Leffler

To start off the weekend, we had a two-hour practice session Friday morning before qualifying. We used the time to prepare our car for a good qualifying run and ended up having a pretty fair car. We were 24th fastest during practice -- our quickest lap was 24.207 seconds (151.246 mph).

Unfortunately, our qualifying run wasn't very good. I pulled as much as I could out of the car but it wasn't enough for a good starting spot. We started the Pop Secret 400 in 35th position. Our best qualifying lap was 24.070 seconds (152.106 mph). Even though we didn't qualify very well, I'm was confident we'd have a good run.

This weekend both of my yellow labs stayed in the motorcoach with me. Dafney is 2½ and Cloe is 11 weeks. Cloe is still in the potty training phase so I've been cleaning up after her quite a bit.

Saturday's practice sessions turned out to be pretty good. The first practice ran between 10:15 a.m. and 11 a.m., and the second was from 12 p.m. to 12:45 p.m. For both 45-minute practice sessions, we practiced in race trim. We were 28th fastest in the first practice.

The car was loose and sliding around a lot. We made some adjustments with the track bar before the final practice. The adjustments we made helped and we ended up 17th fastest in final practice. We finally were able to tighten the car up at the end. We expected it to be 10 degrees cooler Sunday, which would help with grip on the track and the tires lasting longer.

The Pop Secret 400 event began with a caution in Turn 2 of the first lap. I thought we were in for a long day with a lot of cautions but following that accident, we had only one other caution during the 393-lap race. Therefore, we had to make a lot of green flag pit stops during the race.

The car was tight in the corners and I could not turn it well. The Cingular Wireless Dodge team worked on adjusting the car most of the day but we couldn't get it dialed in. We raced between 29th and 33rd positions for the majority of the race and finished the event in 30th place. I was disappointed with the finish, but I got a lot of experience at the speedway this weekend and we'll just have to turn our focus next weekend's race at Homestead-Miami Speedway.