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What drivers expect for Saturday night's Kentucky race
There’s very little history to rely on this weekend at Kentucky Speedway.
The track has been repaved since last year’s race and the Sprint Cup Series is running the lower-downforce rules it’s only run once this year (Michigan). So not only is there a limited set of data from the rules, there’s nothing but simulations and a tire test (for lucky teams that participated) to rely on to prepare for Saturday night’s race.
So how will Saturday night’s race go? No one may really know, though some familiar characteristics of races at recently repaved tracks may be apparent. Here’s a sampling of comments from drivers in the garage about what they expect to see Saturday night.
• “Goodyear usually brings a real durable tire to the repaves, so what you can do in the race is really not take tires at all or take two tires,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “You probably won’t change lefts every time you come down pit road. That is a great way to get track position if everybody else isn’t doing that same thing. You can get off sequence and not pit at all. It just depends. It’s a one groove track, so passing is going to be really difficult.
“The Trucks raced pretty well [Thursday]. They got a little softer tire and they got the track pretty wide in [turns] 3 and 4. I think that we might see some of that in our race, but 1 and 2 doesn’t look like it’s going to get that wide and we don’t have the spoiler and all the grip and downforce that the Trucks have. That is why they were more comfortable running two-by-two, more comfortable than we will be anyways. So, it is going to present a lot of challenges as far as trying to get around the track and trying to pass.”
• “I hope [the groove] moves around and I think as you get later into a run if tires do fall off like we all hope they do, I think that is when you are going to see the ability to move around,” Chase Elliott said. “But, while the tires are good and fast I think it will be a tough thing at first, but hopefully it moves up after that.”
• “ I think it’s going to be wider than a lot of the repaves in the past that we had. It seemed like the limited practice we had yesterday, it wasn’t quite like a typical repave in the sense that when they did Kansas, Michigan, some of those places you never had to put tires on,” Matt Kenseth said. “Every lap was faster. If you ran a 20-lap run, your 20 lap was the fastest and from the limited practice and the cars I looked at yesterday, it didn’t seem like that was the case. It seemed like there was actually some fall off, which is really not typical, so having that always induces I think more passing if somebody has better tires than the next guy and hopefully it will widen the groove a little bit as well.”
• “I would say the approach is to take all of the Kentucky notes and run them through the shredder and start from scratch because what’s worked here in the past isn’t even close to what’s gonna work here this weekend,” Brad Keselowski said. “That’s been pretty obvious before we got on the track and then confirmation once we did get on the track. I think with this package being similar to Michigan and the repave kind of maybe more closely aligning this track to Michigan, a lot of what we’re doing is going off of those notes and what has worked for us there. So far, that’s been helpful for us.”
• ” I do think that the way it’s paved, eventually the higher line in 3 and 4 will come into play,” Austin Dillon said. “I don’t know if it will happen this year. Hopefully, we can get some rubber laid down up there. I would like to go take some cones and move them up about a lane and have practice for about two hours above the groove, just to rubber it in just because we could use that rubber come Saturday night.”
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
