2007 Team ASE Media Kit
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| Musgrave, No. 9 Team ASE Toyota Finish 8th at Atlanta Motor Speedway | ||
| Hampton, Ga. (March 19, 2007)
Ted Musgrave drove the Germain Racing No. 9 Team ASE Toyota to an
eighth-place finish in Friday’s American Commercial Lines 200 NASCAR
Craftsman Truck Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Musgrave
started 25th and steadily worked his way to the front, but his march
to the top five was hampered late in the going by a series of
caution flags that limited the amount of green flag racing in the
final quarter of the race. “Early in the race we kind of dropped back and Rick (Gay, crew chief) and I talked about what changes to make on the pit stops,” Musgrave said. “We started off tight in the center and loose off the corners, but we definitely had something to work with. As the race went on, we got better and things started working our way and we started to move up. We just missed it right at the start and that gave us bad track position.” As the 130-lap race ran towards its conclusion, Musgrave and Gay had made the adjustments needed to run competitive lap times. Musgrave was able to work his way into the top ten, and it looked like the No. 9 Team ASE Toyota was again going to challenge for a top-five finish. But late-race cautions limited the amount of time Musgrave had to race for those positions. “But by the end of the race, we were running lap times just as good as the leaders,” Musgrave continued. “We were very good at the end, but there were just too many cautions at the end and that just murdered our chances to get closer to the front. We needed laps to race those guys and get past them, and instead we were running single file behind the pace truck wasting laps.” With a wide racing groove and a tire that matched the racing surface almost perfectly, Musgrave said some of those cautions were due to over-exuberant driving on behalf of some of his competitors. “The tire here was pretty good,” Musgrave said. “It was a little cool, so it was hard to get going on the restarts and you’d spin the wheels a little, but once you did get going they came in really well. So you can’t blame the cautions on the tires. I think the problem you saw with all of those cautions was everyone knows Atlanta is very wide and you can run anywhere. There was a lot of blocking and protecting positions. I know on the last restart, the guy in front of me did a lot of mirror driving and blocked me and mixed everything up. That cost me a couple of spots. We were able to work our way back up but that definitely hurt us. But as far as the cautions are concerned, it’s the drivers out there holding the steering wheel not the tires.” On the strength of one top-five finish and three top-ten finishes in the first three races of 2007, Musgrave moves up one position and now sits fifth in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship standings, 110 points behind leader Mike Skinner and just nine points behind Jack Sprague for fourth. Next up for Musgrave and the Germain Racing No. 9 Team ASE Toyota is the first short track race of 2007, Kroger 250 at Martinsville Speedway. Practice and qualifying is slated for Friday March 30, with the green flag scheduled to drop shortly after 3 pm Eastern on Saturday March 31, 2007. The race is the first of two to be televised live on Fox, and it can also be heard live on selected affiliates of the Motor Racing Network nationwide. TruckSeries.com will have complete event coverage online at www.truckseries.com. ________________________________________________________________ What is Team ASE? In the early days of racing, the driver
was often recognized as the main reason for a team’s success.
Recently, the crew chief and crew have been acknowledged as equally
important in creating a winning situation for every race team. A
parallel exists between racing and the automotive service industry.
Similar to the way a crew chief and crew must deliver a satisfactory
product to the driver in order to win the race, an employer and the
technicians in a service and repair shop must satisfy the needs of
their customer in order to create return business. But what makes
TEAM ASE most unique is the level of commitment from our certified
technicians involved in the program – both on and off the track.
Being competitive on the race track is important to TEAM ASE because
ASE is itself a standard of excellence. However, TEAM ASE’s success
in motorsports is not solely measured by pole position, top-five
finishes or by slapping hundreds of decals on racecars. There is
much more to the TEAM ASE program.
http://www.ase.com
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http://www.germainracing.com -
http://www.truckseries.com -
http://www.speedtv.com |
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