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When the Sprint Cup Series heads to Darlington Raceway later this year, Kurt Busch’s No. 41 Stewart Haas Racing Chevrolet will pay homage with its paint scheme to the VF-1, which was the first CNC machine manufactured by Haas automation when the company was launched in 1988.
The “V” is for vertical –“ standard designation for a vertical Mill. Since it was the company’s very first one Gene Haas added the “F1” to the name.
Haas Automation Inc., was founded in 1983 by Gene Haas to manufacture economical and reliable machine tools. They entered the industry with the first-ever fully automatic, Programmable collet indexer. As of now they are the largest machine tool builder in the western world and have the largest modern machine tool manufacturing operation in the United States in California.
The Las Vegas native hopes to tame Darlington, the track known as too tough to tame, on Labor day weekend when the Bojangles’ Southern 500 is run on Sunday September 4th. In 19 starts at the South Carolina track, he has two top-fives and six top-10 finishes.
