Posted on by Staff Report

Cup driver to pilot No. 92 in NCWTS at Daytona

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Ricky Benton Racing announced Wednesday that David Gilliland will drive the team’s No. 92 Ford in the season-opening NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race.

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Gilliland, entering his 10th year as a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular, is scheduled to make only his fourth start in the Truck Series in the NextEra Energy Resources 250 (Feb. 20, 7:30 p.m. ET, FOX Sports 1) at Daytona International Speedway.
 
"I want to win races," Gilliland said in a release provided by the team, "And this crew, the engine package and what Ricky has put together can win. I want to be a part of it."
 
Gilliland, who re-signed Jan. 13 with the Front Row Motorsports No. 38 Ford team on the Sprint Cup tour, said maintaining his affiliation to a Ford team in the Truck Series was important. He added that his future with the Benton-owned team, which has participated on a part-time basis the last five seasons, wasn’t set in stone beyond Daytona.
 
"I’m not ruling anything out," Gilliland said. "We are going to run Daytona and see how it goes from there."
 
RBR — based in Cerro Gordo, North Carolina — will continue with Mike Hester as crew chief for the No. 92. Roush Yates Racing Engines will remain the team’s engine supplier. Sponsorship will come from BTS Tire and Wheel Distributors, Goodyear FleetHQ, Wynn’s and Tim Cooksey Oil Company.
 
The team used a rotation of drivers in 2014, with four drivers competing in two races each — Ross Chastain, NASCAR Next’s Austin Hill, Corey LaJoie and Scott Riggs. LaJoie notched the team’s best finish — a 10th place in August at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Posted on by Staff Report

BitPay to be featured on the No. 54 for Justin Boston

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Kyle Busch Motorsports announced Wednesday that BitPay will provide primary sponsorship for its No. 54 Toyota and rookie Justin Boston in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series season opener.

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The digital currency company joins forces in time for the curtain-raising NextEra Energy Resources 250 (Feb. 20, 7:30 p.m. ET, FOX Sports 1) at Daytona International Speedway. The KBM team prevailed in last year’s opener, with owner/driver Kyle Busch taking the checkered flag.
 
Boston, a Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidate, is scheduled to make his second career start in the series at Daytona. He drove a Bill Venturini-owned truck to a 30th-place finish in August at Bristol Motor Speedway, exiting early after a crash.
 
The 25-year-old Maryland native also entered two races last season for Joe Gibbs Racing in what is now known as the NASCAR XFINITY Series. Boston finished ninth in his XFINITY debut on Sept. 20 at Kentucky Speedway, then wound up 12th in the No. 20 Toyota the following week at Dover International Speedway.
 
Boston is one of a handful of new faces behind the wheel at KBM for 2015. He’ll join Erik Jones, Daniel Suarez, Matt Tifft and his truck owner among the team’s stable of drivers.

Posted on by Zack Albert

Organization hopes to boost program that struggled in 2014

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After last season’s bottoming-out, Roush Fenway Racing headed into the offseason needing an injection — of performance, new attitudes and fresh faces. Definitive changes have transformed the latter two, and the team’s hope is that the former will follow suit.
 
Roush Fenway didn’t use name tags for its refreshed roster during last week’s presentation at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom, but it may as well have. New drivers in both the NASCAR Sprint Cup and XFINITY Series have joined the mix, and new engineers are bent on deconstructing the team’s shortcomings and closing its technology deficit.
 
If first impressions mean anything, the team’s first media session with a new core in the competition department showed a loose, enthused group aiming to climb from the performance valley of 2014.

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"I think Roush Fenway has kind of been the same for a long time," said Ricky Stenhouse Jr., a Roush mainstay since 2009, now entering his third NASCAR Sprint Cup season, "and when you’re promoting from within all the time, the guys that you’re promoting kind of learn from the guys ahead of them, everything kind of stays the same. At some point, it just kind of gets stale. With the new faces, we kind of went all-in."
 
