The No. 41 Discount Tire team and Reed Sorenson finished seventh at the Memphis (Tenn.) Motorsports Park on Saturday, avoiding a number of collisions on the way to their 13th top-10 finish of the 2006 season. With only three more races left to run this year, the top 10 also helped them get an even stronger grip on their top-10 position in the NASCAR Busch Series championship standings.
“This car surprised me this weekend because it is usually a strong car, but it was off today,” Sorenson said. “Still, the guys managed to get it to come around to get better through the corners but there at the end it really tightened up on me. We lost a lot of momentum throughout the day because of that. If we could’ve gotten that worked out, I think we would’ve left with nothing less than a top-five finish.”
Sorenson had originally planned to spend a good portion of the weekend in Hampton, Ga., at Atlanta Motor Speedway practicing and qualifying the No. 41 Target Dodge for Sunday’s NEXTEL Cup race. Rain, however, pounded the Atlanta area Friday so Sorenson and a good portion of the double-duty drivers flew over to Tennessee to practice their Busch cars for Saturday’s race. Kevin Hamlin, a Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates (CGRFS) development driver, also helped Sorenson and team prepare the car for race day by running the No. 41 Discount Tire Dodge during part of the final practice session on Friday.
After Sorenson finished practicing the Busch car Friday evening, it was back to Atlanta so he could practice his Cup car on Saturday morning. Sorenson landed back in Memphis on Saturday just before 1 p.m. CT. He had just enough time to get inside the track to take in some of the pre-race festivities before climbing into his No. 41 Dodge to go racing.
Having missed qualifying and driver intros, Sorenson had to start from the back of the pack as the field took the initial green flag for the race just after 1:15 p.m. CT, but by lap 36 he was a top-25 contender.
The team pitted during the first yellow-flag period of the race on lap 48 for four tires and fuel. Sorenson had told his guys the car was really tight through the corner and the water temperatures were higher than usual. The team made air pressure and wedge adjustments, and then discovered the reason the car was running hot. A large amount of debris had collected in the left-side of the front grill. The team removed the trash and then called Sorenson back down pit road one more time to make sure it was all clear before racing resumed on lap 51.
Another yellow flag quickly followed, so Sorenson came back to the pits for his team to put more water back in his car and to top off with fuel. Again, racing resumed on lap 56 with the No. 41 in 28th place.
From there, the CGRFS driver and team cautiously worked their way forward. By lap 130, just after the halfway point of the 250-lap competition, Sorenson was inside the top 15 and never left it the rest of his run.
The team then broke inside the top 10 on lap 167. There was an ongoing battle with the tight handling through the corner a good portion of their run, but with just a little less than 100 laps remaining they thought they had shaken it. However, in the closing laps Sorenson not only battle other drivers to hold his top-10 position but the tight handling seemed to return with a vengeance.
Sorenson managed to hold on to turn his ninth-place running position into a seventh-place finish by the time the green-white checkered flag waved with his new teammate Juan Pablo Montoya following not too far behind him in 11th-place.
The No. 41 CGRFS Busch team and driver maintained their top-10 stance in the Busch Series standings. The team’s running tally of 3,517 helped hold its ninth-place position in the owner standings while Sorenson held on to 10th in the driver ranks with 3,432 points.
The NASCAR Busch Series teams head to Texas Motor Speedway next Saturday to run the O’Reilly Challenge on November 4. The race is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. ET and will broadcast live on TNT (TV) and PRN (Radio).
