Driver: Brendan Gaughan

Owner: Michael Gaughan

Event: O'Reilly 200
Bristol Motor Speedway, Bristol, Tenn.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - 9:15 p.m. (EDT)
Qualifying: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - 5:30 p.m. (EDT)
0.533-mile oval, 106.6 miles/200 laps

Notes of Interest:

It’s hard to argue facts – and the facts say that the Jasper Engines and Transmissions Dodge is on a tear of late. Since the June 18th race at Michigan International, seven races ago, the Jasper Engines Dodge has maintained an average finish of 10th place. Remove the Kentucky event, where the #77 was caught up in an incident not of its making, and the average finish for the last six races goes to 6.83.

Gaughan on Bristol Motor Speedway:

ABOUT BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY – “Bristol is everybody’s favorite track. Some drivers don’t like it and my crew chief Rambo and Park’s crew chief Charlie Wilson both say that if the wreck happens in Turn 4 and you’re going into Turn 1, you still wreck. It’s a lot of crapshoot there. I had the Punisher Dodge there last year, which was probably the neatest racecar ever in the history of NASCAR – I loved that car. I’m biased. I ran third all day right behind Rusty and even had Wallace call me on the radio during the race. We changed channels while we were running and that was just a neat day in the Cup deal. We ended up getting crashed but we still had a great day.

“In the Truck Series I’ve run there and should have finished third but I lifted and (Rick) Crawford didn’t. He took me to school on the caution flag thing back when we raced to the caution. It’s just a bad to the bone racetrack. Roman Coliseum. There are what, 160,000 people there for a Cup race? It’s just bad to the bone.”

ABOUT RACING THE HIGH LINE – “My line is the way to go around Bristol. I’m telling you. OK, there might be some people scratching their heads. No. I just go wherever I have to go to pass people. Most people are battling for the bottom so I’ll pass them high. It’s not like I like the high groove. When you’re in the back and lately the Jasper Engines team had ended up crashing, hitting, wrecking, spinning, getting hit, whatever and starting in the back. You’ve got to make your way through the field and you can’t play follow the leader. You’ve got to find a place to pass them. Nobody’s running high so you go there. At Bristol everybody will be battling for the middle groove and I’m going to have to go wherever it takes to get by people and to pass people. If that means I have to go high then guess what? I’m going to go to the second groove at Bristol and I’m going to try to pass people. It’s not that I like it. It’s that you have to go where you’ve got to go to pass people.”

SENSATION OF SPEED – “In racing, in general, you don’t get a sensation of speed. It’s like riding along the highway with everybody doing the same speed. You don’t feel it. Dover and Bristol are the two exceptions. We’re not putting brake fans on our truck at Bristol because you don’t use them. You drive into the corner so hard and the Goodyear tire and the concrete grip so well that you life and you kind of dive bomb in the corner and you go full throttle and you say, ‘No way is thing going to stick’ and it does. There is a slight sensation of speed at Bristol. Right when you enter that corner and you’re going 130-140 mph at a half-mile and you only slow down to 100. You definitely can feel it there. There and Dover are the two neatest places.”