EA Sports 500 - Ricky Craven Notes

EA Sports 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 (Darlington, S.C.- 3/16/03); 3 Top-5 Finishes; 7 Top-10 Finishes; 0 Bud Pole Awards
2003 Average Starting Spot: 25th 2003 Average Finish: 22nd
Points Standing: 24th Winston Cup Career Wins: Two (Darlington 3/16/03; Martinsville, 10/15/01)
Career Pole Positions: 6 (Martinsville, 1996; New Hampshire, 1996 & 1998; Michigan, 2001; Rockingham & Darlington, 2002)

MBNA Family 400 Recap: Ricky Craven drove his Tide Pontiac to a 40th-place finish at Dover International Speedway. After losing an engine in practice, Craven started from the rear of the field. He managed to power his way from 43rd all the way to 16th before the engine expired on lap 249 of the 400-lap event.

The Chassis: The chassis Ricky Craven will drive at Talladega Superspeedway is chassis No. 27, the same chassis he drove to a fourth-place finish at Talladega in April.

Last Race at Talladega: Craven and the Tide team scored their third top-five finish of the 2003 season with a fourth-place showing in April. The finish was Craven's best ever at the facility.

Ricky Craven's stats at Talladega Superspeedway : Avg. Start: 24.8; Avg. Finish: 20.9; Two top-10 finishes; One top-five finish

Stats: Ricky Craven has four top-20 finishes in his last five visits to Talladega Superspeedway, and a total of seven top-20 finishes in 14 visits to the 2.66-mile oval.

Testing: The Tide team will spend Wednesday, Sept. 24, testing at Kentucky Speedway. The main purpose of the test is to give driver Ricky Craven a chance to "shake down" two different cars and decide which one PPI Motorsports will use as its primary in the upcoming NASCAR Winston Cup (NWC) event at Kansas Speedway. In addition, the team will work on gathering information that can be used at several of the 1.5-mile facilities the NWC Series will visit during the remainder of the season.

PPI Motorsports Engineer to be Featured on SPEED Channel Show - PPI Motorsports' (PPIM) Race Engineer/ Vehicle Dynamicist, Kent Day, will be featured in a segment of this week's SPEED Channel television show, NASCAR Performance. Day will explain and demonstrate the team's Romer arm, a digital device PPIM uses to measure racecar components. PPIM measures every piece of each car it builds to ensure that every part meets PPIM specifications, and that the cars are as identical as possible. Day, who has worked with PPIM since 1999, holds a PhD. in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University. NASCAR Performance will air this Wed., Sept. 24, at 6 p.m. EDT on SPEED Channel.

Ricky Craven, on Talladega Superspeedway - "This place has a lot of history and tradition, and it definitely deserves a place on the NASCAR schedule. The only negative thing about Talladega is that one guy can make a slight bobble or lose concentration for a split second, and it ends up affecting 15 or 20 other guys in the field."

Crew Chief Scott Miller, on the different restrictor-plate packages NASCAR has tried at Talladega (i.e., spoilers across the car's roof, etc.) - "Given the speeds they're wanting to maintain, I don't know that anything has made a big difference. Everything they've tried hasn't really changed the complexion of the race that much. What they have now is about as good as you're going to get with the plates on. If they want to keep the speeds down and change the complexion of the racing at Talladega, my only suggestion is to pull out the bulldozers and reduce the steepness of the banking down to about 20 degrees."

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