On the driving side, the personnel may be new to Roush Fenway but are familiar to most in the NASCAR crowd. Longtime Ford driver Trevor Bayne makes the jump to a full-time Sprint Cup ride in Roush’s hallowed No. 6, and former truck standout Darrell Wallace Jr. joins veteran Elliott Sadler to round out the team’s new look on the XFINITY circuit.
 
But some of the most important changes have taken place behind the scenes, with two key hirings last November. Mark McArdle has joined the Roush Fenway fold as its engineering director on the Sprint Cup and XFINITY side after a successful stint at Richard Childress Racing. Kevin Kidd signs on as the Sprint Cup Series team manager in charge of at-track operations, moving over from Joe Gibbs Racing.

RELATED: Roush makes competition additions
 
The new dynamic, plus a freshening of the team shop, has already helped the team break some of its old patterns.
 
"Problem-solving is very, very difficult," said Greg Biffle, Roush Fenway’s longest-tenured driver. "We recognized when there are single-car teams running better than our cars were that we had a fundamental problem right from the very beginning. It wasn’t until we brought in some new blood and got a 10,000-foot view of what we’re looking at, and kind of dissected the car all the way down to the chassis."
 
Robbie Reiser remains in place as the team’s general manager, a position he accepted at the end of the 2007 season after a long-running career as a championship-winning crew chief. The additions of McArdle and Kidd help bolster the team’s engineering staff, a luxury that Biffle said Reiser didn’t always have.
 
"We gave him a crescent wrench and a hammer, and he didn’t have the right tools," Biffle said. "When we put him in charge of Roush Fenway competition, we were a couple years late as a team, as an organization, maybe three, four, five years late in doing that. So we put him in that position; instantly, our performance went up. We ran better, we made challenges at the title — Carl tied in points with Tony (Stewart, in 2011) — but we never gave him any more support. It was Robbie on an island, and he had to do it all. We needed to provide more stability for that. As other teams grew, we kind of stayed in that position."
 
The overhaul hasn’t been limited to technology; changes have also given team chemistry — often a finicky quality to balance — a significant boost. Jamie McMurray, who drove for Roush from 2006 to 2009 before returning to team owner Chip Ganassi, said he knew the potential pitfalls first-hand during his time there.
 
"The dynamic at Roush was definitely different, and I think it’s different now. It’s changed," McMurray said last week. "I don’t want to put words in anyone else’s mouth that’s driven there, but most guys that drove for Roush and then left couldn’t believe how much different the environment was at a different organization. I was here initially and went to Roush, and I was like I couldn’t believe how good I had it at Ganassi, just the vibe throughout the shop and the way you were treated. …
 
"First off, Jack’s mellowed out a lot in the past five years. Jack would take, you’d have the team meetings on Tuesday and you would go in and sit at this long conference table — all the crew chiefs and all the drivers — and I swear Jack got a kick out of just humiliating you in front of everybody. As you would be the guy being humiliated, you would look around at other teammates and you could tell they were like, ‘Sorry you’re having to go through it,’ right?
 
"I don’t think it’s that way any more, and I think that got Jack a long way at times treating people that way. I wasn’t motivated by being humiliated. I was more motivated by a guy like Chip, wrapping his arm around me like, ‘We’re going to get through this. Hang with me.’ Just way different environment than what I have now."
 
The team has dealt more recently with the departures of Matt Kenseth after the 2012 season and Carl Edwards this offseason. The exodus appears to be stemmed: Biffle recommitted to Roush Fenway after declining offers from other teams, keeping one of its keystone drivers in place.

MORE: Biffle looks to lead Roush reversal
 
To hear Biffle and the rest of Roush’s current drivers tell it, the rise in confidence is already palpable.
 
"As far as the shop, making it nicer and bringing in the new faces, I think it kind of re-energizes everything, but it transfers down," Stenhouse said. "I guess it would start with the drivers, being in shop, hanging out with the guys. When they feel the confidence that I have in what they’re doing and what our organization is doing, a lot of the workers in our shop feed off of that. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t set a bad example. You want them to follow what you’re feeling and what you’re doing. We’ve got a lot of energized drivers.
 
"We had a photo shoot yesterday and all the drivers are getting along, hanging out, and I think that’s part of it. I don’t know if Roush has ever had all the drivers get along and hang out and have fun. I think Jack’s enjoying it as well."

