Skinner

Just when Mike was healing up from a fractured left ankle he got when the right-front tire blew on the Lowe's Chevy at Chicagoland Speedway, the same thing happened again in last weekend's Chevrolet Monte Carlo 400 with about 60 laps remaining. It was kind of ironic -- the Lowe's Chevrolet was carrying a special Yosemite Sam paint scheme in conjunction with Chevrolet's Warner Bros./Looney Tunes promotional. Yosemite Sam had steam coming out of his ears on the Lowe's car and so did Mike after hitting the wall. He's just as disappointed about our recent bad luck as we are.

The weekend at Richmond started off pretty well for Lowe's Racing. When we rolled the Lowe's Chevrolet off the truck Friday morning, it wasn't too bad. Some teams made changes to their cars but old tires weren't as big an issue. You could make practice runs, make chassis adjustments, and then repeat or improve upon the previous lap times. The bottom line is that it was possible to post quicker lap times on older tires -- that wasn't always the case before.

Since the race at Richmond was run on Saturday evening, most on-track activities were packed into Friday. We practiced, qualified and ran Happy Hour on Friday. All we did Saturday was tech the cars and race them. During Friday's practice session, we had trouble getting past a couple of small things Mike that kept telling us about the Lowe's Chevy. The car was decent but it didn't get much better, even though we made changes. It was like we were just missing something.

When qualified rolled around, we had a little time to think about what we needed in the Lowe's Chevy because we had a late draw. We sat down and studied the car for a while and knew we had to make some changes. We tried about five or six things and went out for our turn in qualifying. We took a bit of a gamble -- if we didn't, we were going to end up qualifying 35th. But it wasn't like we were a second off the fastest team. A tenth of a second was going to take us from 28th to fifth-place qualifying. A tenth of a second was worth a lot at Richmond. At places like Richmond and Martinsville, qualifying is really close.

We made some changes using our teammates' information -- they were too loose when they qualified and said the track was slick. We changed the air pressures a bit while waiting on pit road. Mike's first lap was the best he had run all day and we began to think that we really had a chance at a top-five starting position if the second lap was just as good, if not better, than the first. Mike had a heck of a lap going until he came around turn four and got really loose. Even though he got loose on that lap, he still ran almost as fast as he did on the first lap. We ended up 21st, which was better than we'd been all day, and we knew our race car was better than that. We had improved it and were headed in the right direction.

We changed the motor and got the Lowe's Chevy in race trim for Happy Hour. We couldn't get the car to turn in the center exactly like Mike wanted. We threw all kinds of things at in those 90 minutes but the solution eluded us no matter what we gave the car. We made some more changes during the Busch race that night and talked on Saturday morning with Gil Martin, Skinner's Busch crew chief. We changed a couple of A-arms, springs and shock combinations after considering how cars responded to chassis adjustments during Friday's Busch race. We also considered what our teammates were doing and the past history of the car's performance at Richmond.

The race got underway Saturday evening under the lights at the ¾-mile track. Almost from the beginning, we struggled with the Lowe's Chevy being tight in the center of the corner. We listened to Mike's feedback and made some chassis adjustments that greatly improved the handling. Mike began posting some lap times with the top-10 cars and began picking up positions. That all ended with about 60 laps remaining when the right-front tire blew out, sending the Lowe's Chevrolet into the wall. Goodyear thinks we got the brakes, and in turn the tire, too hot. We don't think we had a brake problem, though, and we're still looking into what happened. The "beat" of the wheel, where the tire meets the rim, gets so hot sometimes that it actually melts the rubber on the tire. When that melts, then all the air comes out of the tire and it starts deflating and blows up. We're still looking into what happened and working with Goodyear. The bad thing was that we had a chance to pick up some points on the guys who are close to us in the points because they were having an off-night. We wanted to gain on them a bit but we ended with a DNF. We could have possibly moved from 31st to 28th and started moving forward.

With 10 races to go, we're heading back to New Hampshire and looking to regroup as a team. We're taking the same car that we took to Chicagoland as our primary car but it got wrecked in practice there. We've completely revamped the car since Chicago. It was good off the truck at Chicago and had a good run at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Since it got wrecked at Chicago, we put a rear clip on this race car, stripped it down and completely rebuilt it. It's like a brand-new car. We're going to Loudon with high hopes and we've been known to run well there in the past.

Mike got a little bruised up in the Richmond accident and he's trying to heal up this week. If you're wounded and you keep hitting the same spot, it makes it much harder to heal up. I have talked to him and he feels pretty good and is raring to go to Loudon and try again. Hopefully, this will be the weekend that Lowe's Racing turns its luck around.