Food City 250 - Derrike Cope Notes

‘Bad news: going to Bristol. Good news: Plenty of Advil’
Advil Ford driver ready for high-banked speedway

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Derrike Cope usually has tremendous insight into which teams are running well, and which teams aren’t, at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway – site of Friday night’s NASCAR Busch Series race.

“The guys running pretty well I don’t normally see at all. The ones having some problems getting around the place, they are usually over at our transporter, saying hello pretty quickly and then helping themselves,” he laughed.

Cope drives the #49 Advil Ford on NASCAR’s Busch Series, and free samples of the product are on the back of the team transporter each week.

“It’s like good news-bad news,” Cope laughs. “The bad news is we’re going to Bristol. The good news is we have plenty of Advil.”

Regardless of the joke, Cope is looking forward to the .533-mile, high-banked speedway.

“Seriously, Bristol can be a fun place to race and I know the fans love it,” he said. “When you are running well and running towards the front, Bristol can be a blast. On a night when you are not running so well, well, it’s obviously not so much fun.

“It might be a half-mile but things go back as quickly at Bristol as they do Talladega or Atlanta or any of the superspeedways,” he said. “And when things go wrong, you can hit as hard at Bristol as you can anywhere.

“Bristol is an Advil track, through and through. You need it before the race, and most of the field needs it afterwards too.”

Cope said patience and “cautious aggressiveness” were the key to success at Bristol.

“You can’t get impatient, and that’s really, really hard,” he said. “You get in a line of cars and one or two guys are holding everybody up, and then the guy behind you is beating on your rear end; it’s really hard to be patient. A little ‘chrome horn’ isn’t so bad but if you try to do more than that, you’re taking a chance at wrecking him and yourself. So you have to think things through a little bit – which is pretty difficult to do in a business built on instinct.

“Smart driving doesn’t always win you the race but dumb driving is usually going to lose it for you,” he added. “’Smart’ means being patient when it is time to be patient, which is most of the race. It also means knowing when to go.” The former Daytona 500 winner knows success as a race car driver – he has won twice in the major leagues of stock car racing – and as an athlete. He was considered a prime prospect for Major League Baseball at one point, and is one of the very best golfers in motorsports.

His is considered one of the top business and marketing sides among drivers, making the match between him and Advil – established through another top business mind, Jay Robinson, who owns and operates Jay Robinson Racing.

Cope, a native of Spanaway, Wash., is a two-time NASCAR Nextel Cup race winner. A top athlete whose professional baseball career was cut short by a knee injury in college, he has become one of the top athletes in NASCAR racing, and has become one of the top public spokesmen for the sport.

Jay Robinson Racing, in its fourth season of operation, is one of the fastest-growing teams in NASCAR. Robinson, a Charlotte, N.C., native who is a successful businessman, founded the team as a high-value endeavor that offers high-end equipment and efforts, while proving to be one of the most cost-efficient teams in the sport. Robinson fields two sponsored cars fulltime on the Busch Series: the #49 Advil Ford and the #39 Yahoo! Ford, and runs a third car in many Busch Series events.