Brandon Whitt and the #38 McMillin Homes/Cure Autism Now Toyota Tundra team head to the high-banked 1.5-mile Atlanta Motor Speedway, located in Hampton, Ga., for Friday night's World Financial Group 200.

The Cure Autism Now Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and funding autism research and accelerating the pace of scientific progress toward effective treatments and a cure.  The organization is the largest private funder of biological research in autism, providing more than $20 million in grants since its inception in 1995.

The thoughts of McMillin Homes/Cure Autism Now Toyota Tundra driver Brandon Whitt heading into Atlanta:

"It's been a little frustrating so far this season, because we've had some different things keep us from having the finishes we know we're capable of.  We had a super-fast truck at Daytona and had passed over half the field until we got caught up in the 'big one.'  But, we loaded up and went to California and were fast there too.  We had our best qualifying run of this team's short history (fifth), but fell victim to some handling issues like a lot of people did in California.

"After that California race, I'm not sure how I feel about qualifying and racing in the same day.  If we didn't impound after qualifying I think it would be a little better, simply because you could ready your truck and tweak it to suit the conditions that you'll be racing in.  It's hard on a team to have to prepare a truck that will qualify in the dead heat of the late morning, early afternoon, and still be able to race well at 8 o'clock that night without working on it in between.

"It's two drastically different conditions and most teams will have to choose which to sacrifice.  Do we want to qualify up front and risk slipping back early on and pray for that early caution, or do we sacrifice our starting position and go with a more conservative set-up that we may be more suitable for the racing conditions that night?  It's just too much 'guess work' when we do it the way we did at California.  But, I do realize that it's that way for every team, so, we'll just have to adjust.

"Still, this McMillin Homes/Cure Autism Now Toyota team is showing more flashes of brilliance with each and every race weekend.  We've got a great group of guys who work on getting this truck race-ready every week.  The support from Toyota has obviously been a tremendous help.  We're turning laps consistently faster than we've ever been able to before.  That says a lot for their program and ours as well, considering that together we've been able to show signs of improvement on the track.

"Yeah I know, you look at the finishes and the standings right now and you might not be able to understand what I'm talking about, but if you've seen this team on the track then you know what I'm talking about.  Jamie (Jones, crew chief) has these guys focused and you can tell every time you walk into the race shop.

"Atlanta's another high-banked, high-speed, 'horsepower' track and that should bode well for us.  There's no reason we shouldn't be fast there, considering we've been fast everywhere else.  If we can start to finish like we're running, then we'll begin to make believers out of a lot of people in the process."