Posted on by Nascar

Ford Technical Support Center takes on bigger role with limited testing

Photo courtesy of Ford Motor Company

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Most NASCAR drivers spent the bulk of last week’s Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom seated in front of a microphone fielding questions from the media.
 
Chris Buescher spent his turning laps at Dover International Speedway.
 
The 22-year-old wasn’t ignoring NASCAR’s limited testing policy for 2015. Instead, the Roush Fenway Racing driver completed nearly an entire race in Ford Racing’s full motion platform simulator during the media tour’s stop at the Ford Technical Support Center in Concord, North Carolina.
 
"Very close to 200 laps, very close," the NASCAR XFINITY Series driver said.

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The simulator is the centerpiece of the 33,000-square-foot technology center and is realistic enough that some folks have become ill after sliding behind the wheel.
 
"We put Robbie Reiser (RFR vice president of competition) in the SIM early on and I don’t think he took it too well," Buescher said. "There are people that have gotten sick. It’s a different motion, a lot of movement. The screen is constantly moving. Especially if you wreck, when you get into that position it gets a little crazy."
 
But it’s a bit more than fun and games. For teams, the highly advanced piece is the next best thing to turning laps on an actual track, and can be used to assess setups for each of the tracks on the NASCAR schedule — from superspeedways to short tracks, road courses to intermediates. For drivers, it’s also an opportunity to log laps and become familiar with the nuances of each venue. It’s also one place where weather is never an issue.
 
With NASCAR limiting testing for the 2015 season, such opportunities are more crucial than ever.
 
"The biggest help for me is just more seat time," Buescher said. "Last year before Watkins Glen … myself, (teammates) Trevor (Bayne) and Ryan (Reed), were able to get on the simulator and run some laps leading up to the road races. And that’s one of the places that I think it works the best, at this moment."
 
It should be noted that Buescher went on to win the XFINITY Series race a short time later at Mid-Ohio for his first career victory.
 
Officials said nearly every track would eventually be programmed into the system.
 
"I think that the ovals will come along … we’re making huge steps in that area but it’s still rather new technology," Buescher said. "… I think they were saying that the F1 teams, once they came out with this technology, it took them three to four years to really get it to where it was perfect. … Now that the technology has come so far, we expect our learning curve to be quicker than that. But still, certainly there’s a way to go."
 
Other tools available to all Ford teams at the center, which has been operational for less than one year, include three additional "rigs" used to fine-tune, test and measure specific areas of a race car.
 
The center also boasts a small theater where engineers from Ford as well as the Ford teams can gather to watch practice, qualifying and races with feeds that include live timing and scoring and the ability to sort and retrieve data almost instantly.
 
"Our plan is to use this facility for more than just NASCAR development," said Raj Nair, Ford Group vice president for global product development. "We want to make the tools and resources available to our teams across many of the racing series we compete in."
 
As for Buescher, win No. 2 can’t come soon enough.
 
"Absolutely," he said. "Getting that first one out of the way was huge for us. Now we are just looking forward to 2015 and adding on to that list. We need to get the second and third one and so on.
 
"I think with our XFINITY Series lineup we have here we should be competing for a championship this year. … Everyone in the shop has been working extremely hard and everyone is ready to get back to racing."
 
The simulator may be incredibly realistic and a tremendous learning tool, he said, but knocking off a few hundred laps here or there "isn’t enough practice through the offseason.
 
"We are ready to get to Daytona."

Posted on by Staff Report

Meet Glenda Official NASCAR Fan Council member of the month

Name: Glenda

Current City: Gulfport, Mississippi

Member since: 2008

Getting to know Glenda

Q. Why did you join the Official NASCAR Fan Council?

"For beginners, my family and I lived in Riverside, California when I was a very little girl. We lived near the race track and my two older brothers worked on the pit crews when the race was in town. My brothers always took me with them while they worked and I fell in love with racing. Til this day it compels me to learn more. So with that being said I am so grateful to be a part of a sport where fans can be interactive in helping change the face of NASCAR, by being a member of the Official NASCAR Fan Council so that we can improve the fan experience. No other sport that I know of can offer a Fan Council membership like this. I was one of the original starting members when the Council began and for that I am proud to be in such an elite council."

