Mr. Goodcents 300 - Derrike Cope Notes

Derrike Cope Notes, Quotes: Mr. Goodcents 300
‘Cookie-cutter’ in name only

Derrike Cope and the #49 Advil Ford team head to the 1.5-mile Kansas Speedway, located just west of Kansas City, Mo., this week for Saturday’s Mr. Goodcents 300 NASCAR Busch Series race. Cope, a 45-year-old winning veteran of NASCAR racing, will be among that group of drivers running both the NASCAR Busch Series and NASCAR Nextel Cup Series event at California this weekend.

Cope, a native of Spanaway, Wash., is a former winner of the Daytona 500 and a two-time NASCAR Nextel Cup race winner. A top athlete whose professional baseball career was cut short by a knee injury in college, Cope 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: Cope’s #49 Advil Ford and the #39 Yahoo! Ford, which Cope is helping mentor.

The thoughts of #49 Advil Ford driver Derrike Cope heading into Kansas:

“I guess some of these mile-and-a-half tracks have taken something of a beating from a few in the media over ‘cookie-cutter’ tracks or whatever. I don’t really have a feeling on either side. Sure, I like running places like Bristol and I like running places like Daytona. If everything we ran was a 2.5-mile superspeedway, it would get boring after awhile. Still, if everything was a half-mile bowl-shaped track like Bristol, 36 of those would get pretty boring too.

“Variety is cool, and it’s the basis for our whole sport. The thinking is if you are going to run well in NASCAR, you have to be good everywhere and on every kind of track. In the Busch Series, you have to be good at Daytona and Talladega, and you have to be good at Richmond and Bristol. And you have to be good at Kansas and Charlotte and Chicagoland and everywhere else.

“Once you crank the engine, you don’t think ‘cookie-cutter.’ You think, ‘How can I get around this place as fast as I can?’ It might look cookie-cutter to some but it doesn’t look that way through the windshield. All of these tracks are tough and the competition is tough, week in and week out.

“If all of these tracks were the same, you would figure a guy who was good at Charlotte would be good at Chicagoland and be good at Kansas. But it doesn’t work that way. Every week, you start all over again. The same distance doesn’t make the same race track. Bristol is seven-thousandths of a mile longer than Martinsville, but nobody claims those two are similar.

“The front is the place to be at Kansas, and because of the way aerodynamics come into play, that goes without saying. The front is usually the place to be if you can get there, regardless of the track, but the way the air can play with your car, it makes a bigger difference at the mile-and-a-half tracks. That’s one of the reasons Kansas is such a ‘track-position’ track.

“These days, just about every track is a ‘track-position’ track. Qualifying has become more and more important because of that. The closer you start towards the front, the fewer cars you have to mess around with getting there.

“The reason the leader can pull away at so many of these track is because he doesn’t have to mess with other cars, he doesn’t have those ‘Advil moments.’ While the second-place and third-place cars might be going side-by-side for five laps, the leader is pulling away and going on. Same thing with fourth and fifth and sixth. . . everybody is fighting each other but the leader, unless he has a lapped car on the inside or the second-place car gets beside you on the restart, has nothing but clean air for a long time.

“That’s going to be key for everyone, and it’s going to be key for this Advil Ford team. We’re going to work hard, give it a good run and see what we can do with Kansas Speedway . . . and everybody else.”