06.15.2008 | Michigan International Speedway

Hello, hello, hello…what a great day of racing yesterday at Michigan International Speedway for myself and this Stanley Dodge team.

We had a great practice on Friday posting the second-fastest time before qualifying. We were ready to go get ourselves a pole – until rain cancelled that plan. I hated that points set the line-up leaving us all way back in 27th place. But, those are the rules.
We were fifth fastest in the final practice on Saturday and I knew we had a good car for Sunday. Once the race started, we slowly started to pick our way through the field. I mean, we were passing cars under green flag racing and moved from 27th into the top-15 by lap 75.

Michigan is a big, fast track where track position is everything during the race. We did ourselves a big favor by doing some two-tire stops there near the end. I wasn’t sure who was going to make it on fuel or not in the closing laps, but I knew we had enough to go the distance.


I mean, we stayed in the same fuel window as the leaders and I knew at least five to eight cars in front of us didn’t have enough with 10 to go. We were way back in 23rd with five to go when that caution came out.

A bunch of cars hit pit road for fuel and we moved up to 10th for the Green/White/Checkered finish. On the restart, we picked up one more position to finish ninth. I just wish we could have raced it to the end under green and see how much higher we really could have finished. But, that’s the way racing goes and we finished pretty much where we ran for most of the day, anyhow.

The guys were great on pit road – as usual – and Rodney (Childers, Team Director) made some great calls up there on the pit box. We needed to put together a great run after some of the bad luck we recently endured.

That is our third top-10 of the year and this whole GEM team is starting to pick it up with our on-track performance. Heck, Kasey finished second and Patrick had his career-best finish of 23rd after he was crashed into on the last lap while running 17th.
We’re starting to feel like more and more success is around the corner and everyone, and I mean everyone, is helping to make it happen.

Talk to you after Sonoma

Elliott