Q. What comes to mind when you think of NASCAR? What’s your favorite NASCAR memory?

"Well I am always thinking of NASCAR but what comes to mind is the feeling of the thunder in my chest when the cars go by. The feeling of the bits of rubber hitting your arm while sitting in the seats, the grateful feeling I have knowing I am so fortunate to attend as many races that I have, and to be able to give first-hand information to the council about the races that I have attended. In 201,1 I was able to get into Denny Hamlin’s car as well as talk face to face with him as he signed my purple cowgirl hat. It was exciting to experience behind the scenes activities I was so blessed to be a part of."

Q: Do you have a favorite in any of the following categories?

Driver: "Denny Hamlin"
Track: "Talladega & Phoenix"
Memorabilia: "My signed hat and car by Denny Hamlin"

Q: If you could go to any NASCAR race/track, where would you go?

"Talladega"

Q: Tell us about your family. Do you have children and/or pets?

"I have two older brothers and one sister who all love NASCAR. I have an African Congo parrot named Harley that talks and she can say ‘Boogity Boogity Boogity, let’s go racing boys!’ I have a cat, his name is Denny. I have one son and his wife that have thre boys that are our next future NASCAR drivers!"

Q: What do you like to do in your free time?

"I love woodworking but I collect NASCAR items to add to my 600 plus items in my collection."

Q: What’s your dream car?

"Mustang Cobra"

From all of us at NASCAR, we thank Glenda for her continued support and look forward to hearing from her in 2015!

Posted on by RJ Kraft

With SHR and GoDaddy deals up, this is a big year for Patrick

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MORE: Danica doubts she’ll ever do the double

Entering the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season, Danica Patrick is focused on the chance to build off the gains she felt she made last season. Even with that, there is plenty of other buzz around one of the sport’s most popular drivers.



The Stewart-Haas Racing driver has a new crew chief as she enters her third season in NASCAR’s top series. The third season is often the measuring stick for a driver with team and sponsorship deals often coinciding with that length. Coincidentally, Patrick’s deals with Stewart-Haas and her primary sponsor, GoDaddy, are both up at the end of the year.



For her part, Patrick does not desire a change.

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"Stewart-Haas is an amazing team, and I have no issues here," Patrick said during the Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom. "It’s been the closest thing to family.


"Obviously in the early days of wanting to run NASCAR, I’ve been lucky enough to have a great sponsor like GoDaddy and have the faith of the people around me that I could really name the team I wanted to drive for, and Tony and Gene made it happen, and GoDaddy made it happen. … I didn’t even want to run anywhere else necessarily; I didn’t pick to run anywhere else, and I still don’t."



RELATED: GoDaddy changes Danica, dog Super Bowl ad

Patrick also dismissed any talk of driving a Formula One car. Stewart Haas-Racing co-owner Gene Haas is starting up an F1 team for the 2016 campaign.



Haas sees great value in Patrick and would like to keep her in the fold.



"We’d love to see Danica come back," Haas said. "She’s a big draw, and we want to see Danica’s success as much as anyone does. I think NASCAR wants to see her success. … We’re very fortunate to have someone like Danica here."

While her rookie season of 2013 brought a season-opening Coors Light Pole Award at the Daytona 500, Patrick registered only one top-10 (an eighth-place finish in the Daytona 500), four top-15s and a 27th-place finish in the final point standings. Outside of the Daytona races, she never started in the top 12.



That changed in 2014, when Patrick made several significant strides. She started in the top-12 seven times at a wide variety of tracks (ranging from restrictor plate venues to intermediates to short tracks and road courses). She scored three top-10 finishes, including a career-best sixth-place result at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Labor Day weekend. 

Her average starting position went from 30.1 in 2013 to 22.3 in 2014 and her average finishing position went from 26.1 in 2013 to 23.7 in 2014. And while the end result was a 28th-place finish in the final standings, her overall improvement was not unnoticed.



