks, just haven't had the results that we needed."