Pennsylvania 500 - Ricky Craven Notes

Pennsylvania 500 Preview - Ricky Craven, No. 32 Tide Pontiac

2003 Best Finish: 1st- Darlington, S.C. - 3/16/03 2003 Best Start: 6th- North Carolina Speedway- 2/23/03
2003 Stats: 1 Win; 0 Bud Pole Awards; 1 Top-10 Qualifying effort; 3 Top-5 Finishes; 5 Top-10 Finishes
Current Points Standing: 17th Best Career Finish: 1st (Darlington 3/16/03; Martinsville, 10/15/01)
Career Pole Positions: 6 (Martinsville 1996, New Hampshire 1996 & 1998, Michigan, 2001, Rockingham & Darlington, 2002)

New England 300 Recap: Ricky Craven drove his Tide Pontiac to a 21st-place finish at New Hampshire International Speedway. While a number of other teams elected to gamble on fuel mileage during the last caution period of the race, Craven's crew calculated that the "Tide Ride" could not go the distance and brought Craven in for fuel, which cost the team track position.

The Chassis: The chassis Ricky Craven will drive at Pocono Raceway is chassis No. 39, which he drove to a 10th-place finish in the June 8 Pocono 500. The chassis was built in-house at PPI Motorsports in 2002, and was driven in three events last season (Las Vegas, Texas and Chicago).

Ricky Craven's Pocono Raceway starts: Average Start: 25.8 Average Finish: 21.4

Testing: Ricky Craven and the PPI Motorsports (PPIM) team will test at Kentucky Speedway on Wed., July 23. The team will take chassis No. 38, which has been used in races at Atlanta, Texas, California, Michigan and Chicago. PPIM will also take a second car to the test that will be used to gather data on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for General Motors.

Scott Miller- "We'll work on things with chassis No. 38 that can be applied at any of the 1.5-mile tracks. You can't really maximize your lap times at Kentucky and hope to use that exact same setup at another track. What you do is work on concepts to see how the car responds, then file it away in your memory bank for later on. For example, we might be able to use some of the information we gather about the Kentucky track's flat corners at Indy next month. The corners are obviously not the same, but there are some concepts that will transfer over.

"There were also some issues we had at Chicago that we want to address in this test for use later on in the season. We won't be going back to Chicago this year, but we can hopefully eliminate some of the negatives from that race at other places we will visit, like Kansas."

Soap Box Derby: Ricky Craven and fellow NASCAR driver Joe Nemechek will fly to Akron, OH, following the final practice session at Pocono Raceway on Saturday afternoon. The two drivers will attend the 66th-annual All-American Soap Box Championship at Derby Downs in Akron, where they will present trophies to the winners of the event. Craven and Nemechek will also take part in a special match race in adult-sized soap box racers.

Crew Chief Scott Miller on Pocono Raceway: "It's such an unusual track. It's hard on engines and transmissions, but it's also hard on brakes, which you might not expect from a track of that length. It's like a road course, only in the respect that some drivers love it and others hate it. It definitely provides some unique challenges for myself and Kent (Day, team engineer). But hey, that's why you have to love this sport. It's a different challenge every week." Team Engineer Kent Day on Pocono Raceway: "The biggest challenge for a team at Pocono, I think, is that you have to come to a compromise on getting the car to work well in all three distinct turns. If I had to make a guess, and we'll test this theory this weekend, I'd say you really want to have the car get through turn three. I think that you don't want to 'plow through' turn three, because you need to get the car set up for that long straightaway."

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