Race 2 Win: Food City 250 - Reed Sorenson Notes

NASCAR Busch Series

Food City 250 - Reed Sorenson Notes

Reed Sorenson, No. 41 NicoDerm CQ Smart Control Dodge
Food City 250 – Bristol Motor Speedway – 08.25.06

No. 41 NicoDerm CQ Smart Control Team Fast Facts:

Smart Control at Bristol: The No. 41 Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates (CGRFS) Busch entry will take on a new look this weekend at Bristol Motor Speeedway to represent NicoDerm CQ Smart Control—which is a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) nicotine patch that helps smokers, who wish to quit smoking, work through their withdrawal from nicotine. The special paint scheme is the third run of a five-race partnership between GSK and the CGRFS Busch team. One of the GSK stop smoking products—Nicorette, NicoDerm CQ and Commit—can be seen on board with Reed Sorenson every weekend as an associate sponsor, but NicoDerm CQ Smart Control will take center stage on the No. 41 Dodge this Friday. This is GSK’s second season as a sponsor of CGRFS. To learn more about the pharmaceutical company and its products, go to www.gsk.com.

First in NASCAR History: The entire partnership between GSK and CGRFS is part of the only smoking cessation sponsorship in NASCAR history that features the brands Nicorette nicotine gum, NicoDerm CQ nicotine patches and Commit nicotine lozenges. This unique NASCAR sponsorship also features the first-of-its-kind “QUIT Crew” program that provides quit smoking counseling to NASCAR teams and fans. More than 140 NASCAR team members, officials and media, including several from the CGRFS organization, have enrolled in the program. Free quit smoking counseling and the No. 41 NicoDerm CQ race simulator have visited numerous NASCAR races this year and will be at Bristol this weekend. For more information, go to quit2winracing.com.

41 is a Top-10 Team: After finishing seventh in last Saturday’s Busch race at Michigan International Speedway (MIS), the No. 41 CGRFS Busch team moved up to ninth in the NASCAR Busch Series owner standings with a total tally of 2,723. Sorenson took one step up into 11th place with 2,638 points and is only 46 points out of the 10th-place position in the Busch driver standings.

On the Cup Side: Sorenson and his No. 41 Target team started the GFS Marketplace 400 at MIS last Sunday in 28th. In 200 laps they were able to charge up to an eighth-place finish with a fast race car and flawless pit stops. The great conclusion propelled the Target team up two positions, into 21st, in the overall standings. With a total of 2,329 points, the team is 20 points out of 20th and 155 out of the top 15. In two NEXTEL Cup races at MIS this season, Sorenson and the Target team have recorded one top-five and two top-10 finishes that equals an average seventh-place finish for the young driver at the two-mile track. His most recent solid performance at MIS also helped him secure the Raybestos rookie-of-the-race honors for the fifth time this season. Sorenson is currently third in the Raybestos Rookie of the Year standings with 181 points. He trails leader Denny Hamlin by 56 points. Sorenson has captured rookie of the race honors in five of the 23 races run thus far in ’06 (Atlanta – 10th, Martinsville – 12th, Michigan – fifth, Chicagoland – seventh, Michigan 2 - eighth).

Chassis: Brian Pattie and the No. 41 NicoDerm CQ Smart Control team are returning to Bristol Motor Speedway with the same chassis they have raced at the Tennessee track two out of the last three times they’ve competed there—chassis #451. The chassis helped the No. 41 team post a third-place finish there in April 2005, and this past March they were working on scoring their third top 10 of the season when a late-race hit from another car dealt them a 27th-place finish instead.

Sorenson comments on heading BACK TO BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY:
“Racing at Bristol is always fun, but is a lot more fun if you’re car is good and our Busch car was in March. We had a really good run up to almost the very end there, and then that notorious ‘Bristol domino effect’ happened. I am not sure what started it all but I know we were running around eighth place and cars started checking up. I got the car slowed down but the guy behind me didn’t so I went spinning around on the track. Luckily, I kept the car off the wall and was able to finish the race but definitely not where we should’ve finished. We only had about 50 laps left in the race to recover from the setback, which at Bristol isn’t much time.

“That race in March was just kind of crazy, too, because of the snow, but we had a good time with it. Some of the guys on my team built a snow man that was pretty famous by the end of the night but it was fun and definitely a first for me to see that at the track.”

“The thing about Bristol is when your car gets a little bit off, it’s a hand full and it is very easy to get into some interesting situations there, but I learned a lot there in March, especially in the Cup race. Our car was tore up pretty bad and we still ended the race okay. It is just a really small place where the smallest or most simple mistake can turn your run upside down.”