Photo Credit: Justin McFarland
This weekend NASCAR is at Kansas Speedway for the GoBowling 400 and for Jamie McMurray, driver of the No. 1 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet, its his home track.
“This is obviously a special track for me growing up,” he said. “I grew up 180 miles south of here. When you come back to this part of the country, I think everyone has experienced that if you move away from home, it’s always nice to come back home and run into common restaurants, common roads, just kind of knowing your way around.
“And there’s a great feeling associated with that. So, every year when we get to come back to Kansas I always look forward to that part.”
This weekend race is on Saturday at night. NASCAR gave the drivers one day to prepare for the race with practice and qualifying happening during the day on Friday.
“Yeah, it’s so weird to practice in the daytime and then race at night,” he said. “I don’t really care for this type schedule where you have to do everything in one day.
“Ultimately we’d like to unload and do a couple of race runs and then switch over to qualifying like we typically do. You make a couple of qualifying runs so you have some scuff tires to then use for your race runs later on. It’s just really hard to do here. You typically always end in a qualifying run and then you don’t use that set of tires. I like the traditional Friday, Saturday, Sunday schedule with the exceptions of the speedway races.”
The Joplin, Missouri native last year made the Chase for the Sprint Cup and the experience gave him guidance coming into this season.
“When I look back at our Chase last year, I felt like every year that I had watched the Chase prior to that, that there were always guys that self-eliminated themselves from it,” he said. “Our plan going into that was just be consistent and we did a really good job of that.
“So, I think going into this year and maybe just being a little more aggressive and trying to get a little more out of it; when I look back at those races, I don’t know that I could have done anything different. But yeah, just trying to maybe be a little more aggressive.”