"The results didn’t show it, but she had speed at a lot of race tracks that she didn’t have at the year before," said Tony Stewart, SHR co-owner, teammate and three-time champion.

MORE SHR: For reigning champ Harvick, pressure is off | Stewart ready to win again


Patrick considers the 2014 season a success, although she acknowledged that her final position in the standings wasn’t reflective of how she felt she had run.



"Progress is the standard," Patrick said when asked about measuring how she is doing in the sport’s top series. "I don’t think the championship standings really reflected what happened last year. There were many, many more times where I qualified in the top-12 or right there in the top-15 and that was a huge step in the right direction. … Restarts were definitely much better, especially when we got the car a little bit dialed in. Overall speed in practice was much better. All I can do is look to those things that I want to improve on and see if they have."

Now it is about taking that next step, where the speed is always there and those top-15s and top-20s become top-10s on a regular basis. And the key person in getting that progress out of the driver of the No. 10 Chevrolet SS will be crew chief Daniel Knost. SHR made a crew chief swap for the final three races of 2014 with Tony Gibson moving over to Kurt Busch‘s No. 41 team, while Knost came over to the No. 10 team with the interim tag.



In their three races together, Patrick averaged a finish of 25.3, with her best result an 18th-place finish in the season-finale at Homestead. The interim tag was removed from Knost’s title this offseason. Like all new pairings, hitting the ground running is easier said than done and Patrick is not blind to that fact.

"I’m sure there will be a little bit of a learning curve but I think we can overcome that sooner than later," Patrick said.



Patrick added that Knost’s background as an engineer is something she is used to and she welcomes the new perspective that comes with a new pit boss.



RELATED: Patrick’s crew chief for 2015 revealed

Greg Zipadelli, a former championship-winning crew chief with Stewart and the Vice President of Competition at SHR, liked what he saw from the pairing at the end of 2014 and said it was important to keep continuity within the SHR organization for Patrick.



"It just seemed like they were working better together," Zipadelli said. "We didn’t want to bring somebody from the outside, that didn’t know our program, didn’t know our tools. We didn’t feel like that was going to be beneficial to her."


Only time will tell if the pairing is the right fit. Eighty-two races into her Sprint Cup Series career, Patrick has yet to record a top-five finish or a win. Could a trip to Victory Lane be in the offing in 2015?



"I can’t guarantee anything," Patrick said. "… I have all the confidence that I need to do it. I definitely believe and know I can win."

Posted on by Staff Report

Veteran driver will pilot No. 44 Toyota full-time, lands sponsor

Play: NASCAR Fantasy Live | Vote: Ultimate Daytona Moment

TriStar Motorsports announced Tuesday that it has signed veteran driver David Starr to a three-year deal in the NASCAR XFINITY Series.

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Starr returns to the seat of the No. 44 Toyota with primary sponsorship — also signed through 2017 — from Zachry Group, a San Antonio-based construction and engineering firm. The team said it intends to contest the entire 33-race schedule starting in 2015.

"Words cannot express how excited I am to partner up with Zachry Group for the next three seasons in the NASCAR XFINITY Series," Starr said in a release provided by the team. "It will be an honor and privilege to represent a company with such integrity and commitment to their customers, employees and communities where we work."

Starr drove in 14 XFINITY Series races last year — all but one with the Mark Smith-owned team — with a best finish of ninth place at Talladega Superspeedway in May. The native Texan is also a four-time winner in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, where he has 317 starts.

The XFINITY Series is scheduled to open Feb. 21 at Daytona International Speedway with the Alert Today Florida 300 (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX Sports 1).

Posted on by Staff Report

Four-time champion talks about his future plans on FOX

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Four-time premier series champion Jeff Gordon was a guest Tuesday on "FOX & Friends," and he discussed more details of his new job as a FOX race analyst.

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"I am going to do three races this year for FOX and FOX Sports, XFINITY races," Gordon said. "I’m excited to get in the booth and see what it’s like. Who knows what might come out of it?"

Those three races comprise nearly a quarter of the 14 NASCAR XFINITY Series races that FOX and FOX Sports 1 will televise in 2015.

