Event:
Miami 300 (Round 35 of 35 in the 2010 NASCAR Nationwide Series)Venue: Homestead-Miami Speedway (1.5-mile oval)
Date / Time: November 20, 2010 / 4:30 PM ET
Distance: 200 laps / 300 miles
TV / Radio: ESPN2 (Live at 4:00 PM ET) / MRN Radio, Sirius NASCAR Radio
NOTES OF INTEREST:
Salute the Troops: Steve Wallace’s No. 66 5-Hour Energy Toyota will feature a special graphics scheme this weekend to honor America’s men and women in uniform. The winner of sponsor Avery Graphics’ “Supercast My Ride” contest, the scheme was designed by contest winner Daniel Wayne Logue of Lincoln, NE. It is fashioned to appear like a World War II-era fighter, complete with nose art and the teeth made famous by Claire Lee Chennault’s “Flying Tigers.”
Additionally, 5-Hour Energy, South Point Hotel & Casino and Rusty Wallace Racing have combined to create a unique charity auction, with all proceeds benefitting the USO of North Carolina. More information can be found at rustywallace.com.
Points Race Continues: The Nationwide Series championship has already been locked up by Brad Keselowski, but the battle inside the top 10 is a hot one. 5-Hour Energy Racing’s Steve Wallace is ninth, but he’s only 65 points behind seventh-place Joey Logano and 64 behind eighth-place Trevor Bayne. Wallace will finish somewhere in the top 10, as he’s 197 points ahead of teammate and 11th-place Brendan Gaughan.
Wallace at Homestead: Steve Wallace scored his first Homestead top-ten in last year’s race, finishing eighth after qualifying 15th. Wallace was 15th in the season-finale in 2008 and qualified ninth in his first-ever appearance in 2006.
Closing Out Quickly: Wallace finished the 2009 season with two consecutive top-10 finishes, coming home ninth at Phoenix and eighth at Homestead. He hopes to do that one better this time around, as he was 10th at Texas and Phoenix and looks to make it three consecutive top-10s at Homestead.
Streaking: Wallace and the 5-Hour Energy squad enter Homestead with five finishes of 12th or better in their last seven races. They also sport five top-ten starts during that span. Wallace has been ranked among the top-ten in NNS driver points for 22 straight weeks, the seventh-best such streak in the series; he has been among the top-ten for 48 of the last 56 weeks.
Mr. Improvement: Wallace has improved his performance each year in the NNS. This season, he’s posted a career-best 13 top-10 finishes, improving on his nine top-10s in 2009 and seven in 2008.
The Machine: Steve Wallace’s primary car for this weekend is RWR-036. Car 36 last ran at Bristol Motor Speedway. The team hung a new body on the car in order for it to run this weekend at Homestead.
THIS WEEK’S 5-HOUR ENERGY SHOT:
Welcome Aboard: 5-Hour Energy Racing is pleased to welcome Circle K Convenience Stores to its family of partners; Circle K branding will appear on the television panel of Steve Wallace’s No. 66 car for this second straight weekend in Homestead. For more than 50 years, Circle K has been one of North America’s most popular and successful operators of convenience stores. Today, there are more than 3,300 Circle K stores across the USA and over 4,000 international locations.
Did You Know: Over seven million bottles of 5-Hour Energy are sold each and every week!
THE STORY:
The current NASCAR Nationwide Series car will run for the final time this weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Does that mean the race will be a free-for-all?
“There are a lot of guys who are anxious to get this season over,” Wallace said. “It’s been an up-and-down year for me. I think you’ll see a lot of hard racing, but I don’t think you’ll see anything out of the ordinary.”
Instead, McDougall said this is another race for the No. 66 5-Hour Energy Toyota team to score another good finish – not “checkers or wreckers.”
“That might not be the case for some of the drivers that we’ll be racing against this weekend,” McDougall said. “But for us, it’s just another race to put your best foot forward.”
- Wallace is ninth in the Nationwide Series standings, but could finish as high as seventh after Homestead.
“We sure wanted to finish a lot better than seventh this year, and for the most part we ran up there this year,” Wallace said. “But we had some mechanical problems and got in some crashes, and that killed us. We lost a lot of points in five weeks.
“But that’s definitely not where we want to be. We’re a lot better team, we’ve got a lot better cars and we’ve run a lot better than where we’re probably going to finish in the points.”
- Wallace is referring to a stretch earlier this year where problems not of his own doing knocked him out of four races over a seven-race span. He was solidly in seventh after the Michigan race but bad luck cost him a lot of ground in the Nationwide standings.
“Every year I run, the better I get,” Wallace said. “We’ve got 13 top-10s this year vs. 11 last year, but we should have 20, 25 of those things. We’ve had a lot of fast race cars this year. We’ve just had some misfortunate luck, and it was all right in a row. I take the good with the bad, and this year has definitely been, performance-wise, been a lot better.”
Moving up to seventh in the final standings would be a solid momentum-builder for the 5-Hour Energy team, crew chief Scott McDougall said.
“That would be very beneficial,” McDougall said. “We all get into this sport because we want to see our stuff run better and out-perform the next guy. One way of grading yourself is where you finish in the points standings.”
McDougall said the team is working hard to make sure Wallace has a fast race car for the final event with the current model. And Wallace would like nothing more than to close out 2010 with a solid run.
“A good run this weekend would definitely help a lot,” Wallace said. “We finished eighth there at Homestead last year. I’ve always run really well at that race track. That would definitely give us a little bit of closure on this season, for sure, if we end the year on a good note.”
About Rusty Wallace Racing, LLC
North Carolina-based Rusty Wallace Racing (RWR) is a professional auto racing team steeped in the legendary history of its founder, Rusty Wallace—one of NASCAR’s top-ten drivers of all-time. The team currently campaigns the No. 66 and No. 62 Toyota Camrys in the prestigious NASCAR Nationwide Series, driven by Steve Wallace and Brendan Gaughan, respectively. In 2009, RWR stood as the only team with multiple drivers among the top-ten in the final Nationwide Series driver standings. For more on Rusty Wallace Racing, please visit the award-winning rustywallace.com.
- Rusty Wallace Racing Press Release
