Johnny Sauter carries momentum with him as he heads to Friday's NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Kentucky Speedway. Sauter and crew chief Joe Shear Jr. celebrated their first anniversary together at ThorSport Racing with a fourth-place finish last weekend at Chicagoland Speedway.
It was the pair's 14th top-five finish in 27 races together and their sixth in the last eight races. In once sense Sauter is completely satisfied with those numbers but in another it serves to burn the competitive fire.
This is your first Truck Series race at Kentucky with Joe Shear as your crew chief; what is your process whenever you two come to a track for the first time together? "We talk every day so it's not like we aren't on the same page with each other. He's been to Kentucky a couple times the past couple of years with the ARCA deal he was working with and I've raced there a lot of times. We just talk it over and talk about what worked and what didn't work. We know that we have a good mile and a half package so we'll take our base setup and get ready to make whatever quick changes we need to with it in practice."
You said after Chicagoland that you and the team needed to work harder to catch up to some of the competition; what areas are you and Joe concentrating on? "The best thing for us would be if Todd Bodine just decided he'd like to take a vacation for a week! But seriously, the setups we run are constantly changing. We've run with the 30 team and beat them plenty of times on the mile and a half tracks, but it seems like they've hit on something right now and have gained on the rest of us. So for us, that means we need to get to it and figure out what our next move is. We aren't sitting still by any stretch of the imagination, but we haven't found that little thing that's going to boost our performance like the 30 team has."
What is the biggest challenge as a driver to racing at Kentucky? "The bumps there are a huge challenge with the coil bound setup. You're always looking for compliance with the shocks over the bumps but it's more pronounced at a track like Kentucky that has the type of surface it does. We actually learned a lot last week at Chicago. For whatever reason the track seemed a lot rougher there than it was in the past. We actually rubbed through the splitter on the front we were bouncing off the track so much on low pressures. We're going to adjust the clearances just a little bit and hopefully that will make a big difference."
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