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MITCHELL MISSES
MICHIGAN CUT
BROOKLYN, MI (Aug. 16) ......... West Virginia driver Richard
Mitchell
failed to qualify for Saturday's Cabela's 250 NASCAR BUSCH
Series race at
Michigan International Speedway.
Mitchell, a two-time NASCAR Northeast region Weekly Racing
Series champion,
posted the 39th fastest speed among the 52 entries Friday
afternoon with his
Coach USA / Mountaineer Gaming / West Virginia Tourism Chevrolet
Monte Carlo.
"We just didn't go fastest enough, what more can I say,"
Mitchell said
following the time trial session. "With all the rain this
morning, there was
only an hour of practice. We knocked a full second off our
practice times,
but it just wasn't good enough. We are about half a second off
from being
competitive."
"To be honest, I didn't think the BUSCH Series would be this
tough," Mitchell
continued, "in the ARCA Series you can be a tick off on the car
setup and
still run in the top-third of the field. If you are off by the
same margin
in the BUSCH Series you are going home."
Mitchell and his Coach USA team hope to make some changes to
regain their
competitive edge.
"We obviously need to do something different, if we are going to
be able to
run with these guys," Mitchell added, "there appears to be more
Winston Cup
drivers and teams coming to the BUSCH Series..... I think there
were five or
six at Michigan, so that pushes us even further down the food
chain."
Among the possible changes forthcoming is a testing program.
"Testing at
this level is essential," Mitchell continued, "I can't learn to
drive the
track, and our crew can't be expected to figure out a car setup
running 25
practice laps the day we qualify. The good teams spend two days
testing with
data acquisition programing. We can't overcome that with
wishful thinking."
Another targeted area is technology. "We obviously don't have
access to
chassis dynos and wind tunnel test time, but we need to upgrade
our program
in areas like springs and shocks to try to get on an equal
playing field ,"
Mitchell concluded. "This team is not used to losing, let alone
not
qualifying for races. We are going to try everything humanly
possible to get
this turned around."
The next scheduled race for the Coach USA team is the BUSCH
Series event at
Richmond International Raceway on Friday Sept. 6.
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