Gordon

We checked into the garage at Lowe's Motor Speedway Thursday morning and began the routine NASCAR inspection process. The Lowe's team took the same car to Charlotte that we raced the previous week at Kansas Speedway. Robby Gordon ran competitively all day at Kansas and brought home a 14th-place finish, so we were pretty confident that the car would be good at Charlotte.

Practice started out okay for the No. 31 team Thursday afternoon and Robby continued to give us feedback about how the Lowe's Chevy was handling. We made chassis adjustments and sent him back out on the track throughout the practice session but we struggled to hit on the "right" setup. Gil Martin, Robby's Busch Series crew chief on the No. 21 Rockwell Automation/Brant Motorsports Chevy, also worked with us and we all tried to put our heads together. But for some reason or another, the answer to our chassis problems seemed to elude us. That practice session lasted for two hours and then we had 1½hours to get the Lowe's Chevy through technical inspection and onto the grid for the evening qualifying session.

Lowe's Motor Speedway is one of the most weather-sensitive tracks that the NASCAR Winston Cup teams race on. It's an asphalt track and when the sun beats down on it, all the oil and "junk" on the track heat up and make the track slicker. But when it cools off and the sun goes down, that condition subsides. Qualifying at Charlotte is always held at night while practice is run under the sun during the day.

Needless to say, many teams struggle with their qualifying setups for that very reason and have to make educated guesses on how the track will react to the weather changes in the evening hours.

	Royce McGee is the first-year crew chief for the No. 31 Lowe's Chevrolet team.

The Lowe's Chevy was the 13th of 49 cars to make a qualifying attempt Thursday night for Sunday's event. At Lowe's Motor Speedway, the later qualifying draw a team has, the better. Cooler weather usually makes for faster laps at Charlotte, so we were already at somewhat of a disadvantage. Robby hit the track for his two qualifying laps and concentrated on hitting all his marks consistently but the Lowe's Chevrolet just didn't handle well.

After completing his qualifying run, Robby said the car was tight and tended to push up the race track. He also told us that it bottomed out on the track a lot, which was evident by looking at the car's skirt.

Since we went out so early in qualifying, we had a lot of time to watch the other qualifiers and sweat out whether or not we were going to make the field. We figured we'd get a provisional until the last car went out on the track and bumped us out of the provisional field. The guys on the Lowe's team were terribly disappointed and upset.

We busted our butts and worked our guts out and it still wasn't good enough that particular weekend. As upset as we were, we still had to pack up the tool boxes, load the car and all our equipment back onto the hauler so it could leave the track and head back home. It was a really bad feeling shutting the door on the hauler and grabbing our briefcases to leave while the other teams were still working on their cars.

But we tried to rebound from the weekend as soon as we could. We left Monday morning for Greenville-Pickens Speedway for a two-day test in preparation for Sunday's race at Martinsville Speedway. NASCAR doesn't allow teams to test at the same track that the race will be held at less than seven days before the event. But Greenville-Pickens Speedway isn't a bad alternative. It's a half-mile track just like Martinsville and it gave us some good practice. We took Robby Gordon to the test but we also took Rick Mast to help us out.

Contrary to rumors, Robby is still driving the Lowe's Chevrolet this weekend at Martinsville but Rick is going to practice and qualify the No. 29 GM Goodwrench Service Plus Chevrolet Monte Carlo for Kevin Harvick. That will allow Harvick to concentrate more on his No. 2 AC Delco Chevrolet for Saturday's Busch race at Memphis. The test worked out well for RCR because we had two different drivers giving us feedback about our No. 31 Chevrolet while it also gave Rick some extra seat time at a track similar to Martinsville.

We're taking the same car to Martinsville that Mike Skinner raced there last April. We had a pretty good race car but a cylinder head in the race engine became cracked and caused the engine to overheat in the middle of the race. Mike had to pit every few laps so we could add water to the car to prevent it from overheating. Those bad circumstances aside, we still had a pretty good race car and feel pretty confident that we'll have a better run this weekend at Martinsville. Robby and these Lowe's guys are keeping their heads up and are more determined than ever to put on a good show at Martinsville.