Saturday Charlotte Notebook

Saturday Charlotte Notebook

Notebook Items:

-           Suarez edges closer to XFINITY win with seventh top five finish

-           Blaney happy just to be racing

-           Three decades of Charlotte covers for Sam Bass

Oct. 10, 2015

By Reid Spencer

NASCAR Wire Service

Suarez edges closer to XFINITY win with seventh top five finish

CONCORD, N.C. – Sunoco Rookie of the Year contender Daniel Suarez continued his impressive run in the NASCAR XFINITY Series with a fourth-place finish in Saturday night’s Drive for the Cure 300, tops among series regulars.

The top five was Suarez’s seventh in 29 starts for Joe Gibbs Racing this season, and it left him seventh in the series standings with four races left. Though Suarez is 128 points behind series leader Chris Buescher, he’s only 16 back of fifth-place Darrell Wallace Jr.

The top five points finishers earn places on the stage at the awards banquet at season’s end.

The next step for Suarez is a victory, but the 23-year-old Mexican driver has found the competition exponentially more difficult than in his previous series, the NASCAR Mexico Series and the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East and West.

“I’ve never had to work that hard to be running in the top 10, top five,” Suarez said after Saturday night’s race. “The difference between these, what I’m racing right now in the NASCAR XFINITY Series and the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, versus what I was running in the last few years – NASCAR Mexico and NASCAR K&N and local racing in road course and open wheel stuff, the competition is so much more difficult here.

“When you have a good car, that’s not enough. You have to make the car as perfect as possible if you want to be a contender. That’s something that you can’t learn in all those series because the competition is not the same. One old friend told me that a perfect race car doesn’t exist, so you have to make it better every single time. I think that’s something that applies a lot in this series.”

Suarez has four races left this season—at Kansas, Texas, Phoenix and Homestead—in which to try to score his first victory.

“We just need to put all the luck together and our stuff together to try to win a race,” he said. “I feel like we’re close, and we have the speed. We just need to put our pieces together.”

BLANEY HAPPY JUST TO BE RACING

Persistent rain greeted drivers, crews and fans on Bank of America 500 race day at Charlotte Motor Speedway, but Ryan Blaney didn’t mind—because the rain hadn’t come two days earlier when the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series held its qualifying session.

Because the Wood Brothers Racing team that fields the Fords for Blaney run a limited schedule, the 21-year-old driver has missed three races this season, most recently at Chicagoland Speedway, when rain washed out time trials. But on Thursday, well before the rain arrived, Blaney qualified 16th for Saturday night’s race (on NBC at 7 p.m. ET).

“After Chicago, it’s good to at least know we’ll be driving on race day,” Blaney said. “We had an extra lap on the tires (during the first round of knockout qualifying), and that didn’t really help.

“We just didn’t get enough there at the end to try to get in the top 12, but it’s going to be nice to be racing (at Charlotte) on Saturday night and be part of the show.”

THREE DECADES OF CHARLOTTE COVERS FOR SAM BASS

Among his many other accomplishments, artist Sam Bass has been designing and painting covers for Charlotte Motor Speedway’s race programs for 30 years.

The program for Saturday night’s Bank of America 500 was particularly significant, because it commemorates Jeff Gordon’s last trip around the 1.5-mile speedway as a full-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver.

“They wanted me to sum up Jeff Gordon’s career in one painting,” Bass told the NASCAR Wire Service. “I would have needed a canvas the size of that wall right there to capture it, and that probably wouldn’t have been big enough.

“I wanted to use the Jumbotron as a vehicle to show a young Jeff Gordon and his first (Sprint Cup) car, which I designed for him. I showed the young Jeff Gordon with the moustache and the mullet and his first ride kind of looking at himself in the future and seeing the 3M-clad Jeff Gordon and his car of today, waving good-bye to the crowd.

“That juxtaposition of today and yesterday really worked out nice.”