Return to Nashville comes just at right time for Bires

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Kelly Bires returns to the site of the best finish in his young Nationwide Series career this weekend with renewed hope.

In March, Bires, 23, finished fifth at Nashville Superspeedway. His first career top-five moved him to eighth in the point standings, a personal best. But little has gone his way since, and Bires enters Saturday's Federated Auto Parts 300 at Nashville 16th in the standings.

Fast facts

What	Federated Auto Parts 300
When	Green, 7:45 p.m. ET Saturday
TV	ESPN2, 7 p.m. ET
Radio	MRN (Sirius Ch. 28), 7:30 ET

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The top-five capped a run of four top-15 finishes in the first six races. He has one -- last week's 13th-place finish at Dover -- in the past eight, a stretch that includes four DNFs in five races.

"I would say that you're confidence would go down when you have a lot of bad luck, but we've had fast racecars every week," Bires said. "We've had a top-12 car week in and week out. We just haven't had the finishes.

"We should have a good six or seven top-10 finishes easily this year but bad racing luck ... parts failures, cautions coming out at the wrong time -- none of it was in our hands. We just have to keep doing what we're doing."

One year ago, Bires made his series debut at Nashville with a 15th-place finish. A week later, he posted his first top 10, at Kentucky, site of next weekend's event.

"You look forward to going to all of these places that you run well at," Bires said. "We ran well in Nashville earlier this year. I guess you would say it's my first anniversary of running in the Nationwide Series. It's where I got my start. It's pretty crazy that it's been a year already. We ran really well there, and we're ready to go back.

"When you go back to places where you ran well, you know you can go back with the same package. We're taking the same car. We have everything figured out. As long as we do everything right on our part, we're going to have a solid top-10, top-five weekend, for sure."