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Monday, May 28  Skinner moves up in Cup standings By Royce McGee Special to ESPN.com The No. 31 Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse team got a much-needed shot in the arm last weekend at Lowe's Motor Speedway. We didn't quite get the top-10 finish that we were looking for, but 11th is the next-best thing. More importantly, Mike ran in the top-10 for the majority of the race and led several laps. The Lowe's team proved to ourselves what we've known all along: we are a good team and we build good race cars. We just haven't had the solid finishes to prove it this season. We've struggled in qualifying this year so it was nice to post a good qualifying effort in our backyard at Lowe's Motor Speedway. When we unloaded the Lowe's Chevy off the truck on Thursday morning, it was decent but we made some adjustments that made it even better. Our teammate was running better than we were so we put our heads together and made a few additional changes. Everything worked out for us and Mike had a really good qualifying lap that placed him in the seventh-starting position. We also had a great pit stall on pit road, which helped a great deal because maintaining track position was extremely important. It is almost always to a team's advantage to be pitted as close to the turn one pits as possible so the driver can zip out of his pit stall and off pit road as easily as possible. That way, he doesn't get stuck behind the other cars trying to exit their stalls. The Lowe's Chevrolet was pretty decent at the beginning of the race, which surprised me a bit because I expected it would be too loose due to the weather changes. The Winston Cup teams ran their final practice Saturday morning when it was warm and the green flag didn't wave to begin the Coca-Cola 600 Sunday until almost 6 p.m. Lowe's Motor Speedway is notorious for its changing track conditions with the changing weather patterns. As the sun started to set on the track, the car got a little tight so we made some small chassis adjustments. Some of the things we changed were the type of adjustments that Mike usually doesn't like but those small changes actually fixed the problem. We got the Lowe's Chevy too free at one point but Mike stuck with it and drove the car really hard without over-driving it. He was always in control of the race car. We backed off those changes and got the No. 31 machine running well again. Unfortunately, while we were running in the top five and leading some laps, Mike noticed that second and third gears didn't seem to be working. The Lowe's Chevy had a transmission problem. There were only 16 cars on the lead lap when third gear broke. Since Mike had to take the restarts following caution periods in fourth gear instead of second, we opted to drop to the end of the lead lap every time to get a running start on the field when the green flag waved. We had to do that to get up to speed with the other cars. We went from first to fourth gear on the restarts. NASCAR usually doesn't like it when a team drops back to get a running start but they knew the situation we faced and they excused it. Track position was really important in the race so we had to change our pit strategy a bit. We had to ensure that the Lowe's car would be able to finish the race and gain some points on the competition without losing all our track position. We still have to tear the transmission apart and determine exactly what caused second and third gear to break. It definitely sounds like third gear broke, and when it broke, I think that some of the debris got into second gear and kept the slider from working. Second gear did come back a bit later in the race and Mike was able to use it a little. There are several things that could have happened to the transmission, many of which are mechanical problems. There's also another option we have to look at. The safety crew put some oil-dry down on the track early in the race and it could have gotten up inside the transmission and jammed it up so that it wouldn't slide as easily as usual. There are many things that could have gone wrong and we will dissect the transmission very carefully to determine exactly what happened and hopefully prevent it from re-occurring. There's no doubt in my mind that we had a top-five car. We had to relinquish four or five positions on the restarts because we couldn't get in and out of the pits as well as we should have without second and third gears. We'd get on the track and have to let all the cars on the lead lap go past us so we could get a running start for the restart. We had to give up all the track position that the Lowe's pit crew had just gained for us. We could have easily been in the top-five after all those restarts if we hadn't dropped back. Add to that the fact that Mike was still able to pick off four or five more positions after the restart, and we definitely could have had an awesome finish. We also had to contend with more lapped cars on the inside line of the restart after we dropped back. This Lowe's team showed what it can do last weekend at Lowe's Motor Speedway even though we had a problem out of our control. But Mike and this whole team were patient and didn't give up. As a result, we got an 11th-place finish and moved up four spots in the Winston Cup point standings. We hope to put the whole package together this weekend at Dover Downs International Speedway. We're taking the same car to Dover that we took to Bristol in March. It's in the same configuration that we used in the Bristol race but we cut the bad pieces off and put some fresh ones on. We also put a new side on the car. Dover has a tendency to have long runs in the middle of the race so the car has to be good on long runs. If you look back at the history of Dover, there have been only a few times that even 10 cars were on the lead lap at the end of the race because the leader waxed the field during long green-flag runs. We've got to make the Lowe's Chevy run well for several laps. We'll make a 50-lap run in practice and see where we are at that point because the car has to be strong after 50 or 60 green-flag laps. You can't run 10 or 12 laps in practice and assume that the car is strong. One of our teammates tested at Dover recently so we have a baseline for what we'll use with the shocks, springs and track bar. We'll take that knowledge into Dover, along with some momentum we gained last weekend at Lowe's Motor Speedway, and see what we can do this weekend.  Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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