When asked whether he would consider going into the booth full time after handing the reins of the No. 24 Chevrolet SS to Chase Elliott, Gordon reiterated that he’d be ready but knows he has a lot to learn this year.

"I love to travel and I love racing," Gordon said. "I’m always going to be a part of Hendrick Motorsports. It’s not going to be like focused on driving a race car, but I don’t take it for granted. It is going to be tough to do, and we’ll see. We’ll find out this year."

Gordon was on the FOX News Channel morning show in support of new sponsor 3M and its work during National Children’s Dental Health Month.

"This is a new partner of ours this year, 3M," Gordon said. "You think of innovation and technology, you think of 3M, but they also do a lot of great things for charity like Give Kids a Smile. It’s about the American Dental Association, and this Friday is Give Kids a Smile Day where dentists all over the country are going to get involved with giving kids an opportunity to get dental work."

Click here for more information on Give Kids a Smile.


Posted on by Staff Report

Veteran driver will be one of several drivers to pilot No. 32 Ford

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Mike Bliss will be part of the Go FAS Racing lineup for the 2015 Sprint Cup Series season, the team announced on Tuesday.

Bliss will join Bobby Labonte and Boris Said as drivers of the No. 32 Ford Fusion for select races in 2015. His first start for the team will come in the Folds of Honor Quik Trip 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 1 (1 p.m. ET, FOX)

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"With the top tier teams expanding, we believe our best strategy is to fill the seat with veterans who have performed well in the past," said team owner Archie St. Hilarie in a release provided by the team. "This helps ensure we maintain a healthy standing in the points as the season progresses. Mike Bliss has proven time and time again that he can be competitive in the Sprint Cup Series, while bringing the car home in one piece, which is crucial for a small organization like us."

The 2002 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series champion made eight Sprint Cup Series starts last season for both BK Racing in the No. 93 Toyota and Tommy Baldwin Racing in the No. 37 Chevrolet. His best finish was a 35th-place finish at Richmond International Raceway in September.

"I’m really excited to be driving for Archie St. Hilarie and Go FAS Racing in the Sprint Cup Series," Bliss said in a team release. "I’m really thankful for the opportunity to drive the No. 32 and achieving some good finishes that will help solidify the teams position in the point standings for the 2015 season."

The 49-year-old Bliss has made 169 premier series starts with his lone top-five coming in 2004 in the Richmond fall race. For the past seven seasons, he has run a full-time XFINITY Series schedule and will do so again in 2015 for TriStar Motorsports.

Posted on by Staff Report

NASCAR Next driver was NASCAR K&N Pro Series Rookie of the Year

A new technical affiliation will offer an extra boost of support for NASCAR Next driver Jesse Little’s 2015 plans.

Team Little Racing and Larry McReynolds Racing announced Tuesday the formation of a technical alliance designed to help the 17-year-old driver’s efforts in NASCAR K&N Pro Series events. The new partnership will provide Team Little with engineering and technical support for its No. 97 NASCAR Technical Institute Toyota, plus LMR personnel for shop duties.

McReynolds — a two-time Daytona 500-winning crew chief, now an analyst for FOX’s NASCAR coverage — has the home base for his shop in Mooresville, North Carolina.

"From the very beginning we have been clear that our mission at LMR is to identify and attract the best young drivers in NASCAR and then surround them with the sponsors, people and technical support that they need to succeed," McReynolds said in a release provided by the team. "Not only do we believe that Jesse is one of the top young talents in our sport, but I have no doubt that this partnership will give Jesse the opportunity to show NASCAR and its millions of fans worldwide just how good this young man is."

Little, the 2013 rookie of the year in the K&N Pro Series East, notched his first K&N victory last season at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. He also won the pole position in August at Iowa Speedway in a combined race for both the East and West divisions.

"This is an exceptional opportunity for me and everyone involved in our program," Little said. "To have someone the caliber of Larry McReynolds and his team approach us to join their efforts for 2015 is something we’re very excited about and I am looking forward to working with such a talented group."

Little wound up sixth in the 2014 final K&N Pro Series East standings.