"I don’t think we’ll know how it races until tomorrow," said Chris Heroy, crew chief for the Chip Ganassi Racing No. 42 Chevrolet driven by Kyle Larson. "We were able to get a balance, which seems a little different to work with, but you can never have enough track time, you know? They give you what they give you, you do your best, and that’s what it is."
Sprint Cup teams finally got on track Friday in preparation for Saturday’s Quaker State 400 (7:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN, PRN, SiriusXM), giving the low-downforce rules package its first official laps. The two sessions — shortened, moved and intensified by seemingly omnipresent rain — came after three practices and Coors Light Pole Qualifying were scratched as weather-related casualties.
Though Heroy estimated he only worked through "maybe 20, 25 percent" of the setups he wanted to try before Saturday’s race, Larson still vaulted to the top of the leaderboard for both sessions. Still, neither session — consisting of mainly single-car runs, mock qualifying laps and occasional side-by-side racing — gave a clear indication of how a full field of 43 cars will behave in traffic.
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"It will be interesting," said Denny Hamlin, who was fourth-fastest in final practice. "I think there will be haves and have nots, for sure. Teams that have it figured out, or at least a little bit more than everyone else, and you’re going to have guys that struggled. I think eventually all these teams figure it out in due time and then we’re all right back running the same speed again. I’d say overall you’re going to see as much, if not more passing in this race than you normally would."
Kyle Busch, Hamlin’s teammate at Joe Gibbs Racing, voiced similar conjecture Friday morning before cars got on track, wondering how limited to no practice time would affect their approach.
"A couple guys that I was talking to in the garage area yesterday, we were like are we going to drive off into the corner and just — whoosh! — slide out or is it going to stick?" Busch said. "What’s going to be the feeling? I was like, ‘I have no idea.’ We definitely would like to get some practice time, but if it all comes down to it where they line us up and we race, that might be the best race of the year just because of the unknown."
While some of the uncertainly should linger up until the green flag drops on Kentucky Speedway’s fifth Sprint Cup race in its brief history, drivers seem sold on the theory that the rules package — with shorter spoilers and splitters to reduce downforce — will put the car’s handling more into the drivers’ hands on an already bumpy layout. That suits drivers such as Brad Keselowski, the defending race winner, just fine.
"I want to be able to look a fan in the eye after a race that I’ve won and tell him, ‘I had a great car, but I drove a great race, too,’ " Keselowski said. "And to do that the driver has to play a role in it and this is an increased role for the driver. So that’s very good in my opinion and I’m very happy with it. Certainly the car is a little harder to drive. It’s a race car. It should be hard to drive. It shouldn’t be just point and play. This isn’t a video game, nor should it be. So I’m very happy with the package and what I’ve seen so far."
